Marketing Governance

Eighty-six percent of marketers intend to look for ways to better localize their content, according to a recent survey by the CMO Council. Other findings from the same research reveal the importance that marketers are placing on localized marketing and demonstrate that marketers have more work to do to make localized marketing effective.

• 49% of survey respondents said that localized marketing is essential to business growth and profitability.
• 41% of respondents said they devote 30% or more of their budget to field or localized programs.

Nearly 50% of respondents said that they are underperforming or need new strategic thinking and capability development in the area of localized marketing. Read More

Marketing Resource Management is the marketing engine of marketing departments. Like car engines most MRM projects they stay hidden under the hood, far away from the public eye. When we have the opportunity to share a case study we definitely will, especially when it is presented through a great video.

MRM solutions are designed to enable marketers to do their work easier, smarter, faster. In order to streamline their marketing content creation process, Bouygues Telecom teamed up with Aprimo and implemented the multichannel publishing platform solution, named Aladin. The goal was to improve the quality and relevance of the marketing output, simplify teamwork and relieve the team members from boring and repetitive tasks. You can see the results of the collaboration in the video below, with several team members demonstrating different features of the program. .

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new report from the trade body, performed in partnership with researchers at Nielsen and NM Incite, analysed the online marketing activities of auto firms BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes and Range Rover. Results indicated the companies are achieving conversion rates of between 4% and 11% for visitors to their websites.

For the report, the IAB counted as conversions visitors who subsequently continued their engagement by performing additional brand-related activities, such as configuring a model, downloading a brochure or booking a test drive. The research highlighted strong integration effects between search and display advertising, which are the two most widely-used forms of online ads. Of the consumers analysed, 40-50% of those exposed to display ads also performed some form of search activity related to the brand. Read More

revolutionary design for the London Underground, this Strategic Planning Map has lines for different aspects of marketing, such as market research, video, tv, websites, social media and press, each with different stops along the way. It looks pretty comprehensive. See if you can plan your way towards marketing success!

Click the image to see the full map.

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SproutLoud takes a wide view. Marketing their software solution to both brand marketers and local businesses, SproutLoud highlights the importance of timeliness, local relevance, and brand consistency. A nice touch in this video are the two case studies, demonstrating how their software may be used by marketers operating in completely different markets: from the small local jewelers to a global cruise line,  SproutLoud claims to empower local marketers with the resources of national brands. .

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The amount of data being generated is expanding at rapid logarithmic rates. Every day, customers and consumers are creating quintillions of bytes of data due to the growing number of customer contact channels. Some sources suggest that 90% of the worlds customer data has been created and stored since 2010. The vast majority of this data is unstructured data.

It is not surpring, then, that study after study shows that the majority of marketers struggle with mining and analyzing this data in order to derive valuable insights and actionable intelligence. A recent report by EMC found that only 38% of business intelligence analysts and data scientists strongly agree that their company uses data to learn more about customers. As marketers we need to learn how to leverage and optimize this flood of data and incorporate it into customer models we can use to predict what customers want. Read More

SAS as leaders in its new Wave Report on cross-channel campaign management. The report takes a look at the challenges advertisers and marketers face in a cross-channel campaign – from designing and budgeting to executing it and analyzing its effectiveness, considering the complexities in understanding and properly implementing social marketing, local advertising, mobile tech and real-time decision-making.

Forrester researched and rated twelve products offered by eleven companies (Alterian, Aprimo, ExactTarget, IBM, Infor, Neolane, Oracle, Pitney Bowes, Responsys, SAP and SAS), over 81 criteria and incorporating surveys, product demos and in-depth executive analyses across 156 different companies utilizing those cross-channel services. Read More

In most large enterprises, basic product information is managed and stored in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems typically contain product identification codes (SKU numbers), product cost information, and the data that drive manufacturing operations such as bills of materials and production scheduling. These systems are also used to manage order entry and order fulfillment.

As critical as these functions are, typical ERP systems are not equipped to handle the wealth of additional information that is required for successfully taking products to market. Marketing messages and materials such as print ads, brochures, catalogs, videos, etc. all require information that is not traditionally stored in ERP (and similar product management) systems because these systems are designed to manage products, but not to market them. Read More

Everybody knows the Superbowl isnt really about football its about the commercials. (And of course the half-time show. You never know what might happen trailers for commercials being broadcast in anticipation of the big day. But you dont just want your 90 million-strong audience to watch these commercials, you want them to talk about them. Online, preferably, on Twitter, so you can measure how often people talk about your brand.

Weve discussed the value of social media here beforeBrandwatch did just that, and created a great infographic of it afterwards. See how the major advertisers scored on the social scale how often were they mentioned in tweets, and was the overall sentiment positive or negative?

Click the image to go to the interactive chart.

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SAS Software takes a different approach from the vendor videos featured here so far. Where for example Aprimo and BrandMaker explain MRM from an analytical perspective, SAS takes a more consumer-centered approach. If you know what your customers want, you can better serve them with relevant messages. While data analytics is a crucial part of MRM no matter how you look at it, its also a good idea to keep in mind what you ultimately want to achieve using your metrics and data. .

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