Marketing Governance

The most important word in marketing is new. Or, in some cases, NEW!

The latter certainly applies to the iPhone. Of course the new model is better, more beautiful, faster, and cooler than the one before. American comedian Jimmy Kimmel decided to test this theory and gave people a glimpse of the new iPhone 5 that really was the current iPhone 4S. And yes its way better, thinner, faster, and, strangely enough, both lighter and heavier. Looks like Apple know what theyre doing.

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B2B buyers are doing more research than ever before. Which means  that the initiative no longer lies with the B2B marketer, but with their customers. How to adapt to this new situation? A helpful little video about effective B2B marketing.

With buyers looking for engaging and persuasive content, make your content engaging and persuasive. The old adage applies: content should be king. Whitepapers are a good way of getting your message across 80% of B2B buyers say they get their information from these. But keep it short, because were all on a schedule. And videos, too, are effective they reach 75% of your audience. Mobile and social of course also play a part. But dont oversell your message be informative as well.

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Next October 10-13, the Annual ANA Masters of Marketing conference will be held in Orlando, Florida. With keynote speakers from companies such as BP, Coca-Cola, Ford, and MasterCard, the ANA Conference offers workshops and presentations from top notch marketing professionals. From the program:

Join the nation’s chief marketing officers and leaders from the agency and media worlds for our industry’s signature event. This conference offers an opportunity to learn and engage with the leaders of the marketing community who have built brands, leveraged the expanding array of media, made marketing more accountable and improved the quality of their marketing organizations.

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In the field of digital asset management, we often talk about the importance of having a single version of the truth. By this we mean that one objective of having a robust digital asset management system is to ensure that marketers and other employees and business partners use the right versions of marketing content assets.

It’s equally important to have a single version of the truth when in comes to product information. Unfortunately, creating and maintaining accurate product information is becoming more difficult, time-consuming, and costly, particularly for large enterprises with extensive product portfolios. Read More

Unilever, Inditex, H&M and Nestlé are top performers in European Supply Chain Management according to the annual ranking of the top 15 supply chain organizations by Gartner. The goal of Gartners Supply Chain Top 15 in Europe research initiative is to raise awareness of the supply chain discipline and how it impacts businesses.

Gartner identified the top 15 performers headquartered in Europe, based on a combination of financial metrics (revenue growth, return on assets (ROA) and inventory) and opinion (Gartner supply chain analyst and peer opinion). The top-four companies are also listed in the global Gartner Supply Chain Top 25. Six new companies entered the European top 15 ranking this year: H&M, AstraZeneca, Reckitt Benckiser, Syngenta, Roche and Volkswagen (see Table 1). Read More

Marketing campaigns often use a target audience, or even a model person to use as a starting point for determining the future buyers likes, dislikes, lifestyle, budget and so on. We came across this video that does exactly the opposite. What is the widest possible audience that you can reach? What, in fact, is the worlds most typical person?

Of course youre dying to find out. Good news, you can meet him (yes, the worlds most typical person is male) in this video. And chances are that he may belong to a future target audience on one of your campaigns

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Theres a lot going on to get a marketing campaign done. And then another one starts.

Software vendor Kaboodle knows that creating campaigns triggers and endless stream of traffic consisting of documents, images, revisions, approvals, more revisions and adjustments. With everybody working in their own way, with separate systems such as Word, Excel, and email, sometimes on different continents, it can be hard to keep track of whats going on. Before you know it, your campaign is leading  a life of its own.

Kaboodle offers structure, context, clarity, and flow. A single platform from where marketing campaigns can be run, accessible to everyone in an organization, in different countries and departments.

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Adoption of social customer relationship management (CRM) systems is low among marketers, but it will grow quickly. This became apparent from a recent survey monitored by Awareness released in September 2012; a significant proportion of respondents are planning to use a system by the end of this year. Only 16% of the respondents said they are currently using a social CRM system, but another 21% plan to do so. 17% claim to be unfamiliar with social CRM, while 46% simply do not use a system. Adoption is higher among respondents with social media marketing budgets of more than $100,000: 44% of this group have adopted social CRM, and another 26% plans to do so by the end of the year.

March 2012 findings from Nucleus Research suggest that social CRM boosts sales productivity by 11.8%. 21% of social CRM users reported sales productivity improvements of more than 20%, and a further 37% cited productivity gains of 10-20%. Read More

In two earlier posts (here and here), I discussed the growing importance of localized marketing, and I described how technology enables and supports localized marketing efforts. In a recent survey by the CMO Council, 86% of respondents said they intend to look for ways to better localize their marketing content.

Global enterprises face several complex challenges in delivering relevant, localized marketing content. The most obvious challenge is the need to deliver marketing messages and materials in the primary language of the target audience. According to Ethnologue, there are 6,909 known living languages in the world today. While no company may need to communicate in every known language, it’s very conceivable that a global enterprise will be required to create and manage a few dozen versions of many marketing content resources.

Beyond the language challenge, global marketers must also develop marketing content for multiple ethnic and cultural environments. Read More

polled 2,000 people, some 55% of which proved happy to give corporations access to personal data covering a single medium, like social networks, email or web browsing.

Scores here came in at 19% for two forms of media, and 8% for more than three. However, an additional 18% of shoppers were not open to this type of exchange, the analysis stated. Participants in the 18–24 year old demographic were the most enthusiastic about enabling businesses to utilise this kind of information in relation to at least three channels. By contrast, consumers over 55 years of age made up 40% of the group that was unwilling to let companies leverage their data for communications purposes.

Jon Buss, managing director, digital, at Experian Marketing Services said:

Huge amounts of spending power sit with those who are more reluctant to share marketing information across multiple channels. Marketers need to build trust to engage with these potentially high value customers and move them to share more and richer data.

When assessing their preferred medium for receiving messages from brands, 69% of the sample named email, with direct mail in second position on 27%.

More positively, 24% of 18–24 year olds were happy for brands to connect with them on social networks, by far the most compared to other age groups. Over half (53%) of respondents that would allow data monitoring on a minimum of three channels added Facebook and Twitter to this list, falling to 5% for respondents willing to do so for one form of media.

When assessing how contributors currently engaged with brands, 46% bought items online or via mail order, 44% possessed loyalty cards and 38% completed customer surveys. A further 34% had registered with official websites, while 33% entered competitions and 30% searched for brands on Google. Another 18% had liked a firm or product on Facebook and 12% replied to marketing emails A total of 15% of interviewees did not take part in any such activity, the study found. . .