How do you assess the impact and attribution of your marketing activities across the customer journey?

1 Define your goals and metrics

Before you can assess the impact and attribution of your marketing activities, you need to define your goals and metrics. What are you trying to achieve with your marketing campaigns? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your objectives? How do you align your goals and metrics with your customer journey stages? For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might use metrics such as impressions, reach, and traffic. If your goal is to generate leads, you might use metrics such as conversions, cost per lead, and lead quality.

2 Map your customer journey

Next, you need to map your customer journey and identify the touchpoints and channels that influence your customers along the way. How do your customers discover, research, compare, and purchase your products or services? What are the pain points, motivations, and preferences of your customers at each stage? How do you segment your customers based on their behavior, demographics, or psychographics? By mapping your customer journey, you can understand how your customers interact with your brand and how your marketing activities fit into their decision process.

3 Choose your attribution model

An attribution model is a set of rules that assigns credit to your marketing touchpoints and channels based on their contribution to your goals. There are different types of attribution models, such as first touch, last touch, linear, time decay, position based, and data driven. Each model has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on your business context, data availability, and analytical capabilities. You need to choose an attribution model that reflects your marketing strategy, customer journey, and goals. You also need to test and compare different models to see how they affect your results and insights.

4 Analyze and visualize your data

Once you have your goals, metrics, customer journey, and attribution model, you need to analyze and visualize your data. You need to collect, clean, and integrate data from various sources, such as your website, social media, email, CRM, and analytics platforms. You need to apply your attribution model to your data and calculate the impact of your marketing activities on your KPIs. You also need to visualize your data in a clear and compelling way, using charts, dashboards, and reports. You need to use data visualization tools that allow you to explore, filter, and drill down into your data and reveal patterns, trends, and insights.

5 Optimize and experiment

Finally, you need to use your data analysis and visualization to optimize and experiment with your marketing activities. You need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing mix and budget allocation. You need to find out what works and what doesn't work for your customers and goals. You need to test different hypotheses and scenarios and measure their impact and attribution. You need to continuously monitor, evaluate, and adjust your marketing activities based on your data and insights. You need to use marketing analytics as a feedback loop that helps you improve your marketing performance and ROI.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?