From 2017 to 2019, marketing spending in the U.S. rose by over $6 million. 25% of this spending is related to media placement! Whether it’s pay-per-click advertising, social media outreach, or traditional print and television advertising, the cost and importance of getting your message heard is rising all the time. And the smaller a business is, the more of its revenue is allocated to marketing—businesses of 1-20 employees may spend as much as 25% of revenue on marketing, compared to 7% at businesses with 1,000 or more employees.
All this is to say, it’s more important than ever for small and mid-sized businesses in every industry to find simple ways to determine which media channels are actually providing a return on their marketing investment. Enter the concept of media or marketing attribution. Let’s unpack this concept and how it makes a data-driven marketing budget easier than ever to figure out and implement.
Media attribution is the practice of monitoring and tracking which media channels make the biggest impact on your customer engagement and ultimately, your sales. Finding out which content, promotion strategy, and media platforms make the perfect combination for your bottom line lets you make the most of your marketing spend.
In this day and age, it’s unlikely that one media channel alone is the magic solution for your marketing. Even low-cost products are researched and compared across search engines and social media before a purchase is made. Instead, media attribution is about tracking the customer’s path to discovery of your brand across multiple channels, pieces of content, and perhaps even multiple devices they own.
There is no one-size-fits-all media attribution model for a business. In fact, different marketing campaigns may benefit from being measured using different models. This will be determined by the complexity of the strategy, how long the campaign is planned for, and how many channels are used, among other factors. There are three basic media attribution models, each representing a different level of technical marketing maturity:
Experimenting with different media attribution models will help you gain perspective on your strategies and learn what works best for different kinds of content.
You don’t have to achieve high-volume conversion metrics in the next 30 days to put machine learning at work in your media attribution. We developed DemandJump to draw in data from all your media channels in real-time and provide on-demand insights about campaign performance. Based on the search habits and content consumption by your target audiences, our platform makes keyword and content topic recommendations, and can even create an automatic SEO content outline.
Demand Jump not only provides essential media attribution data to inform your marketing budget allocation, but also helps you create the content that will keep inspiring conversions as you fine-tune the placement. Sign up for a free trial today and learn just how quickly our platform can make a difference for you.