SPECIAL SERIES == Attribution is Garbage 🗑️ <== | BATHROOM Break #60 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That

Daniel Murray: Welcome to a new special series called the bathroom break. That extra ten minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice.

Jay Schwedelson: This collab is gonna be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the marketing millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson, from the do this not that podcast and subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are gonna go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you wanna be in the bathroom, fine. Just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. We are back. It's bathroom break. This is Jay Schwedelson from Do This Not That, here with the man, the myth, the legend, Daniel Murray. So before we get into this topic of the day, which sneak peek, its attribution is total garbage, Daniel, I have a question for you. In your newsletter, at the bottom of your newsletter, you always put in stuff like, I am going to this new restaurant or this is my new favorite song. I always have a hard time finding this stuff. How do you always find, like, the cool new restaurant to go to, the cool new thing to do? Are you just very cool or is somebody feeding you all this stuff?

Daniel Murray: Personally, I'm not very cool. It just most of the stuff sometimes are just, like, repeat things that I do all the time. But I did I I did feel cool the other day when I went to Venice Cafe. That was like I did feel cool. Like because that was like TikTok fame, and then I was like, I'm eating where TikTokers are, and I felt really cool doing that. But, usually, I do we just, like me and Ari will pick a, like, cuisine, then we'll look at, like, ratings of, like, which would be the best, and then we'll, like, try something new if it sucks and never make makes the list on the bottom of the newsletter. So

Jay Schwedelson: Have you ever put something in your newsletter? Because you have a big newsletter, and then you go there or whatever, or they hit you up and say, hey. Thanks so much. Because you put us in the newsletter, we wanna give you, like, free smoothies for life.

Daniel Murray: Have you

Jay Schwedelson: ever gotten, like, anything out

Daniel Murray: of I'm I'm not cool like that, but I did yesterday. Like, I have, like, the question, like, in my opening welcome email that says, like, what's your favorite restaurant? And the person was in Miami, and he messaged me back. Like, I can get you this, like, reservation at, like, this top Miami restaurant if you want. And I was like, oh, finally, like, I get something.

Jay Schwedelson: You're sleeping on this, man. This could be great. I'll tell you what's not great, though. It's attribution measurement. So many people, it's garbage. So, Daniel, let's get into it. what is attribution? What's going on? Why do we what what is your take?

Daniel Murray: I just think that the problem with attribution is like marketers should track things, and I totally believe in tracking things. But the what they do is, like, they treat attribution like it's the map. It's the the only thing that they should follow. And really what it is is just kinda like a compass. It's supposed to guide you in certain directions, but it shouldn't be your, like, end all be all. And too many marketers treat it like that, and and they don't look beyond their dashboards. And they're losing sight of so many things that are happening around, like, dark social, like, where people are actually coming from. So that's the point we're gonna make. But what is your thoughts before we go into, like, well, how to fix, like, attribution problem?

Jay Schwedelson: You know, I think if you have a product that's like a phone case, very inexpensive, low cost, then attribution could be real. Meaning, oh, here's my Instagram ad. I ran we got this many customers from it. It's because I ran this ad because it that's like a $15 thing. If you are selling, you know, a $2,000 master class, if you're selling a SaaS product that's $10,000 a year subscription, whatever, consumer b to b, you are not getting that new customer because of that last email that you sent, because of that LinkedIn ad that you ran. What's going on in my opinion is surround sound, and that's how you have to think about it. It is all of these touch points that you're doing. And then when that person or company is in market for the thing that you sell, you're going to be top of mind. And it's not because you press send on that last email. When when you attribute revenue to that last touch, that is when you go down a rabbit hole and you waste money in all of your marketing.

Daniel Murray: I also think that, like, the thing you gotta take a step back and say, like, how long is the average sales cycle of, like, when someone sees an ad to when they buy? Because, for example, when iOS changed their 28 window to seven day window, a lot of people's buying windows were fourteen, twenty eight, 30, whatever. And people thought, oh, now, like, we're we're not seeing sales anymore. Our dash like, everything's broken. We're not you gotta look beyond and say, like, okay. If someone sees an ad, they usually buy twenty eight days later or thirty days later or six months later. So that one ad is that's gonna happen in in the future. So you gotta account for that's how long it's gonna be out. And a lot of people think, okay. Facebook attribution is is everything. Like, if they don't click, if I spend a 100, I'm gonna get this back. But, really, it's not happening for a longer window because the sales cycle especially in b to b where the sales cycles are could be six months, eight months, twelve months. It's not gonna cut that Facebook ad could have been the one that sparked their initial interest, but then you did 80 extra activities that kept them in the loop and kept them top of mind as you were going along.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. And I think that the biggest takeaway from all this is that you only have so many marketing dollars that you can spend. And how do you decide where you're spending the marketing dollars? Generally speaking, you're looking at, okay, we we did this program. It generated this. Let's do more of that. And that's to operating in a vacuum. Right? You need to have a holistic view on your marketing. It needs to be consistent. It needs to be everywhere. I'll I'll give you an example for my own company, for my agency that we run. We used to have a website that had all this stuff on it. Let's drive people to the website, drive people to website, have them look at everything, whatever. And then we realized the way that we really get business is by having calls. The more calls that we have, the more business that we got. And so what we did, is probably the worst idea of all time is we stripped our website. Our website for agency now is one page. And the only thing you could do, you can't click anywhere. All you could do is book a call. That's it. And then we put out content stuff everywhere else trying to drive people to just book calls with us and whatnot because it's this idea of just by, you know, shoveling out all this garbage and you think that that you're gonna be able to assign value to that one thing that you did, to me it's complete nonsense.

Daniel Murray: I'll give you two things that I I've seen like for my my agency, what I do is I have where did you hear about us? And you'll be surprised where people have heard me on the podcast, LinkedIn, from a referral. Like, it I could have thought it came straight from my website if I if I didn't have, like if someone just searched me or Google did it if I didn't have that field. That's one thing. Number two is, like, what what I've noticed when I used to run marketing ops, like, the best thing to do most attribution fights are an alignment problem. Like, you need to go align what the meaning of influence is with sales, with finance in the same room. Like, you can't operate in this vacuum of, like, my dashboard is my dashboard and sales dashboard is their dashboard and finance dashboard. You need to come together and say, like, we're working as a team. Revenue is a team sport. This is if, like, pipeline, we know that there's multiple influences. Like, SDR is going make a call on, we're going to do marketing, and it could be both that attribute. But at the end of day, this is have clear definitions of that. That's what I've seen, like, avoid a lot of problems and make sales, marketing, and finance work together when you just get in a room and say, let's align on the rules of what attribution is. And then you have a we what we used to do is have a weekly meeting and go over, like there used to be, like, five to 10 attribution problems that could come. And we'll look at the rules like, oh, here's the rules. Like, this attributed here, here's what I've true. And there was no fights of attribution because we got into a room together. There's alignment. We had alignment. Most of it is alignment problems I've seen in companies where, like, we brought in this lead. No. We brought in this lead. Are we and then you're fighting over attribution instead of fighting over what the goal is is getting revenue for the business.

Jay Schwedelson: I think that's super valuable. And I'll tell you the other piece is that the most successful companies on the planet that I work with, doesn't matter if they're b to b, b to c, whatever they are, are are those that have their marketing leadership, their sales leadership sit in on sales calls. They don't have to do the calls, but they have to sit in on those calls. They have to listen to those calls. They have to understand why people are deciding to buy from their company. And you can't just be looking at spreadsheets and dashboards and metrics, whatever. You have to take the time to intentionally be on these calls ongoing. And the biggest best companies, their executives do this. And I think it's if you're not doing that, I think that is a fail for your business.

Daniel Murray: One last point I'll make is the sales calls, that that's one thing that now that AI is available, you could do so much more. Like, there's tools that have AI, but you can also feed it to AI. Like, you should have the way what where did you hear about this question somewhere. It should also be in the sales process like, hey. I just wanna ask. So you can get these questions, and then you can analyze the data and be like, of all these sales calls here, this is the most common place. And then you can it helps your marketing at the end of the day when they say, oh, I actually heard you guys on a podcast. Oh, podcasts actually work. Oh, I heard you from a friend or I heard you from so you're gathering data from podcasts, from form, from all these different sources. And I think a lot of people go off of, like, straight numbers, but qualitative stuff is so much when it in the attribution world is like, you need to track that as religiously as you're tracking the numbers that are coming in and out.

Jay Schwedelson: Totally agree. Alright. So back to the original questions here. So now when you're when you're out there looking for these restaurants, what do you go on? Do you go on OpenTable? Are you in some sort of, like, Instagram group? Are you in, a Reddit about new restaurants? Like, I need to understand how the hell are you finding these places?

Daniel Murray: My two go to places are Reddit and I'll or I'll type in on TikTok, like, restaurants in an area and see scroll through. And then what I'll do is, like, look if this person's local or not local because locals usually have the better recs. And then I'll go on Google and say, like, hey. Like, what is the star rating of this thing? And then look at, like, the food options, like, the menu to see if, like, we would like the menu. Because sometimes the best restaurants are these crazy menu items that we would never eat in. So and we're not picky eaters, but some things are, like, out there. Like, you I would not want to like crazy animals and stuff that you would not want to touch. So how do you pick? You are you just consistent with your restaurants?

Jay Schwedelson: Don't like going anywhere. So I stay home and I go on Uber Eats. I order from the same five places and I'm a big dummy. So, yeah, we're wild. Alright. Well, once again, we crushed another episode. So attribution is garbage and hopefully this episode isn't. Go follow the marketing millennials and we'll smell you later. Daniel, come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. Alright. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This Not That for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing, and I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Daniel Murray: Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the marketing millennials podcast, but also tune in to this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out, and it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you wanna hear. Peace out. Later.