Attribution choicesYou may not think of attribution per se in your everyday life, but in fact it happens frequently. When you consider why a certain event went well, you are essentially attributing its success to one or more factors. Your big dinner party was a smash hit – was it because of the people who attended, the great food, music, weather, or something unexpected? Or when you think of a colleague’s amazing success (OK, maybe with a bit of envy), do you attribute it to his or her smarts, hard work, political adroitness, connections, or what? In both of these cases, while there may be a leading cause, there may also not be a clear-cut answer. It may have been a combination of some or all these factors.

In human relations and events, there is no magic formula to answer questions of cause and effect. In business, it has become much more challenging – and important – to assess what marketing tool or program causes action by a customer or prospect. In the last decade, email, web content, social activity, blogs, online ads, and other channel options have joined TV, radio, print, direct mail and telemarketing to create opportunities for powerful synergy for marketers, accompanied by the complexity in determining which media are driving behavior.

In business, however, there is increasing science that makes it possible to assess the influence of various channels on the desired outcome. AMA Boston is always looking for ways to offer our current and future members strategic and practical advice to enhance their success, and we feel the time is right to offer expertise on multi-channel attribution.

Join us on September 17th to hear a panel of experts from leading consumer and technology organizations discuss how to make “continuous progress along a thoughtfully-developed path” in assessing the success of your multi-channel campaigns.

 

Author

  • William Bullard

    William Bullard is a strategic marketer with extensive experience in the Internet, digital marketing, database marketing, content, and many related areas. His career was in direct marketing and wireless communications before he moved into education marketing. He recently founded EdChanges to help institutions leverage strategic marketing in a fast-changing landscape.