Biggest B2B Marketing Attribution Challenges

Irrespective of all the benefits of marketing attribution, it exposes some inherent challenges for businesses that embrace it.

Enterprises need to have an in-depth understanding of which marketing touchpoints are effective and the ways it contributes to revenue generation. Marketing teams that understand which marketing channels that contribute the most and which ads are less engaged with. Evaluating the entire marketing outcomes will help the CMOs to allocate resources more effectively to achieve the desired results.

Many enterprises find it challenging to design and implement an effective marketing attribution model. It can be a difficult thing for marketers to identify which marketing strategies and channels contributed the most conversions.

Here are a few top attribution challenges that marketers face and ways to overcome them:

Lack of alignment between attribution and marketing

Theoretically, attribution is an easy concept, but when it comes to mapping all the touchpoints that a potential customer might engage with in their purchase journey, right from brand awareness to product purchase. Marketers need to determine the influence of every touchpoint depending on its contribution to potential buyers’ decision-making. With the surge in the adoption of digital-first business environments, there is an increase in the availability of touchpoints and making it complicated for marketers to understand its influence on decision-making.

Also Read: Why Marketing Attribution Is Still Crucial

Without the right skills and tools in the MarTech Stack, it can be challenging for marketers to effectively map the customer experience. The task becomes even more complex for the marketing teams that have manual workflows set to track leads, as B2B customer journeys have multiple touchpoints and decision-makers involved in the process, which need the right skills and tools to ensure an effective attribution model. Just gathering the relevant data will not suffice the goals; businesses should be able to evaluate the gathered data and should be able to get valuable insights from every touch point to make sense of it in a larger picture. It can be a daunting task to effectively analyze the effectiveness of the campaign and optimize the budgets accordingly. Because the KPIs measure the effectiveness of the interactions based on the conversation with the client, which can differ from person to person.

How to overcome this challenge?

One of the initial strategies to implement once the volume starts increasing is to migrate from manual tracking to automated attribution tools to reduce the workload on the marketing teams. It is crucial to integrate automation tools to track leads, segment data of multiple touch points, and map customer journeys effectively.

Monitoring and mapping customer journeys in online and offline channels

Another significant challenge that the B2B marketing teams have to overcome while attribution tracking is mapping the customer journey throughout all the channels.

B2B customer journeys are more complicated because of higher price points of B2B products and services with potential vendor lock-ins, multiple decision makers involved, and longer purchase cycles. Omnichannel marketing is the new normal, and marketing teams might use multiple channels to move clients through the pipeline to drive more conversions. While tracking the attribution of the offline channels can be difficult for the marketing teams.

Also Read: Leveraging Data to Power Automation in B2B Marketing

How to overcome this pitfall?

Organizations with offline channels as an integral part of their demand generation should consider integrating a robust MarTech tool that not only links the offline conversation to interactions from calls and demos but also links the offline presales efforts with all the online conversions. Merging the offline and online channels to understand the influence of offline marketing on website conversions will help marketers to draw a clearer picture.

These are a few inherent challenges that attribution models expose businesses to. CMOs that have effective strategy integrated will be able to overcome most of the challenges and have efficient B2B attribution models.