B2B Marketing Attribution is Officially Canceled

Impressions. Opens. Clicks. Visits. Conversions.

These digital engagement metrics have been the lifeblood of B2B marketing attribution for a generation now. (Literally-the oldest Gen Z-ers were born around the same time as Google.)

Despite the challenges posed by this sea of change, big opportunities are in store. A shift away from tracking and attribution could mean a shift towards ways to effectively reach and drive demand from a company’s total addressable market. Like: zero-party data, strategic narrative building, storytelling, and using the power of dark social. That’s an overall win in our book.

When cookies entered the digital marketing landscape in the late 1990s, it was all so promising. Just a few lines of code allowed marketers to track user behaviors across browsers, devices, email campaigns, and social media platforms.

The hypothetical result was better targeting and more relevant messaging, and over the last few decades, most B2B marketers developed an insatiable appetite for cookies: As of 2022, 81% of companies rely on third-party cookie data.

But what many B2B marketers may need to realize is that the system has been broken for years. In fact, the promise of cookies was only realized for a brief window of time, when everyone surfed the web on desktop computers and before privacy advocates and tech giants introduced policies or features to protect data and proprietary information.

Shortly after, marketers could no longer see opens from Gmail apps, likely due to the move to store proprietary data within a walled garden. While the consequences of these changes were small initially, as Gmail’s market share grew from an estimated 6% to 25% between 2014 and 2018, so did the overall impact on email marketing attribution.

But again, we believe this is a long overdue change. Here’s how to rethink the company’s B2B marketing strategy in this new light.

Zero-party data can be collected in several ways, including:

For example, ask a few questions about a new customer’s role and challenges during their onboarding process. Then, use that info to tailor follow-up emails and content to address their needs and, eventually, upsell and cross-sell.

Or, when a new subscriber joins an email list, simply follow up with questions asking what they’re interested (and not interested) in learning about.

A B2B marketer’s ability to segment and target customers (not lists) is a marketing jackpot.

Compare that to the old model of third-party data: guesswork and assumptions about who prospects are and what they care about based on how they interacted with someone else’s content on someone else’s platform.

Give me zero-party data every time.

An overreliance on attribution can lead to an over-indexing of conversions. Conversions are great, but pursuing them at all costs has, in some ways, papered over what should be a must-have in marketing: building audience trust.

Especially in longer sales cycles with fewer, more valuable leads, companies have to establish a strong level of credibility with a prospect before starting a sales pitch. Otherwise, it’s like proposing marriage on a first date.

Good stories capture attention. The reader can't help but to put themselves in the character's shoes. And keep turning the page to see what happens next.

In our new era of B2B marketing, storytelling skills are a must. Marketers may be unable to measure every open, view, or engagement across all the platforms where a target audience comes across the company’s content. And we may lose the ability to retarget them across other websites, bringing a company back to the top of their mind.

But compelling stories keep audiences engaged and coming back for more. Humanize messaging and create the emotional connections that are key to successful B2B marketing.

Here are a few ways to channel an inner Pixar screenwriter and tell better stories:

With compelling storytelling in place, the company’s marketing messages should become more humanized and consistent—and, ideally, centered around shared values, customer challenges, and how the company helps solve them.

We can’t measure what happens on dark social. But we can pay attention to it and work to impact these valuable sources (albeit indirectly):

Finally, pay attention to what is measured: branded search, direct traffic, new customers, and revenue growth. You may not be able to attribute them directly to any one marketing channel, but if those graphs are trending up, you know you’re doing something right.

B2B marketers can’t control how people interact with content—or fully track their behavior across devices and company channels. But we can control messaging and storytelling.

When you focus your marketing strategy on understanding customers’ problems and how the company’s product solves them, craft a narrative, and tell consistent stories in compelling ways, you will see success in your B2B marketing.

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