It's amazing to me how versatile and critical customer insight and targeting capability are. Understanding who your customers are, knowing what they do, and where they live has far reaching impact, beyond just marketing. To illustrate, I'm going to discuss a subject matter I haven't touched on much lately: sales. More specifically, lead qualification.

Although my work focuses a lot on the marketing side of things, because of our heavy involvement and interest in attribution, I have frequently found myself optimizing the sales process as well.

The issue I see most frequently is this: marketing drive calls or incoming leads, and the sales people are faced with long lists of prospective clients to call back or reach out to. So how do they decide who to address first?

Over the years, I've developed some successful techniques for qualifying leads, many of them based on the same method we use for media targeting. Those same concepts that allow us as marketers to identify and locate target customers based on demographic and behavioral qualities can be reversed to assign high probability profiles to incoming leads.

This allows sales people to prioritize their lists, according to a set of predetermined qualities. They can now reach out to the most qualified customers first, thereby maximizing their time and the company's money.

Just another reason to find the right customer insight and targeting methods.

I've worked with organizations in the past where the job of Brand advertising is in one department, and the job of direct-response (often online) advertising is in another. And while I think these things are different, they are still connected – or they should be. Yet, more often, these resources are siloed with their own budgets, objectives and agendas.

If you think about the Customer Journey in terms of five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase, and Loyalty, there should be media that addresses each of these phases and facilitates the path to purchase and repurchase. In that case the Branding media is especially useful during the Awareness phase (really all phases though) and Direct Response media helps with that final push into Purchase.

Yet it all works together to drive sales.

But how do we understand how this happens? I'm not talking about using the latest and greatest technology platform that apply complex algorithms and probabilities to get at the answer. I'm saying that most of the time, macro-attribution will do.

When we apply that model, we see just how much Branding and Direct Response are linked— and if the media works together, shouldn't the resources as well?

I came across some interesting infographics from the end of last year pertaining to marketing measurement. What I found interesting in particular, was the obvious lack of one important graphic. Obvious to me, anyway.
 

As you can see, "Changes in consumer behavior" is one of the key issues driving the development of marketing measurement and accountability programs. These changes I assume, cover shifts in online behaviors. As in, the proliferation of devices consumers now use to access and engage with the Internet.

Yet, with all this fragmentation, I see nothing in terms of measurement 'tools' that could help solve tracking across multiple devices. I see lots about web analytics, but what web analytics tool can tell me how online marketing is driving sales for customers who search from their work desktop computer, follow up on their iPad during the train-ride home, and call from their mobile device from their house?

Macro-economic attribution is the answer: using geo-targeted media testing to understand the true conversion - and impact - of web marketing. Learn more