As marketers explore cross-channel marketing campaigns, is it worth the investment without media attribution modelling?
Marketers are finally becoming more interested in starting conversations with their audience rather than delivering a straight marketing message to consumers.
It’s no longer about pushing a service or product out into the marketplace. Content marketing and earned media channels are helping businesses pull audiences to the brand.
What can become overwhelming for marketers and businesses is the sheer number of marketing channels available for brand messaging and content.
Digital Consultant David Sealey has published this open Google document where he lists 105 (that’s right, 105) communication channels available today, many of which can be used for marketing messaging.
The above Experian survey shows that 80% of marketing organisations are planning on running cross-channel marketing campaigns.
Cross-channel marketing differs from multi-channel marketing in that it requires running integrated messaging across various channels, as opposed to running simultaneous campaigns on different channels.
So while cross-channel marketing is on the horizon for most marketing organisations, the difficulty lies in collecting the proper data required in order to conduct proper analysis its performance.
Planning for multi-channel media attribution
It’s important to plan what data will be created as a result of the campaign before the campaigns are executed. While there are standard attribution models available, rarely will these fit your business requirements perfectly.
To get any chance of generating accurate reporting, it’s worth investing in a custom media attribution model that reports on the right types of traffic generated in your campaign.
While not offering a fully customisable model, Google Analytics Premium does offer a robust and effective data driven attribution model.
This is of course assuming that an organisation is willing to invest in the resources to plan, develop and manage the model.
The biggest challenge faced by senior marketers was the collecting and managing of structured and unstructured data.
There’s little point in investing in a cross-channel marketing campaign unless the planning has been put in place to develop a media attribution model that can support and report on the campaign.
It’s exciting that marketers are willing to think outside the box in terms of the channels they use to reach their audience.
But if it can’t be quantified for analysis and reporting, then I’m not sure how much value this adds to wider marketing efforts
