SPECIAL SERIES == Attribution is Garbage 🗑️ <== | BATHROOM Break #60 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That

0:01Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and SubjectLine.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. We are back. It's bathroom break.

0:35This is Jay Schwettlson from Do This Not That, here with the man, the myth, the legend, Daniel Murray. So before we get into this topic of the day, which sneak peek, its attribution is total garbage, Daniel, I have a question for you. In your newsletter, at the bottom of your newsletter, you always put in stuff like, I am going to this new restaurant, or this is my new favorite song. I always have a hard time finding this stuff? How do you always find like the cool new restaurant to go to the cool new thing to do? Are you just very cool or somebody feeding you all this stuff? First of all, I'm not very cool.

1:09It just most of the stuff sometimes are just like repeat things that I do all the time. But I did, I did feel cool the other day when I went to Vinny's cafe, that was like, I did feel cool. Like, cause that was like TikTok fame. And then I was like, I'm eating with a tiktokers are and i felt really cool doing that but usually i do we just like me and ari will pick a like cuisine then we'll look at like ratings of like which would be the best and then we'll like try something new if it sucks and never makes the list on the bottom of the newsletter so have you ever put something in your newsletter because you have a big newsletter and then you go there or whatever or they hit you up and say hey thanks so much because you put us in the newsletter we want to give you like free smoothies for life have you ever gotten like anything no i'm I'm not cool like that.

1:58But I did yesterday. Like, I have, like, the question, like, in my opening welcome email that says, like, what's your favorite restaurant? And the person was in Miami, and he messaged me back, like, I can get you this, like, reservation at, like, this top Miami restaurant if you want. And I was like, oh, finally, like, I get something. You're sleeping on this, man. This could be great. I'll tell you what's not great, though. It's attribution measurement. So many people, it's garbage. so Daniel let's get into it first what is attribution what's going on why do we what is your take I just think that the problem with attribution is like marketers should track things and I totally believe in tracking things but the what they do is like they treat attribution like it's the map it's the the only thing that they should follow and really what it is is just kind of like a compass it's supposed to guide you in certain directions but it shouldn't be your like end-all be-all and too many marketers treat it like that and and they don't look beyond their dashboards and they're losing sight of so many things that are happening around like dark social like where people are actually coming from um so that's the first point we're going to make But what is your thoughts before we go into like how to fix like attribution problem?

3:21You know, I think if you have a product that's like a phone case, very inexpensive, low cost, then attribution can be real. Meaning, oh, here's my Instagram ad I ran. We got this many customers from it. It's because I ran this ad because that's like a$15 thing. If you are selling a$2 ,000 masterclass, if you're selling a SaaS product that's$10 ,000 a year subscription, whatever, consumer B2B, you are not getting that new customer because of that last email that you sent, because of that LinkedIn ad that you ran. What's going on, in my opinion, is surround sound. And that's how you have to think about it.

4:00It is all of these touch points that you're doing. And then when that person or company is in market for the thing that you sell, you're going to be top of mind. And it's not because you press send on that last email. When you attribute revenue to that last touch, that is when you go down a rabbit hole and you waste money in all of your marketing. I also think that the first thing you got to take a step back and say, how long is the average sales cycle of like when someone first sees an ad to when they buy because for example when ios changed their 28 window to seven day window a lot of people's buying windows were 14 28 30 whatever and people thought oh now like we're not seeing sales anymore our dashboard like everything's broken we're not you got to look beyond and say like okay if someone sees an ad they usually buy 28 days later or 30 days later or six months later.

5:01So that one ad is that's going to happen in the future. So you got to account for that's how long it's going to be out. And a lot of people think, okay, Facebook attribution is everything. Like if they don't click, if I spend a hundred, I'm going to get this back. But really it's not happening for a longer window because the sales cycle, especially in B2B where the sales cycles could be six months, eight months, 12 months. That first Facebook guide could have been the one that sparked their initial interest, but then you did 80 extra activities that kept them in the loop and kept them top of mind as you were going along.

5:38Yeah, and I think that the biggest takeaway from all this is that you only have so many marketing dollars that you can spend. And how do you decide where you're spending the marketing dollars? generally speaking you're looking at okay we we did this program it generated this let's do more of that and that's too uh operating in a vacuum right you need to have a holistic view on your marketing it needs to be consistent it needs to be everywhere i'll give you an example for my own company for my agency that we run um we used to have a website that all this stuff on it let's drive people to the website drive people to the website have them look at everything whatever and And then we realized the way that we really get business is by having calls.

6:18The more calls that we have, the more business that we got. And so what we did, which is probably the worst idea of all time, is we stripped our website. Our website for our agency now is one page. And the only thing you can do, you can't click anywhere. All you can do is book a call. That's it. And then we put out content stuff everywhere else trying to drive people to just book calls with us and whatnot. because it's this idea of just by, you know, shoveling out all this garbage and you think that you're going to be able to assign value to that one thing that you did. To me, it's complete nonsense.

6:54I'll give you two things that I've seen. Like for my agency, what I do is I have, where did you hear about us? And you'll be surprised where people have heard me on the podcast, LinkedIn, from a referral. Like I could have thought it came straight from my website if I didn't have, like if someone just searched me or Google did it. If I didn't have that feel, that's one thing. Number two is like what I've noticed when I used to run marketing ops, like the best thing to do, most attribution fights are an alignment problem. Like you need to go align what the meaning of influences with sales, with finance in the same room.

7:33Like you can't operate in this vacuum of my dashboard is my dashboard and sales dashboards, their dashboard and finance dashboard. You need to come together and say like we're working as a team revenue as a team sport this is if like pipeline we know that there's multiple influences like an str is going to make a call and we're going to do marketing and it could be both at an attribute but at the end day this is have clear definitions of that that's what i've seen like avoid a lot of problems and make sales marketing and finance work together when you just get in a room and say let's align on the rules of what attribution is and then you have a week what we used to do is have a weekly meeting and go over like there used to be like five to ten attribution um problems that would come and we'll look at the rules like oh here's the rules like this attributed here here's what you and there was no fights of attribution because we got into the room together there's alignment we had alignment most of it is alignment problems i've seen in companies where like we brought in this lead no we brought in this lead.

8:36And then you're fighting over attribution instead of fighting over what the goal is, is getting revenue for the business. I think that's super valuable. And I'll tell you the other piece is that the most successful companies on the planet that I work with, doesn't matter if they're B2B, B2C, whatever they are, are those that have their marketing leadership, their sales leadership sit in on sales calls. They don't have to do the calls, but they have to sit in on those calls. They have to listen to those calls. They have to understand why people are deciding to buy from their company. And you can't just be looking at spreadsheets and dashboards and metrics, whatever.

9:11You have to take the time to intentionally be on these calls ongoing. And the biggest, best companies, their executives do this. And I think it's, if you're not doing that, I think that is a fail for your business. One last point I'll make is the sales cars. That's one thing that now that AI is available, you could do so much more. Like there's tools that have AI, but you can also feed it to you like you should have the way what where did you hear about us question somewhere it should also be in the sales process like hey i just want to ask so you can get these questions and then you can analyze the data and be like of all these sales calls here this is the most common place and then you can it helps your marketing at the end of the day when they say oh i actually heard you guys on a podcast oh podcasts actually work oh i heard you from a friend or I heard you from, so you're gathering data from podcasts, from form, from all these different sources.

10:04And I think a lot of people go off of like straight numbers, but qualitative stuff is so much when in the attribution world is like, you need to track that as religiously as you're tracking the numbers that are coming in and out. Totally agree. All right. So back to the original questions here. So now when you're, when you're out there looking for these restaurants, what do you go on? Do you go on OpenTable? Are you in some sort of like Instagram group? Are you in like a Reddit about new restaurants? Like I need to understand how the hell are you finding these places? My two go-to places are Reddit and I'll, or I'll type in on TikTok, like best restaurants in an area, um, and see, scroll through.

10:48And then what I'll do is like, um, look at this person's local or not local. Cause locals usually have the better recs. And then I'll go on Google and say like hey like what is the star rating of this thing and then look at like the food options like the menu to see if like we would like the menu because sometimes the best restaurants are these crazy menu items that we would never eat you know so um and we're not picky eaters but some things are like out there like you i would not want to like crazy animals and stuff that you would not want to touch so how do you pick you are you just consistent with your restaurants Oh, I don't like going anywhere.

11:27So I stay home and I go on Uber Eats. I order from the same five places. I'm a big dummy. So yeah, we're wild. All right. Well, once again, we crushed another episode. So attribution is garbage. And hopefully this episode isn't. Go follow the marketing millennials and we'll smell you later. Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work. Get out of there. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast. Do This, Not That for marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break.

12:02This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millet podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email, subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.