Look For Lift

“Look for lift!”

That was my response to a comment from Rand Fishkin when he shared his thoughts on a post about marketing attribution.

He enthusiastically agreed.

If you’ve been in marketing for at least five minutes, you’ve likely heard the old adage from John Wanamaker,

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

Not something to say to your CFO, of course, but as Rand puts it “the half that does work will have a higher ROI.”

What that really means is that what we do in marketing is very rarely a single thing that drives a sale or overall revenue growth. It’s many things working together to influence our buyers and buying groups to make a decision in our favor.?

“Look for lift” simply means that while we may not be able to directly attribute a specific marketing effort to a specific sale, we can look for signals that one thing we’re doing is positively influencing the other things we’re doing. I.e., brand efforts driving greater ROI on demand capture efforts.?

Here’s a more tangible example of that…..

You create a great piece of thought leadership (e.g., research report) and distribute it through your social channels, un-gated. You’re probably not getting much data that ties leads, pipeline, and sales to the people that might have read your report. Running a podcast program is another example of this. I wrote about one of my experiences as a buyer using a podcast as an example.

Now, let’s say some of the same people who read your report also see a display ad, or when they search for vendors in your category, you show up in paid search. Since you’ve created mental availability (Thanks, Byron Sharp ), the dollars you’re spending on those paid channels are likely to be more effective because of the thing you can’t measure as directly (the report).?

We’re back to what Rand said....

"The half that does work will have a higher ROI."

With all that said, I’m not suggesting we throw marketing budgets around willy-nilly, but it’s important to understand that what we do is about how our @ works in harmony to drive the greatest results. Said differently, the sum is greater than the parts.

Now, get out there and waste half your budget ;) (just kidding, CFOs!)