Welcome back to Snacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Krenula and I'm here with Sydney Waterfall to talk about attribution and funnel tracking. Sydney, what was your favorite childhood snack? I had to think about this one for a little bit and then I totally remembered exactly what it was.
The fruit by the foot, but normally I'd have three of them, like three feet of the fruit by the foot. And just one foot. They sell them in three packs or did you just now continue to extend the feet? I just grabbed three of them out of the pack.
You know, I keep going. Perfect. What are the key elements that marketers need to understand about attribution when taking a demand-gen approach? There's a few key elements that I'm going to chat through.
First is the evolution of buyer behavior. Ten years ago buyers would get their information through friends, through sales team, lack of communities, lack of internet. And now, especially buyers of all ages, the whole entire universe uses the internet much differently than they previously did. So this is driving different behaviors and the buying cycle, research, education, and even entertainment space, I would say.
So first acknowledging that shift has happened. It is no longer the case that content is consumed via PDFs via direct mail as much. Content is consumed digitally and more content is consumed digitally when it is native on the platform and ungated. So that's the first just fundamental thing that you need to acknowledge and just think about it in general.
It logically makes sense. The second thing is dark social. So what is dark social? It's word of mouth channels powered by the maturity of the internet at scale through advocacy, sharing of content, other forms of word of mouth that don't get tracked by traditional attribution software and that don't create intent data either.
What are some of these? All of your social platforms, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, maybe you're watching this on YouTube, maybe you're watching this in the Slack community. Who knows? Director of mouth, third party virtual events or in-person events or meetup and then even just internal comms, Slack, Discord, Zoom, Google meets, all of those types of things.
With the upper eyes of dark social, that's key to understand and acknowledge because with those two things happening, it makes traditional, I'll call it brand awareness and awareness tactics much harder to track, which is why most markers run a lead gen model. Which is conversion based campaigns, direct click, very easy to generate leads and then track those leads. So that's the concepts that you need to understand. Then when you want to switch your strategy to from maybe a lead gen approach or maybe a conversion performance based approach to a demand gen approach, what does that mean?
That means that you are probably going to use these channels, like social media, all the dark social channels that I just mentioned, in the way that the channel is designed for, which means that you will not have direct attribution on the content, the campaigns, the posts, anything that you are sharing on there, either organically or in ads. So you lose a lot of tracking. So that's what you need to understand. But what do you do about it?
Of course, you're going to look at things like in platform custom conversions. You're going to probably think about implementing self-reported attribution and a few other things. But that's the key element that you need to understand about how attribution has changed with taking a demand gen approach. And then the last factor is just the general privacy, data, security policies that have changed in our cookies, iPhone tracking, all of these things that are going to continue up all, has really accelerated the past two years and into next year and beyond.
It's only going to get worse. If you switch your strategy and you lose that direct tracking, so it looks like things aren't working, how do you implement a mindset shift so you don't panic? We don't want anybody to panic, especially executives or people that can control the budget. The first set is mindset, which you mentioned, then it's metrics, which I think we'll get into.
Mindset is outlining these key shifts in a consumable way for the team that you're working with or just your company organization to get on board. If you take a step back and think about it logically, you're like, yes, this happened. Yes, buyers have changed. Yes, the acceleration of internet.
Yes, all of these things are true if you were to say them to someone and yes, this makes sense. Outline that in a very easy way for people to consume internally and then provide the solution with, okay, now in order for us to shift the strategy and meet buyers where they are at, we need to then shift how we measure and how we think about the intent of the spend or resources we are allocating towards this strategy shift. All right. And we will definitely get into both of those things in later episodes.
So we'll leave it for you for now and we'll see you next time.