February 1, 2018 •Egan Montgomery
How does the face of business change when Prescriptive Attribution becomes the new reality as opposed to the innovative exception? What happens when marketers have a platform they can rely on the way sales teams rely on a CRM?
While the potential gains are seemingly endless, here are three of our
Marketing will no longer be treated as a cost center . Instead, we’ll be treated like a revenue center
With the ability to accurately forecast the value of a future marketing investment, businesses will flip from thinking about marketing as a cost
Innovative organizations might stop thinking in terms of marketing budgets at all. Instead, they will set ROAS or ROI targets, and investments will be effectively limitless so long as certain returns are met.
If you knew every dollar you spent on marketing would turn into $10 in revenue, why would you ever set a budget at all?
Marketers will start to think like investors
Even in a world that claims data is king, marketers are still operating within a largely spray and pray model. We guess and test ad
The waste that goes into this approach is immense - but accepted - because it is the only way we know.
But other industries can teach us a thing or two about our own. Take the world of financial securities for example. It wasn’t long ago that investors, like marketers today, made decisions based on little more than gut feel and disjointed data.
But between the 1970s and 1980s, some of the brightest thinkers in the world descended on Wall Street and started applying complex mathematics to financial markets. Today, just 10% of trading volume in stocks are made by fundamental discretionary traders. The vast majority of activity is categorized as either algorithmic trading (AT) and high-frequency trading (HFT).
With the onset of Prescriptive Attribution, marketing is poised for a similar shakeup. Guess and test strategies will fade away, and humans and computers will work together to build marketing plans around financial goals and overall cost and revenue objectives. Marketing investments will be calculated and predictable as opposed to random crapshoots.
Marketers have their first ever central source of the truth (a marketing brain)
Marketers have never once been connected to a centralized source of daily truth - think a CRM system for a salesperson.
There are over 5,300 marketing technology tools, many of them serving a totally siloed purpose. And while certain analytics providers can connect disparate data sources together, all fall flat when it comes to critical performance characteristics like multi-touch attribution, data ownership, unlimited drill-down capabilities and full customization.
What if a marketer could walk into work every day, flip open a single platform, and quantifiably know what to do next to maximize revenue, grow qualified traffic and prove ROI to the rest of the organization.
Massive amounts of waste will be eliminated when marketers can see all their data overlaid with market intelligence, creating a transparent and accurate picture of their entire digital ecosystem.
Conclusion
The onset of prescriptive attribution is going to change the way businesses and marketers interact with customers. For the first time ever, marketers will be able to accurately predict the value of their marketing efforts. The days of marketers blindly allocating marketing spend using the 'guess and test' principle are over. With prescriptive attribution, businesses will finally have a view of their entire digital ecosystem and all of the touch points that resonate with customers.
