Big data discussions focus on the enormous amount of information available to businesses thanks to the social web. While adoption is low, the opportunity for companies and nonprofits to serve customers with specific offerings is irresistible. However, doubt remains as to its long-term impact for businesses.
Enterprise Marketing Management, or EMM, is a software technology solution for marketing organizations that provides a comprehensive marketing platform for managing customer and prospect interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
The practice of marketing is challenging these days because of the rise of the “empowered customer.” Today’s customers are well-informed, use other people as their primary information source, interact with companies through multiple channels, touch points and media, and want (but rarely get) a superior customer experience—and have outlets for venting frustration when they don’t get what they want.
Your customers are truly empowered. To serve these empowered customers, marketers must—now more than ever—put customers at the center of everything they do. In the whitepaper Today’s empowered customer puts businesses to the test—Enterprise Marketing Management empowers marketers IBM tells you how to do so.
The results of IBM’s groundbreaking Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) study, released in 2011, reinforce the observation that marketing is a challenging practice these days. IBM interviewed over 1,700 CMOs from around the world to create this study. The data reveals some of the most important challenges facing CMO’s and their marketing organizations today.
The top four challenges are data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics. It’s easy to see why CMOs are facing a “complexity gap,” because all of these challenges make marketing much more complicated today that it has ever been before. And it’s only going to get more complicated in the future.
You might think this “underpreparedness” exists only at companies that are underperforming, in terms of their overall business performance. But in fact, the problem is universal. Even marketers who work for the most successful organizations—the “outperformers”—are struggling. IBM’s CMO study shows that outperforming organizations are slightly better prepared to manage the most critical challenges—but only slightly. And less than half of these outperformers feel completely ready. Those in underperforming organizations are even more uncertain of their ability to cope.
Marketers need to respond to all these challenges by better integrating all their marketing efforts, across all media types, into one cohesive, coordinated marketing program. Marketing effectively to empowered customers requires building one relationship between customers and the companies that serve them, no matter what media, communication channel or touch point the customers are using at a given moment to interact with that company.
The problem is that most marketing organizations still have their marketing efforts siloed by media type. Some groups manage “paid” media—the advertising that is bought externally. Other groups manage “owned” media—that is, the company’s own website, emails, direct mails and other owned touch points such as call centers, stores, and branches. Yet other groups manage “earned media,” which today is thought of mostly as social media, that powerful force which is impacting all marketing, but which also includes things such as PR.
In addition to organizational siloes, marketers lack two things:
EMM serves as the marketing optimization platform marketers need to unite marketing across paid, earned and owned media. EMM does this by supporting five key marketing processes across all media types: collect, analyze, decide, deliver and manage.
EMM works. Many have realized significant improvements in the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, including an increase in online marketing ROI by a factor of 15-20, a 15-30% increase in campaign ROI, and a 10-50% increase in response rates. Customers also report impressive efficiency improvements, including the ability to execute 2-5 times more campaigns with the same resources, a 20-40% reduction in marketing costs, and a 25-75% reduction in customer acquisition costs.
Read the full whitepaper here
Enterprise Marketing Management, or EMM, is a software technology solution for marketing organizations that provides a comprehensive marketing platform for managing customer and prospect interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
The practice of marketing is challenging these days because of the rise of the “empowered customer.” Today’s customers are well-informed, use other people as their primary information source, interact with companies through multiple channels, touch points and media, and want (but rarely get) a superior customer experience—and have outlets for venting frustration when they don’t get what they want.
Your customers are truly empowered. To serve these empowered customers, marketers must—now more than ever—put customers at the center of everything they do. In the whitepaper Today’s empowered customer puts businesses to the test—Enterprise Marketing Management empowers marketers IBM tells you how to do so.
The results of IBM’s groundbreaking Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) study, released in 2011, reinforce the observation that marketing is a challenging practice these days. IBM interviewed over 1,700 CMOs from around the world to create this study. The data reveals some of the most important challenges facing CMO’s and their marketing organizations today.
The top four challenges are data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics. It’s easy to see why CMOs are facing a “complexity gap,” because all of these challenges make marketing much more complicated today that it has ever been before. And it’s only going to get more complicated in the future.
Ahhh FallFor many of us it signals welcome relief from the summer heat. Also, for many of us it signals budgeting season and that too many marketers will be submitting their budgets before even creating their marketing plan. Yes, that does seem a bit backwards! How can you know what to budget if you don’t yet know what you plan to do? So what do we do? One common approach is to build the budget based on how the current budget is allocated across headcount, travel and various marketing activities, such as PR, Digital, Events, Training, and so on, make a few adjustments and hit the submit button.
While this may seem like a feasible method, it’s a dangerous one. The budget may be allocated against activities we intend to produce, but it’s unclear what impact or value these activities, and the associated funds, are going to have on the business in terms of new customers, retained customers, additional vertical or customer expansion, or contribution to the business from new products. It’s no wonder our budget is suspect and immediately comes under fire, especially from the folks in Finance. And this approach sets the stage for questions like these:
Right away we’re playing defense – with others e.g. finance, suggesting ways we can reduce our spending. And before we’ve even gotten out of the gate our budget is eroding. If this isn’t your world, congratulations! If it is, here’s the shocker. It’s your fault.
If those of us who end up in these conversations had taken a different approach, the conversation would have gone differently. As marketers we need to think beyond the subaccounts in the cost accounting system. We need to understand how the dollars we’re requesting are actually going to move business needles. Businesses are based on revenue and profits generated by customers buying our products/ services, hopefully profitably. This is the very essence of Marketing. As a result, we need to think about our budgets in terms of the customers and what they buy. So rather than submitting a budget for activities, what if you submitted a budget that allocated funds into buckets such as these:
Of course this would mean we would need to know how many existing customers the company currently serves, where, what products they buy, and how many potential customers there are for these products and where are these potential customers. And we’d need to know what new products are going to market, the competitive situation, and what customers are most likely to buy these products. And we’d have to have some targets for each of these categories. Imagine though that we knew this information about our customers, products, and market.
If we were to budget in this fashion, it doesn’t mean our friends in finance wouldn’t be making a visit, but the conversation will certainly be different. They will still want to know why we need so much money but instead of defending an activity that we don’t even know we will want to deploy since we haven’t created the plan, we’ll be having a discussion about the business – how many customers, which ones, how easy or hard it will be acquire, retain or grow these customers, our competitive situation, and our product innovation situation. I’d rather have these conversations with the CFO or other members of the leadership team any day than a conversation about which tradeshows to attend. And once we have clarity around marketing’s contribution via customer acquisition, retention and growth, we will also have achieved better alignment with the business and gained insight into how to measure and account for our value. Plus we will have created maneuvering room and the ability to select the activities best suited to achieve the result.
We often hear about ROI and marketing success but what does that mean? Is it pure and simple numbers? Is it finding opportunity? Strong integration? Or does it mean making your brand a positive force versus a net negative impact on society?
Improving brand compliance is one of the benefits you might come across in pitches and kickoff presentations concerning optimization of marketing processes and implementation of marketing software. Especially when implementing Brand Portals or Digital Asset Management systems, this is something to take into account because brand compliance can be improved by centrally storing brand assets and by using workflows, authorizations and approval steps to control creation and distribution of marketing materials. In some cases you might even be able to put a number on it as historical data may reveal money spent on campaigns that had to be recalled or merchandising that could not be used and had to be destroyed.
Every now and then we are asked if it is possible to include impact on brand value in the business case of a marketing operations project as well. This is a different story because many more variables that are not affected by optimizing marketing resources, redesigning processes and implementing software come into play.
But don’t worry, this is the Friday Coffee Break so we won’t elaborate on calculation details. Instead, this is our top 5 fake brands:
1. Heimekem
2. Special Man
3. Johnnie Worker
4. Polo Ralpl House
5. Sunbucks
Word of mouth now creates trust in brands more effectively than any other marketing method. Brands with evangelical supporters develop third-party validation and are more likely to be trusted sources. In turn, the opinions of colleagues, friends and family members may matter more than any strong advertising campaign.
In times of big data, predictive analytics and marketing automation it looks like we forgot marketing is about connecting with people. But as data and analytics provide more and increasingly accurate insights into target audiences and customer behavior who your clients are, what they do, why they do it, what they need, what they like and how they feel it enables companies to continually improve products, services, campaign messages and brand experience.
This is a highly relevant topic for companies working towards an integrated marketing management approach and now companies get more experienced in translating data into action, we expect more publications and case studies to become available over the next months. In her article on forbes.com, Sandra Zoratti explains how to link marketing IQ to marketing EQ using a pet food case study. Click here to read the article on forbes.com.
