marketing trends
Customer Conversations: The Value of Adding Data & Analytical Skills
Jamie, the VP of Marketing at one of our manufacturing companies, in a recent conversation expressed excitement about securing someone from the finance group to support marketing data and analytics. “It took 2 years of lobbying but now we’ll be able to make better and more informed decisions,” said Jamie. To which I replied, “Awesome!” 
Then, in my usual fashion, I asked a series of rapid-fire questions:
- What decisions are you hoping to make and in what priority order?
- What and where is the data that they will be accessing?
- What is the data capture and management plan?
- Is he just going to start delving into the data( A.K.A. boiling the ocean to see what treasures await) or are there specific insights about customers or the market that you want to gain?
- How will his contribution be measured?
- Is his role specifically digging into and analyzing data- and if so for what?
- Will he serve your team in a broader capacity a.e marketing ops, performance management and reporting?
Well, you can see the line of questioning.
Jamie said, “Whoa, I didn’t really think about what he was going to do or how, I just knew we needed someone who was comfortable with data and analytics because this isn’t my strong suit.” I said, “Adding this capability to your team is a great win, and demonstrating how it will prove and improve the value of marketing will create an even more important win. Now that you have this person, it might be a good idea to take some time to think about and decide function’s scope, role, purpose, etc.”
Jamie said, “Yeah, these are good questions and getting off on the right foot and in the right direction is really important for the team and for him. It almost took a miracle to get this person; we won’t get a second chance at it.”
Jamie asked if we could schedule a meeting next week to discuss things further. I said, “Of course, it would be our pleasure. In the meantime, your person may find our Marketing Operations: Enabling Marketing Centers of Excellence and from Intuition to Wisdom: Mastering Data, Analytics and Models white papers helpful .” As we set a date for our next call, Jamie said in closing, “ Downloading these as we speak.”
Power Up Your Marketing to Prove Business Value
Numerous studies throughout 2012 reiterated just how challenged marketers are in proving
Marketing’s business value.
The Capsicum Report found that “Marketers lack commercial acumen and don’t speak the language of the business, reporting their contributions in terms of ‘activities’ or ‘outputs’ rather than the business key performance indicators.”
The Economist Intelligence Unit reported that “the CMO’s traditional dilemma of demonstrating effectiveness, return on marketing investment, and relevance to the business still persists.”
The Forrester Evolved CMO study stated that “to prove their value and justify investment, they (CMOs) must tie marketing closer to business results.”
The 11th annual marketing performance management study conducted by VisionEdge Marketing and ITSMA reported a continuing trend of the C-Suite’s perception that only about 25% of marketers are able to demonstrate their impact and contribution to the business.
Some marketers, though, are cracking the code, and we can learn lessons from them as we work to power up our marketing.
One of the key differences about the stellar performers is that these marketers view and present themselves as businesspeople first. This elite group is customer-centric above all else, and it’s driven to transforming or establishing Marketing as a center of excellence within the organization.
These marketers work at ensuring that Marketing focuses on producing results that matter to the business, particularly in customer acquisition, retention, and value, and they are able to communicate those contributions in ways that are relevant to the C-Suite.
These marketers consistently apply five best-practices:
1. Aligning marketing activities and investments with business outcomes
2. Developing outcome-based metrics and reporting capabilities to demonstrate their
accountability
3. Employing and developing analytical skills
4. Investing in the infrastructure, processes, and systems to support their work
5. Building collaborative alliances with Finance, IT, and Sales colleagues.
They also recognize that deploying those best-practices is only part of the equation for boosting their performance and measurement competencies. They realize that playing a more strategic role takes added muscle, which they build by…
- Embracing strong talent, balancing creativity with science derived from valuable customer and market insights
- Emphasizing innovation for all aspects of marketing—related to strategy, implementation, processes, and so on.
Every organization can benefit from adding such power and muscle to their marketing team:
Take a look at the most recent 2013 Marketing Performance Management Report: Executive Summary (FREE DOWNLOAD) or Purchase the Full Report at the VisionEdge Marketing Online Store!
Measuring Relevancy: A Three Step Approach for Linking Content and Behavior
Various studies over the years have examined the relationship between content relevancy and behavior. Almost everyone would agree that content must be relevant. But what is relevance? According to Wikipedia: “Relevance describes how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter.” A thing is relevant if it serves as a means to a given purpose.
In the context of this discussion, the purpose of content is to positively influence customer or employee behavior, such as increasing purchase frequency, purchase velocity (time to purchase), likelihood to recommend, productivity, etc.
When we ask marketers and others how they measure content relevancy, we often hear, “We base it on response rate.” If the response rate meets the target, then we assume the content is relevant; if response doesn’t meet the target, we assume it’s not relevant.
Clearly there is a relationship between relevance and response. Intuitively we believe that the more relevant the content, the higher the response will be. But measuring response rate is not the best measure of relevancy. Many factors can affect response rate, such as time of year, personalization, and incentives. Also, in today’s multi-channel environment, we want to account for responses or interactions beyond what we might typically measure, such as click-throughs or downloads.
So, what is the best way to measure relevancy?
The best-practice approaches for measuring relevancy are many, and many of them are complex and require modeling. For example, information diagrams are an excellent tool. But marketers, who are usually spread thin, need a simpler approach.
The following three steps provide a way to tie interaction (behavior) with content. It’s critical
that you have a good inventory of all your content and a way to define and count interactions, because once you do, you’ll be able to create a measure of relevancy.
The process and equation include the following:
1. Count every single piece of content you created this week (new Web content, emails,
articles, tweets, etc.). We’ll call this C.
2. Count the collective number of interactions (opens, click-throughs, downloads, likes,
mentions, etc.) for all of your content this week from the intended target (you’ll need to
have clear definitions for interactions and a way to only include intended targets in your
count). We’ll call this I.
3. Divide total interactions by total content created to determine Relevancy: R = I/C
To illustrate the concept, let’s say you are interested in increasing conversations with a particular set of buyers. As a result, this week you undertook the following content activities:
• Posted a new whitepaper on a key issue in your industry to your website and your
Facebook page
• Tweeted three times about the new whitepapers
• Distributed an email with a link to the new whitepaper to the appropriate audience
• Published a summary of the whitepaper to three LinkedIn Groups
• Held a webinar on the same key issue in your industry
• Posted a recording of the webinar on your website, SlideShare, and Facebook page
• Held a tweet chat during the webinar
• Tweeted the webinar recording three times
• Posted a blog on the topic to your blog
We’ll count those as 17 content activities.
For that very same content, during the same week, you had the following interactions:
• 15 downloads of the whitepaper from your site
• 15 retweets of the whitepaper
• 15 Likes from your LinkedIn Groups and blog page
• 25 people who attended the webinar and participated in the tweet chat
• 15 retweets of the webinar
• 15 views of the recording on SlideShare
That’s a total of 100 interactions. It’s likely that some of these interactions are from the same people engaging multiple times, and you may eventually want to account for that likelihood in your equation. But, for starters, we can now create a content relevancy measure:
R= 100/17 = 5.88.
Using the same information, had we measured only the response rate, we might have counted only the downloads and attendees—40 responses—so we might have had the following calculation:
R = 40/17 = 2.353
As you can see, the difference is significant.
By collecting the interaction data over time, we will be able to understand the relationship between the relevancy and the intended behavior, which in this example is increased “conversations.”
I strongly encourage you to consider relevancy as a key measure for your content marketing. By tracking relevancy, you will be able to not only set benchmarks and performance targets for your content but also model content relevancy for intended behavior.
Does Your Marketing Team Have the Right Stuff?
The
Right
Stuff,
a
1979
book
by
Tom
Wolfe,
chronicled
the
sequence
of
events
bridging
the
breaking
of
the
sound
barrier
and
the
Mercury
space
expeditions.
The
book
(and
subsequent
movie)
explored
why
the
Mercury
astronauts
accepted
the
danger
of
space
flight,
as
well
as
the
mental
and
physical
skills
required
of
them
to
do
their
job—in
other
words,
the
”right
stuff.”
Recent studies suggest the need for many marketing professionals to re‐skill and re-tool. Only about 5 percent of marketers surveyed in a recent CMO Council study are highly satisfied with their levels of accountability, operational visibility, and marketing output. Most see plenty of room for improvement.
So what skills and tools are needed for your organization to have the right stuff?
Regardless of company size and industry, marketing teams (whether a team of one or more) are under increased pressure to drive top‐line growth and profitable revenue. For many organizations this means acquiring new skills related to marketing performance measurement and management, analytics, benchmarking, and customer engagement. Let’s review these four specific skills every marketer should have under their belt:
• Metrics and performance target‐setting. With greater demand for marketing to be more accountable, solid metrics, performance target‐setting, measurement, and reporting skills are crucial. Participants in numerous studies comment on the importance of being able to set measurable goals and track results. These skills will be in vogue for a long time to come.
• Analytics. This is the ability to derive insights from data. If growing valuable customer relationships and being able to forecast sales from future marketing activities are important, then analytics ought to be on the top of your skills‐to‐acquired list.
• Benchmarking. This is the process of comparing what your company does to another that is widely considered to be an industry standard or best practice. The aforementioned CMO Council study indicated 58 percent of respondents have nominal or no benchmarking capabilities. If you don’t know what the standard is, how will you know what to strive for when it comes to such things as win/loss ratios, marketing key performance indicators, share of preference, product adoption rates, and so on? Benchmarks are essential to any organization that believes continuous improvement is critical to the pursuit of excellence.
• Customer experience management. If business exists to produce and serve a customer, and marketing’s job is to create, communicate, and deliver value to customers, then marketing is your organization’s ultimate steward of the customer experience. Marketers need to be sure they have the skills necessary to improve customer engagement and touch- point effectiveness. They also must respond to changes in the buying cycle and conduct voice‐of‐customer research in order to retain customers, create loyalty, and transform customers into advocates for the company.
Marketing operations refers to infrastructure — that is, the tools, systems, and processes in place to facilitate customer‐centricity. Forty‐four percent of the respondents in the CMO Council study are looking for way to lower costs and improve go‐to‐market efficiencies. For many organizations, achieving these operational efficiencies requires infrastructure changes and improvements.
With limited resources, where can you get the best bang for your buck? Here are four areas for investment consideration:
1. Operational process alignment. When was the last time you mapped your operational processes and verified marketing alignment with the sales, product, service, and other parts of the business? All of us get into routines and habits. Reviewing processes and updating them may be time consuming, but if you are looking for ways to reduce inefficiencies internally, this is a necessary step.
Many years ago, when I was in the semiconductor industry, we needed to find a way to reduce the time from order to delivery of product. It was just taking too long to get product to customers, and we didn’t know why. When we calculated the time it took for the individual steps of order placement, manufacturing, testing , assembly, and shipping, the time didn’t add up to what it actually took.
So we mapped the process, counting the time product was ”in‐transit,” whether physically or in some other way. Lo and behold, the in‐transit time was off the charts. The mapping process enabled us to identify the inefficiencies, label the white spaces, and put in new processes to reduce and even eliminate them.
2. Market/Business intelligence. There is an art and science to using external information for driving business strategy. Business intelligence applications enable the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of competitive, channel, product, and customer information to derive trends and insights. The value of having such a tool is that, when used properly, it enables you to begin conducting scenario analyses and anticipating the future. With the insights derived from business intelligence, there is the potential to anticipate the development of new markets, technological turning points, and how the competitor will react.
3. CRM. If the marketing organization is responsible for the relationship between the company and the customer, then it stands to reason the organization needs tools to facilitate this relationship. As you know, there are a range of CRM tools out there, so selecting the right one can be a daunting task. Even so, in today’s environment a company can’t afford to operate without a formal approach to customer relationship management. Of course, once you have the tool , the next biggest hurdle is using it.
4. Performance management. The ability to use analytics, reporting, and dashboards to assess marketing’s effectiveness, efficiency, financial contribution, and progress toward achieving pre-determined goals is performance management. In the end, marketing must demonstrate its value, which lies in how much you are “moving the needle.” This necessitates reporting on performance, impact, and ROI from the program level up.
Progress doesn’t come without missteps, misfires, and failures. Winners look for ways to overcome challenges and continuously improve. They seek outside help, new ideas, and new skills. While attending a Webinar, reading a book, or going to a conference helps, consider looking for ways that will enable the whole team to be on the same page at the same time. There are plenty of on-site and online programs offered by professional organizations and institutions, as well as by firms specializing in these areas.
In Wolfe’s story, the national heroes of the Mercury space program were not necessarily the truest and best. What they possessed was the right stuff, the skill and courage to ”push the outside of the envelope.” Does your marketing team have the right stuff?
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