Let’s break that down.
What is a customer’s interaction with your brand? It doesn’t have to just be a booking or purchase, it might be that they started to follow you on Instagram, visited your website or pinned one of your images to their Pinterest board. And why does this matter? Because it demonstrates interest and kicks off their customer journey with your brand!
So what is a customer buying journey? We like to call those sales funnels — all the steps that potential clients take as they discover, interact with, convert to paying clients, and advocate for your business or service.
Most common sales funnels:
Lead attribution is crucial to scaling (and investing in) marketing strategies because without the knowledge of how effective a specific marketing strategy is, you lack the certainty that said strategy will actually perform. By tracking and analyzing each sales funnel and how clients discover your business, you can make educated decisions on the best and most effective routes. We call this measuring your ROI (return on investment) or ROAS (return on ad spend).
Particularly with any paid advertising, it’s vitally important to calculate your ROAS by dividing the amount of revenue you generated by the amount you spent on advertising. A ROAS of more than 1 can be considered a positive return. Of course, not all advertising is focused on creating a conversion. Some activities might purely be targeting growing your brand awareness, collecting more emails, getting more followers etc. These types of campaigns don’t always have a positive ROAS on their own but can be a significant driver in getting people into your purchase funnel who might convert at a later date. This is particularly true in the wedding industry where the sales cycle can be longer than 12 months, depending on when your potential client’s wedding date actually is.
According to our most recent reader survey, 56% of couples tell us they hired a vendor that they actually discovered natively on social media. We don’t even have data on what percentage of couples hire a vendor that they discovered elsewhere, then went to Instagram to do a little research but you can be sure that number is high.
Unfortunately the fragmentation of the digital landscape has made it harder and harder to track exactly where your leads are coming from. For example, let’s say a customer sees a picture of your work on Style Me Pretty’s Instagram and starts to follow your page, after a few weeks they send you a message via the contact form from your website. Even if you proactively ask them where they found you – what will they say? They could say Style Me Pretty, they could just say Instagram, they could even say your website. We can no longer rely on consumers to accurately report where their customer buying journey began because the process is non-linear across multiple platforms, publications and profiles.
And this example also assumes they only needed to see your work once to decide to “consider” you. While we don’t have exact data on how many times a bride/groom engages before they decide to contact a vendor, we do know that with traditional advertising a consumer needs to interact with a brand on average 7 times for it to be impactful in producing a conversion. This is called the “7 Times” rule.
And what if all 7 of those times take place in a different medium? Who is responsible for the lead?! The simple answer is there is no simple answer. We have to measure your holistic marketing efforts, rather than looking at each individual investment or activity in a vacuum. And to make things even more confusing, ROAS isn’t the only metric you’re going to want to track.
All of these data points are going to give you more facts about how your overall marketing efforts are performing. Tracking these over time, and particularly in time where you are changing your strategy, will give you a better view of the specific types of messaging and touch points that work for your brand and your audience.
Despite the fact that lead attribution has become increasingly difficult to track, there are a number of tools that can help you to get a better picture of where your audience is coming from and to help you move them through the sales funnel to a potential transaction.
Here are some helpful tools or simple processes to get started:
You can then find your campaigns in GA and see what drove the most traffic – check out this article for more details.
So to conclude, if you want to feel good about your marketing investments, you need to make sure you’re measuring the effectiveness and paying attention to where your audience is coming from and how they behave before they convert. Tracking social media leads may feel like a minefield and is only getting trickier as brides/groom move away from traditional planning sites to places like Pinterest and Instagram.
However, the more you can educate yourself on what your successful marketing efforts look like, the better assumptions you can make as well. If your number one source of leads is Instagram, you can feel good about investing your precious time into building a following and a strong brand identity and investing in programs that broadcast your content to larger audiences (aka, Style Me Pretty!).
Images by LBB member Ether & Smith | see the original feature here