Posts Tagged ‘analytics’

Customer experience evolves into Co-experience

Posted: November 10, 2011 in Co-experience, customer experience
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Most companies define customer experience as bi-directional brand interactions; the prospect reacting to an ad, a first time buyer, or a customer interacting with customer service. With the advent of social networks, the proliferation of mobile devices and fundamental shifts in the purchase process, traditional customer experience is being replaced by co-experience.

Consumers engage with your brand every day without any direct interaction. When a fan Tweets about a celebrity and their followers re-Tweet the same message, they are having a customer experience with your brand even if there is no direct interaction. Ratings and reviews take place more and more on websites like Amazon and Yelp. People “Like” products or brands on a 3rd party pages or websites. And word of mouth is between consumers and communities, whether it’s happening across the back fence, on a social network or via an eCommerce site.

The sum total of all customer experiences with a brand defines co-experience. Companies and brands have to understand all permutations of consumer relationships across media and channels, how they relate and interact with each other and ultimately how a company can participate in the co-experiences with relevant, contextual content and engagement that produce the most engaging and relevant customer experiences.

The identification and validation of a trend enables real-time marketing

Posted: August 31, 2011 in CMO, real-time marketing, social media
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I’ve been reading a lot about trend identification and real-time marketing lately. I wanted to put the subject into some context. For the last year, I have been working with a new start-up, Blab, which is based on the idea that trends are what get people’s attention, that their attention is very short lived and that understanding trends is only valuable for marketers if they can act in real-time and leverage people’s interest in a particular trend.

Historically, in marketing, trend identification was the prevue of market research companies and typically involved a combination of quantitative (surveys, data mining and modeling) and qualitative research (focus groups and observation). The trends that were identified tended to be macro in nature and were described as the shift in ideas and conduct over time, most commonly measured in years.

The output of these processes were delivered to creative groups and agencies and used to create the “big idea” upon which a marketing campaign was created. They were designed to trigger emotional engagement, leaving a consumer with positive brand association. Validation came in the form of public acceptance, measured again through quantitative and qualitative metrics. Impact was independently measured, typically as a product of reach (the number of people exposed to the “big idea”) and frequency (the number of times an individual was exposed to the “big idea”.)

This methodology has been pervasive over the last half century and continues to be used by most consumer brands in conjunction with the creation and distribution of marketing messages across traditional marketing channels (Broadcast, Cable, Print, Out-of-home…).

Direct marketing provided marketers with access to specific and detailed data relating to who viewed a message and what action they took after consuming the message and outcome. This data driven approach has been applied to email, search, display, web and other digital channels. It has also allowed marketers to improve their ability to identify trends through data mining and modeling techniques, resulting in behavioral analysis leading to predictive analytics, which is intended to give guidance to a company as to when, where and how a consumer will be more receptive to their product/service offering. Like brand marketing, the insights delivered through this type of research are typically delivered to a creative group or agency and used to create a series of campaigns, targeted to like sets of audiences and addressed to identified individuals. Validation is measured by actual response behavior.

More recently, with the advent of social networking and the near ubiquity of Internet access, trend identification and validation has taken on a new meaning. Trends proliferate virally in a matter of minutes and hours rather than months and years. It is possible to spread a message via Twitter or Facebook to 500 people who each forward to another 500 almost instantaneously, reaching 500² or 250,000 people who by their voluntary social association share interests, attitudes and behaviors.

In this context, my company, Blab, has authored a specific and unique methodology and associated algorithms for identifying and validating these volatile and transitory trends in real-time, providing marketers with insight into the pulse of the culture at any given point and the resulting ability to contextualize their content to align with the appropriate topical trends.

Over the next few weeks, I will dig deeper into our ideas around how to identify trends, categorize them and then use that information to inform contextual content creation and publication.

Can CMOs and CIOs become good partners

Posted: March 16, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Let’s start with understanding the problem. It’s not that CMOs and CIOs speak different languages, it’s that they fundamentally approach problem solving differently. Most CMOs come out of the advertising and creative world of the “big idea.” At the end of the day, they are dealing with abstraction, creating emotional ties to an ephemeral concept, known as the brand. While they can measure success from outcomes, they can never conduct QA testing to see if the solution works or not. Whereas most CIOs come from an IT background where at there is ultimately a “right” answer or solution to a given problem and it is easily measured b whether it works or not. And the outcome of working is out of scope.

At our company, Blab, I’m lucky that our CTO Joseph and I have a strong working partnership. It comes mutual respect (very common at C level), shared goals (common if business focused) and most importantly, because we spend a lot of time together talking through ways to solve problems.

I’ve learned some of the lingo of technology. I have a rudimentary understanding of database schema and at least don’t cringe when I hear the terms php, ruby on rails and lamp stack. I recognize they are development languages. But what is more important is that I understand that they are critical to my being able to effectively and efficient communicate with my customers across multiple channels.

Joseph, on the other hand, has not spent his entire career managing IT infrastructure. He can write code himself, actually thinking its fun and is excited about solving challenging problems. He’s learned something about frequency and reach and the abbreviations, cpc, seo, sem and crm don’t make his eyes glaze either.

But the real key to our mutual success is sitting down together in front of a whiteboard and sometimes over a beer, talking about the big picture issues we both face. Are we keeping up with our customers? Do we understand the problems they have? Are we equipped with the ability to listen to our customers, analyze what they’re saying and acting on the insight before it’s too late.

Joseph’s mind certainly works differently than mine. He often comes up with a completely different perspective on the issue and as often as not, his logical rational mind is as perceptive as the most gifted and creative brain. And then he tells me how he can build whatever it takes to bring the idea to life.

Welcome to a new season of the SDMA

Posted: August 21, 2009 in Ascentium, SDMA
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In addition to my role at Ascentium, I have been privileged to be elected president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, SDMA, and as we kick off our new 2009-2010 season of events I’d like to welcome back all our members, colleagues, friends and everyone that has an interest in the marketing profession.

We’re in the home stretch of summer. Our sub-baked brains are shifting from vacation to back to school, from playing hooky on a sunny Friday afternoon to getting the next proposal out the door. In other words, the fun’s over. But wait a second! Just because it’s no long 103 degrees outside, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to. The SDMA is here and it’s time to kick off another great season of speakers, events, networking and the continuation of our exploration into the art and science of modern marketing.

Last year we debuted a new tagline for the SDMA, “thinking outside the mailbox” in recognition that direct marketing has evolved into integrated marketing. We’ve taken the expertise direct marketers have gained in the areas of targeting, segmentation, analytics and ROI and are applying it to email, online advertising, search and social media. We’re extending brands across multiple new channels like mobile, branded content and the Web. And all while remembering that traditional media and direct still make up the lion’s share of marketing budgets and are evolving just as much as the new media is coming on the scene.

This season, the SDMA is going to mix things up a bit. In response to our success last year in Bellevue, we’re going to host some events on the East side and some in Seattle. We’re going to experiment with different formats including thought leader interviews, competitor panels and bring you real-life case studies showing how companies are using new ideas as well as re-inventing established methods to produce tangible and measureable results for their businesses. For this year’s calendar, visit www.sdma.org/events

In addition to our monthly events, we are partnering with the PSAMA and the Social Media Club to produce the region’s premier marketing conference, MarketMix 2010, to be held on March 10, 2010, at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. Mark your calendars today.

If you haven’t checked us out in awhile, visit our website at http://www.sdma.org, our groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, or even better, join us for our season’s kick-off on Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 5:30-8:00p at The Bellevue Hyatt for our evening event, “Transforming your Marketing and Customer Relationships with Social Media – Real Tweets from Real Practioneers at Leading Northwest Firms,” with panelists from Alaska Airlines, REI, PCC and Comcast. To register, visit, http://www.sdma.org/events .

Looking forward to seeing you and having your participation in another great year for the SDMA and for the marketing profession in the Pacific Northwest.

On behalf of the entire SDMA board,

John P. Kottcamp, President

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.

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.