Marketing Attribution In The Water And Wastewater Market
One of the reasons Marketing gets such a brush off in the water and wastewater market is that unlike Sales, it has always been difficult to measure Marketing’s return on investment. Measuring sales is easy. It doesn’t matter what happens out in the field, at the end of the day, you measure your Sales reps on how many units they sell. They might be hard to manage but their output is simple to measure.
When it comes to Marketing, the old adage remains as embedded in the water and wastewater market today as it has always been – as Nineteenth century Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker once supposedly said -- “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”
If you don’t know if your marketing is working, then it’s logical to leave budgets in place year-over-year and assess wins and losses on the performance of your Sales team alone. However, data-driven attribution models are evolving to guide you in assessing Marketing’s value in ways that you’ve never contemplated before.
The best attribution models have two basic things in common. One, they use a multi-touch model. And two, they track company-wide engagement across multiple contacts.
The First Part Of A Good Attribution Model Is Tracking Multiple Touches
Single-touch attribution models are easy. It’s relatively easy to track when a prospect first enters your funnel, or to track the last interaction before a sale. In the distributed sales landscape of the water and wastewater market, it’s easy for multiple touches to get lost and for Sales to emerge the hero with contract in hand, unassisted in scaling the utility’s barriers to entry.
In reality, your customer’s purchasing process contains hundreds of interactions, most of which are taking place before they engaged with your sales rep. Buyer’s journeys are a hot mess in the water and wastewater market. Just look at how Gartner depicts the process. There is nothing linear about it. You can’t even tell where marketing stops and where sales begins.
60 percent of purchasing activity is happening before your prospect engages directly with your sales rep.
Single-Touch Attribution Models, Such As Those That Only Track The Last Touch Before A Purchase, Result In Decisions Based On Misleading Data
And you don’t want to dry up your pipeline based on misleading data.
For example, let’s say you use a last-touch model. You see a trend that contracts tend to get signed after a prospect visits your booth at a trade show. It’s easy to conclude that the sales rep who worked the booth at the trade show should take credit for the contract. However, a multi-touch attribution model would have identified the content that the booth visitor had engaged with prior to the trade show. The sale would arguably not have happened if it wasn’t for the Marketing effort to get him to your booth in the first place!
In this example, misleading data is why your sales team would want you to invest more in trade shows and less in every other aspect of marketing.
A side note on single-touch attribution models: the default mode for Google Analytics is a last-touch model. Beware of Google! Google Analytics can be a great, free tool if you’re just starting with attribution but make sure to check out the Multi-Channel Funnels Model Comparison Tool. With the complexity of decision-making loops in the water and wastewater market, online last-touch attribution can be as misleading as our in-person tradeshow example above.