Archive for the ‘Closed Loop Marketing’ Category

Launching the Rainier Advisory Group

Posted: September 7, 2010 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, online marketing suite, Rainier Advisory Group, SDMA, Strategy, web marketing
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After nearly 5 years, I’m leaving Ascentium and starting my own consultancy, Rainier Advisory Group specializing in helping companies navigate the complexity of the marketing technology landscape.

I’m very proud of the success I’ve had growing Ascentium from a small technology consulting firm into the 5th largest independent digital agency according to AdAge and being called out with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the country by Forrester Research in their 2009 Forrester Wave® of Top Interactive Agencies.

Now is the time to move on and focus on my real passion of mastering cross-channel customer experiences through the integration of the technologies that are helping transform the marketing landscape from search to analytics, lead management to CRM and everything in between. With the maturation of cloud-based services, today’s marketer is faced with a myriad of choices and almost no one to help navigate not only the applications and services themselves, but how they fit into an integrated cross-channel strategy, Forrester calls Digital Brand Orchestration.

I believe that my combination of executive experience on the client side for Lufthansa, T-Mobile and Gateway, agency consulting experience working with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Lexus, and Ford as well as start ups like Marketfish, Quasar, and Surveyanalytics as well as my thought leadership and speaking engagements for organizations like Forrester Research, the DMA, Digital Hollywood, Mirren New Business, The Integrated Marketing Conference and MarketMix, position me well to provide the strategic consulting services needed by leading companies, marketing service providers and advertising agencies.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like more information or if you know of any firm in need of my services.
I will also be devoting time to my commitment to our industry in my capacity as past president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, incoming president of the Pacific Northwest Business Marketing Association chapter as well as lecturing on digital marketing at local institutes of higher learning.

Most of my contact information remains unchanged, with the exception that I can now be reached at john@rainierag.com or jkottcamp@gmail.com . Today I have also launched my new company website, www.rainierag.com . Farewells are always sad, but new beginnings are even more exciting. I continue to wish everyone at Ascentium continued success and I look forward to sharing new stories with each of you in the near future.

Jury Trials and Social Media: They’re not so different after all

Posted: September 16, 2009 in Blogroll, Closed Loop Marketing, community marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social media, social networking, Uncategorized, Web 2.0
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I was on jury duty last week. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say it was a criminal case and we ended up finding the defendant guilty. He will probably go to prison and it’s sobering to realize that you may have had something to do with sealing his fate. Choice does matter, though sometimes more than others.

So what do juries have to do with marketing and what is the connection between jury trials and social media? Well there’s the obvious, that a jury is just like any other audience and the lawyers are like competing brand marketers trying to spin their narrative so that you will choose one side over the other. But I think it goes a little deeper than that. Being a juror, I was not only a member of the target audience, but also a key influencer on the decision of the rest of the audience; the jury.

The attorneys did their best to convince us, from their opening statements where they each painted vastly different scenarios, through the presentation of evidence and down to their closing arguments where they tried to make the sale. But, back in the jury room, we saw right through the manipulations of “facts” and in the end pretty much discounted everything the lawyers said and relied on our own judgments and the perceptions and persuasiveness of our fellow jurors. We believed each other because we knew we had no vested interest in the outcome, except for making the right choice.

Again, what does this have to do with social media? Well, to my mind, the lawyers were like traditional advertising. They sure looked sharp when they were presenting, but after you got out of the room, their pitches went right out the door. What prevailed was the common sense and back and forth examination of the evidence and intelligent choices made by consensus. To me, this is a perfect embodiment of what social media is all about. Social media gives us the opportunity to reach out to our fellow consumers (jurors), listen to each other’s arguments and through discussion and interaction, reach a conclusion that results in a choice being made. In this case, the choice was guilty or not. For consumers it may one brand over another.

I left the jury room feeling I had made the best choice I could have and I was supported in that decision by my fellow jurors. I only hope I will feel that way next month when I start looking for a new wireless carrier.

Market Researchers are the keymasters of loyalty

Posted: July 25, 2009 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, Strategy
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I was thinking about loyalty the other day. I had just sat through a company presentation where we talked about the almost 2 years of experience we have with Net Promoter Score. In the same meeting we also talked about our new Web site and how we were going to start capturing visitor data via our Web analytics tools and then incorporate that data into our CRM system. And at the end of the meeting, the topic even began to cover the piloting of capturing social media data and putting that it into CRM. Wow, that’s a lot of data. But what’s the connection between loyalty and data.

In the past, I’ve written about two distinct ways that connect data and loyalty. First, by applying what I call Closed Loop Marketing, a company can create endless loops of communication between consumers and companies. By opting in, a company can track a Web site visitor’s behavior, match with data captured from offline interactions like events, retail transactions or customer service. Then if intelligence is applied to understand the needs and wants of the customer, a company can reach back out to the customer to advance to dialogue, drive incremental transactions or take care of service incidents, closing the communication loop and advancing the relationship and by extension increasing loyalty.

In other contexts, I’ve made arguments about how companies can begin to use a mix of behavioral data captured online, demographics from CRM systems and transactional data from line of business systems to enable predictive analytics that will optimize response rates, close rates and ROI in general.

But today I had an epiphany. The missing piece has been the role of market research. Traditionally we think of market research as focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and endless cross-tabs slicing and dicing every possible sort of data. And more recently, market research has been turned upside down with the advent of online surveys like Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey. But what is still in its infancy is the pairing of market research analytic expertise with social media influence monitoring.

So what does it all mean? For over a decade we’ve been hearing about the 360° view of the customer. And this has for the most part meant getting more individual data about a customer to be able to sell them more. But what it lacks, besides the fact that virtually no one has achieved it, is that we need to stop talking about data and start talking about intelligence. Capturing transactional data from online and offline is valuable, but only if someone is looking at that data and gaining insight from it.

CRM is primarily a tool of sales people and sales people do not have the time, the background or the motivation to analyze data and turn it into insight. Campaign or brand managers are only interested in their slice of the customer and aren’t really the best choice to be the customer’s advocate.

My choice is to call upon the market researchers. Their skills lend themselves to be good listeners and good ones have the ability to synthesize and extract patterns, critical keys to gaining true understanding of behavior.
So to all of those fellow travelers in the market research space who are seeing their budgets being stripped, there traditional approaches being usurped by self-service tools online and are wondering where their next career move will take them. Start looking at yourselves as the customer advocate and make sure everything you are doing advances your understanding of customer behavior and that you are able to translate that for your businesses or your clients. That will be where you add the most value and this is the key to loyalty.

Forrester Research features Ascentium among the top Interactive agencies

Posted: June 9, 2009 in aQuantive, Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, ecommerce, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, social media, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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On Friday, Forrester Research published its Forrester Wave™, Interactive Marketing Agencies – Web Design Capabilities, Q2, 2009. Ascentium was covered for the first time along with other top digital agencies including Sapient, imc2, Razorfish, IconNicholson, IBM Interactive, Organic, Blast Radius, iCrossing, OgilvyInteractive, Resource Interactive, and Rosetta, Critical Mass, Molecular, R/GA, VML, Whittmanhart and Arc Worldwide.

In addition to just being favorably reviewed among such a great group an agencies, we take pride in that Ascentium scored the highest out of all the agencies in the category or customer satisfaction. We credit that in large part to emphasis we have given to growing customer loyalty and constantly measuring it with tools like Net Promoter Scores.

When I joined Ascentium almost four years ago, we were primarily a technology consulting firm with strong Web development skills and some good design talent, but we hadn’t yet made the commitment to become a true full service digital agency. But we got together as a team and agreed that the future was in leveraging technology to advance marketing and to move from advertising to engagement.

Three years and a roster of blue chip clients like Microsoft T-Mobile, Dell, Cisco and Random House, later. We have garnered the attention of the likes of Forrester Research and have grown from a local Seattle-based firm to an agency with offices across the country and internationally as well.

It’s been a privilege to be a part of this journey and to have helped nurture it along the way. It wasn’t always easy teaching technologists and marketers to not only get along, but to actually work synergistically, to create a new model for what Forrester has called, the agency of the future.

So congratulations to all the other agencies featured in the Wave, thanks to all the analysts at Forrester who have seen value in what we’ve created and well done to each and every employee I have the privilege of working with at Ascentium. Just wait for what we have in store for you next.

RFIDs for People, it’s finally here

Posted: April 1, 2009 in Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, ecommerce, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, online marketing suite, re-marketing, social media, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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Chipmaker, BrandChip Inc., announced that they have perfected a RFID chip that can be embedded in jewelry, watches or other personal items commonly worn by average people. This chip will contain opt in personal information regarding the wearer’s tastes, shopping habits and brand preferences. Participating retailers will be able to access the information whenever the wearer comes into the store and can then automatically generate a special offer via mobile phone.

This is the ultimate in one to one marketing. Don Rogers of Peppers and Rogers fame has been quoted as saying he’ll sign up as soon as he can and looks forward to getting some great offers from The Sharper Image. Google is figuring out how to offer a stripped down version for free and Microsoft is said to be studying it and should have a beta in market by 2015.

I applaud these efforts and look forward the next generation when they won’t even need the mobile connection. You will be able to get the offer straight from the chip.

Oh, and by the way, have a great today, April 1, 2009

High ROI Marketing Strategies for a Down Economy

Posted: February 6, 2009 in Ascentium, Blogroll, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social media, social networking, Strategy, Web 2.0, web marketing
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high-roi-tips1Last night I had the opportunity to moderate a great panel discussion on the topic of High ROI Marketing Strategies for a down Economy, held in conjunction with the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, SDMA. monthly dinner meeting.  The panel consisted of Andrea Schwarzenbach from Alaska Airlines, Andy Cotton,Yahoo, Jamie Lomas, AdReady, Brian Ratzliff, WhatCounts and Michael Williams, Williams-Helde.

The was a great turnout of about 85 marketing professionals from all over the Puget Sound and the discussion was both lively and thought provoking.  The overriding messages were; don’t be afraid of the economy, now is the time to try something new and pay more attenpation to your customers.

I had asked each panelist to come up with 1 tip that they could pass on to the attendees and we put all the ideas together in a short deck.  Take a look, download it or pass it on to a friend.  We all got a lot out of the evening and I hope you will as well.

B2B Recommendations for Turbulent Times

Posted: November 22, 2008 in Ascentium, Blogroll, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, social media, social networking, Strategy, web marketing
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I spend a lot of time with our clients figuring out the best strategy, the latest measurement tools and how to cut through the noise. But lately many of the questions have been around should B2B marketers be doing in times of economic turmoil, when no one is sure how far it is to the bottom and when we will start coming back up. So I carved out a little time and tried to come up with a few key best practices that might give at least a little direction. I’d really like to ask for everyone else’s thoughts. And maybe together we can chart the right course.

First, as the old saying goes, the best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. And while the weather metaphor may not match the current financial outlook, the lesson should be heeded by every marketer and by B2B marketers the most. Success in B2B focused businesses comes as a direct result to the quality of the relationship between companies. Traditionally this has been primarily the province of the direct sales force. But in an increasingly more online world, the quality of the relationship is measured by the quality of the online experience, which is most often managed by marketing rather than sales. So in hard times, when B2B purchasing is put on hold and buying cycles lengthen considerably, it is up to the B2B marketer to use all the tools at their disposal to nurture the relationship so that when the recovery comes and the buyers have money in their hands, they turn to those with whom they already have a relationship.

Second, in today’s world, the selling of technology is becoming a larger share of B2B transactions and the process of buying and selling technology is changing rapidly. IT purchases used to be the almost exclusive realm of technology professionals. They would recommend new technologies, deploy them and have complete responsibility for their support. And to many business users, how that technology worked and how it worked together was a mystery that went well beyond both their expertise and their interest. Now however, approaching the end of the first decade of the 21st century and when Gen X types are approaching what we used to call middle age, the roles are in flux. The rapid growth of Software as a Service and even Software plus Services, especially in the enterprise space, is testament to the fact that business owners are no longer willing to completely delegate technology to the IT department. For this new generation of business leaders, technology is not just the plumbing that runs behind the scenes, it is often the measure of innovation and a key differentiator in their business. For the B2B marketer, this means that technology can’t be packaged just for the geeks and promoted by the proverbial speeds and feeds, it must be presented to the business decision maker and must demonstrate the business value it delivers. It’s solution selling at its most basic.

Next, it’s not only that technology is moving out of the server room, it’s also being taken home. According to a recent survey of online adults, 77% used Microsoft Word at home as well as 58% used Microsoft Excel, once an exclusive business tool. What does this mean to a B2B marketer? The line between B2B and B2C customer is becoming blurred as the line between our work and our home lives fades. We are taking traditionally business applications like Word and Excel home and we are bringing Facebook and Twitter into the office with us. This is especially important as consumer products lead the innovation race and it’s just as likely that a business will be clamoring to get the latest B2C products and services, but use them in a business context. So the B2B marketer has to recognize that their audiences may be interested in their products as a consumer and that their companies are competing against consumer products in the business arena.

Finally and perhaps the most important tip for today’s B2B marketers comes from one of my favorite analysts at Forrester Research, Laura Ramos. She’s been posting a series on Forrester’s marketing blog entitled, “B2B Marketing Obsolete, Really?” And one her best messages is, “For marketing to evolve, we need to learn to listen more than we talk.” The world of Web 2.0 is no longer an abstraction. According to the most recent data I’ve seen, 75% of online adults in the United States participate in some form of social media. And that number is fairly consistent across most age groups. It’s not just a bunch of tweens on MySpace. Companies are being talked about on the Web, B2C and B2B alike. Business people are seeking out their peers to research and rate products and companies alike. And if you are not reaching out to find out what they are saying, where they are living online and who they are listening to, you can bet your competitors are.

Bottom line, despite the economy, there’s a lot B2B marketers need to be doing now and its not just this quarter’s sales that depend on it. The future of their companies may depend on how they step up to the plate.

Keeping Ahead or Keeping Pace with Customers

Posted: October 29, 2008 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, re-marketing, social media, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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I’m attending the Forrester Research Consumer Forum in Dallas this week. As usual with Forrester, there is some very good information, the networking is great and the event is well run. My only criticism is that some of the analysts present snapshots of research that in some cases is months old and I’ve already reviewed it. This wouldn’t be necessarily bad if the in person sessions shed deeper insight or generated a lively discussion on the topic, but as in most conferences, the Q&A is weak and most discussions are conducted at a fairly low level of expertise.

The theme of this conference is “Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Customer”. It’s a very important topic, especially in troubled economics times. And I was pleased to see that many of the sessions spoke to the guerilla in the room, namely how do we cope with the ups and downs we’re facing every time we look at the markets and the economic forecasts.

I will dive into some of the specific sessions in future posts, but I wanted to raise one question up front. While the theme is keeping ahead of tomorrow’s customer, shouldn’t the real theme be more of keeping pace with customers. It seems a throwback to the old school of marketing to think that we as marketers can keep ahead of customers, that we are responsible for controlling the conversation rather than being active participants.

Is Integrated Marketing the same as Integrating Marketing?

Posted: August 26, 2008 in Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0
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The other day I found myself in a heated discussion about integrated marketing. On the one side, it was argued that integrated marketing is a decade old concept that was proven not to be either practical or particularly effective. The other camp argued that integrated marketing is a core element of anything we call marketing2.0 and regardless of name, is something that is essential for the future of marketing. Both sides of the debate have good arguments and I couldn’t find any fault with their logic, however I think both miss the point.

The future of marketing does not hinge on integrating messaging across multiple channels like we tried to do at the advent of the internet age. We’ve learned that different media and different mediums require unique messaging. Just because a TV ad is video, does not mean that it’s going to be a hit on YouTube. Traditional print copy losses most online readers before the first sentence is complete and anything that hints of advertising or hype will be shot down within any community.

On the other side, simply participating in every new social network like Twitter, Imeem or Boing Boing does not automatically mean great marketing. Companies still spend as much on Yellow Pages ads as they do on internet marketing and broadcast TV is still the biggest single line item in any marketing plan. They key is not trying to be everywhere, but trying to be in the right places, where the right customers are.

I started out by saying that both points of view are missing the point. It’s not that they are wrong, but I think the real meaning of integration in today’s marketing world should reflect solutions to the problems that are keeping CMOs up at night. The biggest struggle marketing has is not with customers, but with the rest of the company.

For decades, marketing departments have used their own metrics and their own milestones for success. Even as their methods and tools have become more sophisticated, most marketers still speak in terms of reach & frequency, opens, click-throughs and response rates. Those that do attempt to measure business metrics like ROI, tend to use implied or derived revenue data and quite often their formulas do not reflect basic understanding of finance principles.

And this lack of business rigor is reflected in the way other parts of the enterprise view marketing. From the CMO council to Forrester Research, there are multiple studies that say the same thing. Most CEOs do not believe that marketing can justify its expenditures, even if they know intrinsically there is value in what is being done. Few CFOs accept any numbers marketing presents as accurate and VPs of Sales tends to argue over the influence and therefore impact of marketing programs. In general, they assign the revenue to the one who closed the sale, not the one who found the lead.

The answer is the integration of marketing into the rest of the enterprise, allowing the CMO to take their rightful place as a business leader in the C suite. Like everything else in business, this integration has people, process and technology elements. From a people perspective, marketers have to become increasingly left brain thinkers. Identify themselves as business people, no matter how creative they may be and learn to look at everything they do by asking the question, does this advance the business? From a process point of view, organizations have to stop thinking in terms of the marketing funnel, the sales pipeline and customer service and understand and track the customer along the complete customer lifecycle continuum.

And finally, look to technology as the enabler of both people and process. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, has got to come out of the Sales closet it normally hides in. If companies’ marketing, sales and customer service groups are not all using the same CRM application, or at least the same data, then they are bound to remain siloed in their approach to the customer. If the data collected from each customer touch point is not brought together and form the basis for a robust business intelligence solution, then each division will continue to report on its own metrics; campaigns, sales, incidents and not understand the value contribution of each interaction.

So, by integrating marketing into a closed loop environment, built upon a platform where all customer interaction is captured in a CRM system and then reported on and analyzed through the multiple lenses of a BI solution, companies will be able to understand their customers across time and behavior, as well as across media. The result will be achievement of integrated marketing through the integration of marketing.

What is Agency2.0?

Posted: July 26, 2008 in Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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What is Agency2.0? Several of us at Ascentium have been working on the definition of for some time and it is at the heart of how we define ourselves in the future. Last year Peter Kim (who is also presenting with you at MCONN08) at Forrester Research put out a paper entitled, Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency, in which he posited that as corporate marketing organizations reinvent themselves and become customer centric, they will need more and more help from their agencies, not just in traditional ways, but increasing as trusted advisors helping clients “capitalize on emerging channels and technologies.”

This spring he followed up that paper with another good piece called, “The Connected Agency”, where he argued that agencies now need to help their clients listen to customers rather than just shout at them. Peter and I were at a forum together in Toronto in May and spoke about the new role agencies can play helping clients engage with clients, which means multi-directional rather than either the traditional one-way push advertising of most of the last half-century or the bi-directional construct embodied in the 1:1 marketing movement of the last decade.

While I’m not holding up Forrester as the be all and end all in marketing thought leadership, I agree with Peter’s basic tenets that the new style of agency has to be a resource that enables companies to engage. And that engagement is defined by the customer experiences that are generated, managed, monitored and acknowledged by the client. And that it is up to the agency to be a creator of those experiences.

For the agency to be able to create those experiences, they have to be able to bring to bear not only the traditional skills of brand, strategy, research, account planning and creative, but now they need to be able to excel at analytics, technology and business intelligence. This new combination of skills is what defines agency2.0, or at least how we should define it so as to own the space.

Once you’ve defined the space in that way, the agency engagement model you describe of black-box delivery and risk- sharing make sense. I don’t think most marketers are ever very concerned about the internal organization of their agencies as long as they have clear lines of communication and a single throat to choke.

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