The Digital Marketing Executive

If you market to business professionals, you’re no stranger to the complexities of the buying cycle. In most cases, prospective buyers don’t sign on the dotted line immediately—it’s a gradual process, beginning with awareness and education, fueled along by solid nurturing, and then stages of evaluation, proposals, and negotiation, before the final purchase is made (if we’re lucky).

When the deals are signed and we’re patting ourselves on the back, it’s tempting to say that a specific marketing channel was the grand contributor to the closed deals—this level of attribution would certainly make our lives easier as marketers. But there is no simple answer when it comes to online marketing, and this type of thinking can lead us to optimize to the wrong metrics and invest in the wrong channels.

In my recent guest blog post for Marketo “Don't Overlook the Display Alley-Oop" I discussed that as forward-thinking marketers, we can’t fall prey to the assumption that our prospects aren’t influenced by a variety of factors in their journey toward a business purchase. Specifically, display has been proven to have a tremendous effect on the likelihood that users will search for a specific brand or product. The danger in measuring display and search—or any other marketing channels for that matter—as discrete marketing siloes, is that we’ll never gain an accurate picture of which marketing investments are having the most impact. But if we strive to look across our entire marketing mix to recognize the value that each channel brings, we’ll realize that in most cases, there was another player, or even an entire team, behind that slam-dunk marketing effort.