Marketing Governance

The Greenbox collected some of the latest funny and innovative ads.

John Broadbent, CMO at Netmark.com, coached 5 years of college club hockey during the early years of his career in internet marketing.

During that time he implemented a coaching process that works well for internet marketers.

The process:

• Observation
• Preparation
• Action

The very best marketing strategists apply this process with a duel-facet approach. They are both analytic and creative. Leaving out either facet from your marketing campaign limits the strategic impact.

During the observation stage, marketing strategists must analyze and empathize. Great strategists look closely at data and identify with their target market. These marketers understand the people they are targeting through data and intuition.

In preparation, the best marketing strategist will synthesize an efficient process while visualizing the end result with imagination and clarity. They tap into both natures to create game-changing plans for success.

While in action, the most effective marketing strategist will create an efficient system that leaves room for resourceful improvisation. These marketers understand the value of flexible processes.

Its easy to simply focus on being a technical marketer. Its safe. You can blame the data for telling you to implement a poor strategy. Its also lazy. The analytic marketer needs to be creative in order to be the best marketing strategist.

‘Marketing is different’. “What’s more, we believe there is a better approach to building sustainable marketing operations, and it is not rocket science.”

The two start their paper with a bold statement. “From a marketing operations point of view marketers are no better of than they were a decade ago and their conventional thinking persists”, they state in the first paragraph of the first chapter.

There are three common views on marketing which dont work:

Not traditional

Traditional approaches to marketing do not work the way marketing works. The approaches do not account for marketers’ natural iterative human relationships and their fundamental task to enrich and deploy their ideas as late in the process as possible. Managing global decision-making, reporting relationships, incentives, processes and technologies are wildly complex and making sweeping improvements is nearly impossible.

Technology

The technology available today is mature, does what it must do: supporting customer interactions and providing data to inform the next interaction. However, according tot Rotkow and Manders, a view on the full ecosystem of technologies that help marketers get the work done think back office and those that interact with customers- think front office – reveals there is a significant incongruence. Front-office tools are increasingly utilized to manage customer interactions across channels. While back-office solutions haven’t been fully executed by the softwarevendors who have instead responded with incomplete solutions which are serviceable but further isolate marketing, rather than connecting it to the enterprise.

Advisors

Advisor don’t know it all. The gaps left across agencies, consultants, and technology vendors, results in a disconnection between a marketer’s operational capabilities and the customers it is trying to influence. Who is designated to build marketing people, process, and technology to drive the capabilities needed to deliver the world-class programming? “No one, in our view”, Rotkow and Manders say.

Marketing is unique

That is because marketing is a different kind of cookie. Marketing is unique because:

• Marketers must navigate unprecedented technological advances and a new regulatory standard (think of, for example, all the new channels coming up)
• Marketers must navigate increasingly complex internal relationships
• Marketing process is critical to success, though linear approaches don’t meet the challenge
• Marketers depend on a network of resources to successfully collaborate

The depth and complexity of the issues discussed by Rotkow and Manders cannot be addressed in a simple checklist of action items to be owned by the CMO’s direct reports. The best path forward is not a new buzz, but rather that marketers may realize operational improvements by applying the marketing-specific design principles to tried-and-true business design frameworks. Sustainable improvements require a mix of methodical top-down study and design, and practical bottom-up initiatives.

In conclusion they state: “Marketers who wish to enjoy an advantage in the coming decade will adopt a view of their organization – an uncomfortable view perhaps – that is less about a hierarchical organizational design and more about collaborative human interactions set within a specific process context. They will use a smart mix of technologies to enable these collaborations made possible by even smarter information standards that allow open communication. To start, marketing and technology leaders should initiate a top down design of an optimum marketing function, while identifying high impact improvement opportunities from the bottom up. In time, the top down will meet the bottom up for an organization that has the capacity for dynamic operations.”

study by the MediaSchool Group.

A survey amongst 2000 students in the age of 20 to 25 years by the MediaSchool Group revealed that 70 percent of the students think that marketing will be a whole different kind of job than today. They think that marketing will be “dominated” by content marketing and “PR thinking.” An advertisers job will be mostly to “entertain” rather than “sell,” according to 7 in 10. Recent survey results indicate that American consumers already believe that should be the case.

The European students almost universally see the importance of social media as an integrated marketing channel: 90 percent feel that it’s a channel that should be used by all practitioners, rather than a stand-alone discipline. As a result, 85 percent believe that in the next 10 years, social media and digital agencies will be integrated with other marketing communications agencies or be full-service agencies themselves.

In an industry where entertaining is more important than selling, 81 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that content marketing – where brands become publishers and creators of their own content – would be an essential part of their job 10 years from now. Meanwhile, “PR Thinking,” where word-of-mouth creation and trust in brands are paramount, will be similarly important, according to the students, with 70 percent believing that will be the primary way in which agencies respond to briefs.

And in a nod to TV, an excellent medium for story-telling, 70 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that TV advertising would be irrelevant in 10 years.

Here we are, doing all fancy about marketing, marketingcampaigns, marketing technologies and so on. But then, these guys come along and explain what marketing is all about and how you get the best results. In only two minutes you know all.

1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: I am very rich. Marry me! Thats Direct Marketing

2. Youre at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says: Hes very rich. Marry him. Thats Advertising

3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day, you call and say: Hi, Im very rich. Marry me. Thats Telemarketing

4. Youre at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink, you open the door of the car for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and then say: By the way, Im rich. Will you marry me? Thats Public Relations

5. Youre at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says: You are very rich! Can you marry ! me? Thats Brand Recognition

6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: I am very rich. Marry me! She gives you a nice hard slap on your face. Thats Customer Feedback

7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: I am very rich. Marry me! And she introduces you to her husband. Thats demand and supply gap

8. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say anything, another person come and tell her: Im rich. Will you marry me? and she goes with him Thats competition eating into your market share

9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say: Im rich, Marry me! your wife arrives. Thats restriction for entering new markets

For maximum impact and return, marketers must go beyond simple segment marketing or click reporting and create a personal dialogue with each visitor.

Behavioral digital analytics can fuel this personalization process by providing specific insights about each segment and individual. This can drive personalized product and content recommendations, as well as individually tailored retargeting for greater marketing ROI

VisionEdge Marketing (VEM), ITSMA, and Forrester, organizations committed to helping marketers improve their effectiveness, released the findings from their 2013 Marketing Performance Management (MPM) Survey. We made a call for that in of our previous blogs.

The 2013 MPM Survey captured input from more than 400 respondents, enabling ITSMA, Forrester, and VEM to expose valuable insights on the performance measurement and management challenges marketers face. The study, began by VEM initially, is now in its 12^th year.

Marketing Activity, Not Business Outcomes

The study reveals that few members of the C-Suite rely on marketing data to make decisions. Results show that only nine percent of CEOs and six percent of CFOs rely on marketing data to make decisions. The reason? Marketing dashboards report marketing activity rather than business outcomes. Marketers cling to metrics that measure and report marketing’s performance, continuously justifying marketing budgets and resource allocations when they should be showing how marketing moves the needle on topline growth or profitability.

“The data demonstrates how marketers rely too much on their CRM and marketing automation systems to produce dashboards or report on marketing results. These systems are fine for providing a view into marketing program activity and pipeline, but the research shows that most fail to produce the level of information and metrics that business executives want to see,” said Laura Ramos, Vice President, Principal Analyst serving CMOs at Forrester. Read More

latetst blog.

The first is a Content Manager, the second a Nurturing Manager and last but not least a Marketing Operations Manager.

You will need someone who enjoys mechanics. Setting up integrations, key reports, segmentation, and flows in the system are just some of the activities a good marketing operations person will do.  This is one of the most critical roles to get right because they are essential to building the technological framework.  A good framework = total and complete awesomeness.  A bad framework = wasted time and added expense, which we all know equals bad things.  A good candidate for this is anyone on your team who enjoys technical details, has a good mind for process and how things work, and feels happy when in Excel.

So, do you recognize yourself in this picture?

Asia has always been a big driver in innovation and this can lead to challenges in marketing operations and keeping pace. Here Wilson Raj, Global Director Customer Intelligence at SAS talks about what companies are doing to reduce time to market.