Attribution modeling can save the relationships of CMOs and CFOs everywhere.

You know how it goes, marketing can get a bad reputation when it comes to finances. Sales makes money, but marketers often have to “spend money to make money.” And for a long time, marketing teams could spend a lot of money on campaigns that did not result in revenue, labeling them as “awareness” or “brand campaigns.” Results could drive financial teams crazy and create an understandable rift between CMOs and CFOs.

Attribution Modeling to the Rescue

Here’s the good news. With attribution modeling (AKA multi touch attribution), the days of unattributed resources are gone. Marketers now have the tools they need to demonstrate how all their efforts affect the bottom line, making financial teams happier.

Are you ready to impress your financial team? We have five easy tips to build credibility with your CFO and help eliminate marketing’s expensive reputation.

1. ABA: Always Be Attributing

Do you remember the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and how Alec Baldwin’s character popularized the phrase “Always Be Closing,” aka the ABCs of sales? 

Well, we’re adopting and adapting it for marketing – ABA: Always Be Attributing.

Attribution modeling is one of the easiest ways to maintain a good relationship with your CFO by demonstrating the value of your marketing activities. Showing the ROI of your efforts will help your finance teams understand how the marketing budget is being spent and how it is continuously contributing to the bottom line. This goes beyond ads and campaigns, where it is easy to connect the dots between spend and revenue. Your marketing team must practice finding attribution and ROI for every marketing activity, even those identified as brand or awareness.

With the right attribution modeling, you can easily prove the value of every marketing piece that goes live. Dealtale, for example, can show you the monetary value of blogs, PR, and other content that was previously difficult to find ROI on.

2. Find Your MOM

One of the best ways for a CMO to connect with other teams is to identify month-over-month (MOM) metrics that matter to everyone.

Alignment with your finance department is impossible if you both have different ideas of what success looks like. If you’re focused on impressions while they’re focused on conversions, you’ll never be on the same page.

Agreeing on objectives is the first step towards alignment, and it’s an ongoing process. As your company scales or your marketing activities change, it’s essential to regularly review these metrics to ensure both parties are in sync on marketing objectives.

3. Take Your Customer’s Side

Customer experience is powerful and has lots of revenue potential.

Companies understand the importance and potential of customer experience, but they are still uncertain about where it fits into their organization. According to research by Deloitte, customer experience remains dispersed among teams and lacks a clear champion among executives. Without a clear advocate, customer experience begins to decline.

This is where CMOs can step in. Your marketing team’s primary stakeholder is already the customer; you’ve already invested time, money, and resources to get closer to them, so an impactful next step would be to lead this program. 

By piecing together the mosaic of the customer journey, a CMO can provide clear leadership around CX and have more influence on business and product strategy. When you evangelize for the customer, you become an indispensable part of the company’s future.

It’s easier than it sounds. Using Dealtale’s Customer Journey Mapping, you can make data-driven decisions based on user behavior and buying patterns. 

4. Practice the Art of Optimizing with Attribution Modeling

Okay, okay, we can’t get through this whole article without mentioning the elephant in the room: marketing budget.

Marketing budgets are notoriously large, and at the end of the year, some teams end up scrambling to spend their budget out of fear of losing it the next year. This leads to less strategic spending and is every finance team’s biggest nightmare.

So if you’re trying to get on the good side of your CEO and CFO, you need to get your team in the habit of constant optimization. What does this mean? It means ensuring that everything that goes-to-market has an actual impact on your customer. If it doesn’t, you need to analyze the data and revise.

For example, let’s say you have a marketing campaign with multiple touchpoints, from blogs to ads, emails, and landing pages. You track the entire campaign from start to finish and find that the ads are not as effective as your blogs. You revise your ads to be more engaging, resulting in more conversion, providing a higher ROI.

When it comes to optimization, it’s not always about spending the budget or pinching-pennies; it’s about getting the most bang for your buck. 

5. Become Friends with Finance

Your finance team is not the enemy.

At the end of the day, this organization has something that all marketers are (or should be!) chasing: data.

Yep. Your finance team is crunching the numbers and looking at dashboards, just like you. Instead of working in silos, it’s time to combine your powers. Having finance as an ally can make all the difference when it comes to your yearly strategy.

If you want to see their data, they will definitely want to see yours. Dealtale is a no-code, easy-to-use marketing tool that can be used to quickly update other teams on marketing performance. Show off your marketing organization’s successes with Dealtale. Schedule a demo here.