007 - Performance marketing is dying
1* “Performance marketing is dying”
Marketers are increasingly becoming more accountable for driving business impact. The days of simply driving website traffic and reach as your KPI, and that’s your job done, are becoming numbered.
Brands who are choosing to duke it out at the bottom of the funnel with all the other advertisers, as their sole strategy in 2022, are in real danger of becoming outgunned because of increasing costs, increasing competition and no differentiation,
Your buyers have changed, but your marketing hasn’t.
But what percentage of your ICP is actually in the market for your product? Less than 10%? Less than 55? What about the other +90%?
For that +90%, how are you educating and engaging them based on their problems? What are you doing to keep front of mind?
Capturing demand is easy. Using your attribution to report back on” good” leads is easy.
Creating demand is hard. Being top of mind is hard. Changing your KPIs to what matters to your business is hard.
But doing what’s easy, isn’t usually what’s right.
Performance marketing is getting more expensive and more competitive. If your 2022 strategy is largely dependent on performance marketing, anticipate tougher times ahead.
2* We can’t track everything, but that's OK.
Making all marketing decisions based on attribution alone is a mistake. I said it. My steak is officially in the ground.
2020 Chris Peters would have thought I’ve gone mad.
But since then, my POV has evolved.
I have seen and reviewed the data of multiple B2B businesses, analysed dozens of campaigns and consumed 100s of hours of content from super-smart people.
My conclusion.
So many of your buyers are buying your product that is wrongly being attributed in your attribution tools, and you and your team could be making some pretty big calls based on a blinkered view.
The decision journey is being influenced more and more by activities you can’t track.
The Dark Funnel, where a lot of this action takes place, represents a huge opportunity for brands to drive more business impact. The issue, it’s hard to track, justify to your finance team and get budget for it.
For now, here’s a simple explanation of The Dark Funnel and where attribution is going wrong.
I just signed up to purchase a SaaS product.
Here were the steps I went through
- I ask a former colleague for a recommendation
- Googled the company name and 2 other competitors I also knew of
- Read a review site
- Conducted a free trial for 2 of them
- Watched a webinar after the trial I most liked
- Purchase from a brand I preferred, which happened to be my friend's recommendation
"Source" in their CRM is 'Organic Search' - the first time I got to their site was through Google.
If they stop looking at their attribution there, they'd think 'Great, our SEO is working! Let's invest more in it!'.
Understanding your buyer, and how they buy in today’s world is imperative for success in 2022 and beyond.
Is attribution important, 100%, it should be an important part of all decision making for your marketing, should it be the “single source of truth” no. I don’t think there will ever be one. You should be using multiple pieces of data to make the bigger overarching decision for your marketing.
3* This statement is soooo powerful
https://twitter.com/agazdecki/status/1467159141038788613?t=POqXlwKBw29m-ULVrodxyA&s=19
Taking my former start-up hat off and applying this statement to myself and my B2B peers.
Don’t fall in love with your customers but be obsessed with them.
Marketers should have a healthy obsession with their customers.
This means truly understanding their challenges, how they attempt to solve these challenges, where they hang out, what they talk about, what they’re interested in, who they’re interested in.
Everything you do in marketing starts with the above.
4* “More attention, ultimately means more sales”
My super smart colleague Andrew Spurrier-Dawes put together this analysis of. “Contextual of the Attention Economy“.
Features:
Seedtag teamed up with Lumen to assess the value of context on attention and found:
Ads holding attention for more than 2.5 seconds can drive sales up to 50%
Social drives more seconds of attention per ad (2.4”) than standard display ads (1.4”) Outstream video (1.8”), but less than rich media (3.6”)
This is built on how much ads are noticed – social ads are noticed 84% of the time, vs 61% for standard ads, 80% for Outstream video and 40% for Rich Media
This means the Social has the most attention time per 1,000 ads, at 2,024” vs 837 for standard ads, 1,448 for outstream video and 1,437 for rich media
What this means or us specifically:
Ignoring the PR nature of the partnership here there are some interesting variances
Rich Media delivering such a huge amount more attention but then underdelivering on getting noticed is a delta that can be optimised
Social delivering a consistently decent seconds in view time is also something to be noticed – keeping an eye on how we define viewability and attention is key here
How are you measuring effectives or digital KPIs as a proxy for effectiveness? And how are they consistent across channels?
Check out the full piece below.
3011_SEEDTAG_LUMEN_WHITEPAPER (hubspotusercontent40.net)
5* The best B2B content marketing agency in the world just shared their content marketing benchmark report.
Side note, I have never used Animalz, but their brand is so powerful, their content is so captivating, their leaders are so impressive that this is my genuine perception without ever working with them.
Take a look at their website, follow their leaders on LinkedIn, and read their podcast. This is an excellent example of brand positioning done very well.
Now back to the report.
The report is jam-packed with insight for you content marketers.
Here is a quick teaser, but please check it out for your yourselves. https://www.animalz.co/blog/benchmark-report-2020/
*Bonus*
Each week I will share a tool I have used, plan to use or I find just interesting.
Zapier is the easiest way to connect and automate your workflows.
For every manual process, for every cross-platform process, there is likely to be a “Zap” solution for you to claw back and save your time.