Jay Thompson and Neil Pursey, founders of Measurebyte, on how the rules of marketing are changing for business.
As marketers we are accustomed to adapting strategies based on platform updates but, as experts in the field, we believe the biggest change is about to come – and it will make a lot of marketers and business leadership uncomfortable.
The rules for marketing are changing for businesses. We are seeing an over-investment and obsession at the bottom of the funnel “performance” marketing to drive leads and sales for businesses, yet we’ve seen many case studies of companies experiencing stagnated growth and declines in growth due to this approach – even in high growth categories, so we can’t blame Covid-19 or slow economies for this.
This obsession with lead generation has been driven by multi-touch attribution i.e measure only what your adtech can measure. As marketers, we have built a reliance on attributed reporting.
Time lag is attribution’s biggest enemy. Think of how many touch points there are along the customer journey. Attribution software can’t measure in the dark funnel and it’s a big piece to the customer journey.
So where to next for measuring marketing performance? The lack of a measurement framework across paid, owned and earned media is probably the single biggest challenge I see companies having. Too many silos, too many misaligned KPIs exist because there is no standardised measurement framework in place.
A well-structured measurement framework focuses on what we call ‘direct measurement’; we use it to centralise marketing, sales, customer and product data.
Direct measurement across the full customer journey identifies the right counter metrics across teams, which then is the catalyst for collaboration.
Once your measurement framework has been visualised, it changes culture for the better and ensures C-suite understands the impact across the full customer journey. It’s not only acquisition that will drive growth.
Surprisingly for most, it inspires creativity amongst teams because the right customer journey metrics are being presented to all relevant stakeholders.
There is no doubt a case for attribution measurement, which is dependent on the maturity of the company – but an over-reliance on this approach will no doubt stifle the growth of marketing’s impact on sales.
~ Neil Pursey & Jay Thompson, founders of Measurebyte.
