Are you familiar with the term “attribution” in marketing? Wikipedia defines it like this: Attribution is the process of identifying a set of user actions (“events”) that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then assigning a value to each of these events. Marketing attribution provides a level of understanding of what combination of events influence individuals to engage in a desired behavior, typically referred to as a conversion.
Football coaches and experienced automotive marketers respond to it like this: “Attribution ….Pssshaw!” They’d rather focus on “influencing” the opposing offense in advance to play into their defense’s strengths rather than validating that one or more of their linebackers attributed to a tackle after the play. They understand that that tackle (event) is really a correlation to a lot of other contributing factors.
“Focus on Influencing the opposing offense in advance to play into their defense’s strengths.”
And you should too. Let’s stick with our football analogy for a moment. In most football tackles on a running back there are multiple defensive players involved. Game announcers and fans typically attribute the tackle to one player. That one player (consider him a marketing vendor) is only too happy to take all the credit/attribution as well. Yet the Defensive Coordinator knows all too well that it was a team effort where all of his players “contributed” to the tackle (conversion) versus one player being fully responsible or “attributed” to the tackle. The smart Defensive Coordinator even knows that before the ball was snapped, his entire defense, his formation, even their reputation “influenced” the direction of the running backs’ play to begin with. This is how you as an advertiser should look at conversion too. Preplanned influence has more to do with conversion than does an advertising tactics’ attribution metrics.
“Preplanned influence has more to do with conversion than does an advertising tactics’ attribution metrics.”
Running with the football analogy further, like your customers and prospects, a running back takes very different paths and even changes roles and acts as a receiver or a blocker – oft times at the last moment. They engage the opposing defense in many different and unpredictable ways, so too does your customer. Your best bet is to influence them in advance so that all of your advertising tactics work in concert… to contribute to the conversion, or the tackle as our analogy would have it. Preplanned effective influence matters more than any attribution metric. For example, if you have a strong Vehicle Exchange Program in place, (for instance like the Vehicle Exchange Program at Rick Case Honda in Davie, FL) then driving that brand intelligently to your pre-funnel opportunities will influence those customers to “connect with,” recognize, and engage with your brand/logo as soon as they get into the sales funnel. In this way, you influence your opportunities to play into your strengths.
Let’s be specific about your advertising tactics. Let’s say that you have an incredibly strong attribution metric from a widget on your website. Let’s say that it’s so strong that you constantly talk about it with your management team and associates in the field. As you evaluate all of your tools you find that it’s the one conversion tool that has the highest attribution metric in your marketing stack. Here’s an experiment, take that widget link and email that link proactively to all of your customers that purchased 3 years ago. Do you think doing that will drive the same attribution metrics as those customers who found that widget on your website through a sequence of other advertising elements that contributed to them finding it on their own when they were looking? Of course not, not even close. What (or more specifically who) influences your customer trumps the value of any advertising tactic over time.
Indeed there are events (sales & service) that are directly attributable to one or more specific events consistently, yet they’re limited to direct customer referrals, repeat buyers loyal to you, end-of-lease factors etc. But that’s really it. The rest of your conversions are correlation’s of many contributing and variable factors.
Remember, your customers and prospects are influenced by a variety of factors and engage with you in many different ways. They engage with many of your competitors for the very same reasons as they do with you. So your main advantage, the single largest element in their overall conversion to you is your preplanned influence and conditioning. Some refer to this as branding, but here I’m talking about a more sophisticated brand-gagement strategy that focuses on pre-sales funnel, anticipatory influence. In this way you influence your opportunities singly, intelligently, persistently, and effectively before they get into the shopping and buying cycle or “sales funnel.” In doing so all of your messaging will contribute more effectively with for you regardless of how and where those opportunities engage you.
To do this you leverage your unique brand early and often in your market in a “brand-gagement” fashion to those targets that are most likely to “get into the sales funnel” relatively soon. Market before the funnel. You also do so with those customers that haven’t serviced with you in a year or longer because re-engaging a lost customer is 2 to 3 times more beneficial to your dealership then winning a new customer.
Again, an intelligent and persistent communication strategy – early and often – with those customers and opportunities that you have the most influence over will produce more consistent and ever growing sales, service, and profitability for your dealership. And that success of course, you’ll be able to “attribute” to your deep understanding of relationship between brand, your customers, and influence.
If this article makes sense to you and you want to have a real world discussion about how your dealership can begin effectively influencing your opportunities BEFORE the sales funnel, shoot us an email or give us a call and we’ll walk you through it. You can reach me directly at ronmorrison@pureinfluencer.net or give me a call directly at (408) 218-6407. You can also visit us and learn more at www.pureinfluencer.com.