Marketing Governance

Marketing departments will soon manage their technology stack like eco-systems of connected apps. This finally brings them agility, efficiency, resiliency and more revenue.

The marketing technology landscape is becoming ever more crowded. Last year the number of MarTech vendors grew by 18 different tools on average.

Working with a myriad of different tools is no recent development. Internal black markets for apps have always existed below the counter, but managers have tried to prevent individuals taking matters into their own hands.

But with the explosive growth in the number of apps and the need for agility, managers cannot ignore the cry for freedom any longer.

Marketing managers fear losing consolidated insights and reports… but they don’t need to be. There is a way to facilitate MarTech moonshiners, making them work for you instead of against you.

Integrate your marketing technology stack with… yet more apps. Apps like Zapier and IFTTT tie all other tools together, allowing for MarTech stacks to behave like ecosystems. Teams or business units will be free to select the tools they like and use them for any project, for any duration.

Management reports drawn from multiple data sources can be created using Boardview.io.

You can build your own castle from numerous ‘Lego bricks’ while remaining in control, as Google is doing running ‘microservices’. Matt Miller argues that, as an alternative for building big software platforms, software development teams now move to building ‘microservices’, i.e. “small, loosely coupled and composable autonomous pieces”. Sounds like an ecosystem to me.

4 Benefits of an integrated marketing technology stack

The result of managing your MarTech stack like an ecosystem? Increased agility, efficiency and resiliency.

Agility - Take away the need for expensive change management projects by effortlessly pulling reports from different data sources.

Efficiency - Teams will only select apps that serve their purpose best and leave other apps be, so you don’t waste money on what you don’t use.

Resiliency - The dispersion of apps across teams allow for seamless scaling. Meanwhile there is no single point of failure, limiting downtime

…which, in the end, results in more revenue.

Why not grab yourself one of those apps you always wanted? Go for it.

Big Data is the magic word now-a-days in marketing and sales. Gather everything you can and benefit from all the knowledge we gain about our customers. But do we? How do we manage the avalanche of information we gather? According to a recent survey by SAS and SourceMedia 21 percent of the respondents say they didn’t know enough about it, 15 percent don’t understand the benefits of big data and 9 percent say they lack data quality in existing systems. Some believe that the more intel you gather the greater the benefits, but it’s not how much you gather, but it matters what you gather, says MultiChannel Merchant (MCM)  in their executive summary about Big Data and Database marketing.

The meaning of big data can be tough to decipher. You need to start to remember that data is not about numbers but about customers, says MCM. Your customer is supplying you with huge amounts of very useful information, so called first grade information. Think of email addresses order histories, click rates etc.

When this information is integrated with inventory information, revenue management systems and buying history, you will be able to create  customer-specific offers that will not only create a personalized message that reflects shopping habits and preference, but can also help business goals and increase revenue.

The road to the big data success is not about shifting through piles and piles of data. The focus should be on returning customers, the frequency of their purchases and their behavior patterns.

Get to know your customer

Once that is set, look at that data to uncover new insights about these specific visitors. This can help you generate ideas that will increase engagement about your brand, the products you sell and your website as a whole.

The best thing to do with the enormous amount of data, is to figure out what matters most to your organization. With all that information, create an aggregate data source that is fed by your best analytics. Decide also whether it’s best to use technology or a person to compile all this data sets.

Another important thing is to store all the data in one place. So everyone has access to the same source and uses the most up-to-date data. It needs to become the one true data source.

Take a small piece

And look at just a small piece of the pie. When homing in on a specific aspect of big data it might produce it’s best results. For example: big data might reveal that for some reason visitors in a specific region could be more prone to abandon their cart. But by examining the data further, you could learn that it could be because they live in a closer proximity to a traditional brick-and-mortar store than the rest of your visitors, or they prefer different payment options or generally do not hit the free shipping threshold offered.

It’s also important to get data in real time, so quick decisions can be made. You can easily identify what is working and what not. It makes it easy to tweak your operations.

Big data is important for the entire organization. Not only can it be used to boost sales, but your marketing department can use it to identify and engage your customers on specific grounds. Big data makes it possible to personal address your customer.

Big data is not just about harnessing information to boost an online sales experience; it can be used for catalogs and in store. A detailed understanding of what’s going on in your company can help managers forecast staffing needs, address customer service issues and evaluate how things like merchandising, promotions and product placement impact sales conversions. This intelligence not only leads to better and more profitable decisions in individual stores; it can also help merchants measure brick-and-mortar performance within the context of broader multichannel strategies.

Marketing advantage

With big data technology, marketers now have the tools to identify every visitor to an ecommerce site, as well as the ability to see exactly which mouse click got them there. This new tactic is also allowing marketers to deploy their messages in a much more personalized manner.

And people like that. A recent survey has found that customer-centric marketing—the ability to  engage consumers in one-to-one conversations across the customer lifecycle and all touch points—increases buyer readiness, engagement and sales activity.

According to the research study of 1,100 consumers, 40% of respondents claim they buy more from retailers that comprehensively personalize the shopping experience across channels. Results revealed that consumers increasingly reward customer-obsessed retailers. Nearly 60% of  consumers indicated that personalized product recommendations make it easier to find the products they are most interested in and provide a valuable service. More than half of consumers state website recommendations and emails personalized based on their past browsing and  shopping behavior is desirable to receive.

Simply put, concludes MCM, when big data is implemented across the channels, retailers realize 100% increase in purchase frequency, a 50% increase in average order value and a 25% increase in conversion of cart abandoners to buyers.

This Executive Summary was published before on MultiChannel Merchant

Optimizing the marketing infrastructure can save up to 20% of the total marketing budget, and achieve an additional 15% sales increase, according to a survey conducted by MRMLOGIQ among 99 marketing professionals in 22 countries.

Key steps to improving the marketing infrastructure are consolidating and standardizing marketing materials and automating campaign management and production processes. The infographic below contains a brief summary of the survey results. The whitepaper is available for download here.

 TDC) has released the results of its pan-European marketing study, “The Data Driven Marketing Survey 2013, Europe”. The study reveals that a shift to digital channels and the increasing importance of data have led to a “class structure” in marketing technology investments among companies using these solutions. Telco and IT companies invest almost 20% of their marketing budget on improving their marketing infrastructure, whilst retail (17%) and finance (13%) are close followers. Overall, however, 50% of marketing departments across all industries surveyed spend less than 5% to improve their marketing with technology investments.

In creating the report, Teradata eCircle surveyed more than 1,100 marketing professionals ranging from CMOs and key decision makers to marketing managers and technology users, from 19 European countries and across nine major industries, to uncover the challenges and trends in data-driven marketing adoption by European businesses and how marketers use technology to master them.

The study shows that despite the current, uncertain economic climate, the shift to digital is significant. Marketers still plan to increase their spending in digital channels, especially in social media (79%), mobile marketing (79%) and online display advertising (70%) within the next 12 months. What’s more, the first seven channels marketers plan to invest in are digital, with call centers being the first non-digital investment priority in 8th place.

The research also highlighted marketers’ desire to embrace data, citing it as a key driver of marketing success, with data-driven marketers more than twice as satisfied with their marketing programs than their counterparts who are not basing their decisions on data.

With two-thirds of marketers claiming a lack of simple metrics and the short-term view of their marketing departments as their biggest obstacles to success, the findings provide an eye-opening insight into the struggles facing the modern multi-channel marketer. In fact, the single biggest challenge facing marketers in 2013 was revealed to be the pressure to increase revenue.

Out of the more than 50% of marketers utilizing seven or more channels, the research also found that only 33% currently have Campaign Management technology to monitor their activity, whilst a mere 17% use a Marketing Resource Management solution. Notably only 10% use both.

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Saepio Technologies, in  the whitepaper ‘MAM, Making Assets Actionable and Engaging’.

And why is that?

As a vital part of the advertising process, MAM combines digital asset management, collateral customization and marketing automation technologies into a single, seamless process that:

• improves brand compliance;
• advances measurable return on marketing investment (ROMI);
• eliminates repetitive tasks;
• enables speed-to-market; and
• engages distributed marketers.

In the white paper Thomson first defines where MAM fits in the Enterprise Marketing Management strategy. “There are many models that depict the component of an EMM system”, according to Thompson.”But this document focuses on CRM, business intelligence/analytics, MRM, MAM and customer nurturing as key components.”

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A fast, steady and predictable growth, that is what companies these days want. The fastest growing companies of today use repeatable marketing and sales 2.0 techniques to grow revenue predictably and reliably. They are embracing the shift from the selling process to the buying process, moving marketing from a cost center to a revenue generator. By replacing the old linear sales model with a new holistic approach, companies are redefining the way marketing and sales teams work together.

The new buying landscape has changed marketing’s approach to lead generation and management. This tectonic shift has created a need to improve upon outdated systems that can no longer keep up with the demand to increase lead flow, ensure lead quality, and prove program effectiveness and ROI.

Companies that implement a marketing automation system to support their marketing and sales efforts are better equipped to manage lead flow and process leads more efficiently. A whitepaper by Marketo outlines how marketing automation optimizes marketing programs and can help companies:

• Create a faster and more predictable revenue cycle
• Increase profitability with tactics that result in higher conversion rates
• Align the efforts of marketing and sales teams to substantially increase topline revenue growth

Source: Marketo Benchmark on Revenue Performance as of Sept 15, 2012

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‘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.”

Irv Shapiro. “I am fascinated by many of the results that reflect the innovation that is occurring in marketing measurement.”

So, what are the results?

A primary trend from the 2013 research is the level of support, and scrutiny, that marketers are receiving from their CEO’s around marketing measurement as a growth engine. Two thirds of CEO’s surveyed have significant influence in marketing decisions and half receive regular marketing measurements. In fact, one in ten CEO’s seek marketing measurements daily (9.2 percent) while one in five (19.7 percent) are receiving updates weekly.

How often marketing metrics are reported

 (graph by Ifbyphone 2013: State of Marketing Measurement Survey Report)

What is being measured?

Marketing teams are being asked to measure a wider range of marketing metrics with a greater focus on revenue and tracking of customer interactions from both offline and online sources. Tracking new customer sources is the highest rated marketing metric utilized (by 49 percent of all respondents), with measuring increases in sales/revenue across marketing channels a very close second (48 percent).

Given the dominance of the sales-related metrics already being measured by the marketing team, it is not unreasonable to conclude that marketing measurement innovation, which enables marketers to better track and monetize engagements with customers and sales prospects, will be a high priority in coming years.

Use of marketing metrics

 (graph by Ifbyphone 2013: State of Marketing Measurement Survey Report)

Marketing enjoys budget growth

Investment in an emerging generation of marketing measurement tools is needed to satisfy the CEO’s increasing demand for tracking data. In order to facilitate this, budget growth and additional marketing resources are being provided.

Possibly as a result of the increased focus from the CEO and the growing role marketing has as a growth engine, almost half of respondents (45 percent) reported an increase in their marketing budgets in the past year while only 12 percent are working with a tighter marketing budget.

Respondents were asked what their marketing personnel priorities would be for 2013/14 and a significant majority were focused on proactive and growth related strategies. Almost a third (32 percent) plan to add more full-time marketing resources, one in five respondents (19 percent) plan to invest in more contingent marketing workers, while one in 10 (10 percent) will hire a new marketing agency.

One in 10 respondents (10 percent) will also share resources with other departments, such as IT, reflecting the highly technical nature of twenty-first century marketing analytics. A much smaller percentage of respondents are planning to downsize their investment in marketing personnel in 2013/14.

The emergence of the Growth Hacker

In line with increasing marketing budgets, more marketing people are being hired. Growth hackers, marketers who combine marketing knowledge with a strong technical background to drive growth, are having an impact on improvements in marketing measurement. One quarter of respondents (25 percent) now have a Growth Hacker on their marketing team, the same percentage that have Product Managers.

Marketing teams with Growth Hackers are prioritizing investments in emerging marketing measurement technology, across both online and offline channels. Almost three quarters of marketing teams with a Growth Hacker engaged (72 percent) are experimenting with Voice-Based Marketing Automation (VBMA), 19 percent more than marketing teams generally. Meanwhile, 44 percent of marketing teams with Growth Hackers are using marketing automation software compared to only 26 percent of marketing teams generally.

Over a third of Growth Hacker-backed marketing teams (34 percent) are utilizing heat map tools compared with only 20 percent of the average marketing teams. Almost twice as many marketing teams with Growth Hackers (28 percent) are experimenting with emerging workflow automation tools, compared to 15 percent generally.

Across every category of marketing measurement technology, it is the Growth Hackers who are leading the charge in experimenting and innovating with emerging tools that will give them, their CEO, and their marketing colleagues the edge in tracking where the best results are being achieved for marketing investments.

See the complete survey at Ifbyphone.com

Adobe 2013 Digital Marketing Survey. The survey was published April 26th. Some 53 percent of the digital marketers surveyed from around the world say they devote less than 5 percent of their budget to optimization activities. Last year 48 percent of the marketers said this. Only 6 percent of respondents are allocating more than one-quarter of their budgets to these activities, relatively unchanged from last year’s 7 percent. And that is strange, because through optimization companies can reduce the costs of their marketing operations. By calculating the ROI for the optimization projects it can become apparent that the reason not to, is actually the reason to do it; saving budget.

Eye-openers

Adobe conducted this survey amongst 1800 marketers from around the World. “Some of the findings are eye-opening”, says John Cristofano, PR-Manager at  Adobe, “like data showing a majority of the companies surveyed spend 5 percent or less of their marketing budget on optimization activities. Five percent or less, even though it’s also clear from the data that companies investing more get more in return. For example, companies allocating more than 25 percent of marketing budgets to optimization are twice as likely to see high conversion rates.”

With these kinds of results, it’s only logical to ask why there are not more companies are investing in optimization. According to the survey there are two major challenges. Budget and resources are the two most important things, that hold marketers back says almost half of the respondents.

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Though frequently at odds, marketing and IT executives agree that harnessing Big Data is imperative to building a customer-centric corporate culture, SAS.

They also agree that a lack of CMO/CIO alignment, rigid silos, unclear responsibilities, and a lack of leadership impede an organization from using Big Data to its full potential, the survey of CMOs and CIOs found.

Big Data is important to achieving a customer-centric culture, according to the study:

• 40% of marketers and 51% of IT executives said its critical for improved decision making.
• 36% of marketers and 23% of IT execs said data drives the ability to personalize customer experiences.

Below, additional findings from the CMO Council study, titled Big Data’s Biggest Role, Aligning the CMO & CIO.

Access to in-depth data, and the ability to translate it into insights, is a competitive advantage according to 70% of marketers: 30% say it is critical, and 40% say it is part of the overall picture.

However, most respondents view the flood of incoming data as part obstacle and part opportunity: 61% of CMOs and 60% of CIOs say so, admitting they have a long way to go still in using Big Data properly.

The main challenge, according to 52% of marketers (and 45% of IT professionals), is that functional silos block aggregation of data from across the organization, making it difficult to truly achieve customer-centricity:

Moreover, 39% of CMOs say the corporate culture is not aligned around the needs of customers.

A likely explanation for the lack of total customer focus is that no clear ownership of the customer exists. Among marketing executives, 18% say that ownership rests with the CEO, 17% say the CMO, and 19% say sales. IT professionals assign ownership to the CEO (20%), CMO (19%), and sales (17%).

Organizations that report they have achieved total partnership between CMO and CIO also have clearer ownership of the customer.

In such organizations, marketers (24%) and IT professionals (30%) say the CEO owns the customer. Furthermore, marketers and IT executives in total partnership organizations are highly satisfied with their companys ability to engage the customer (42% of marketers, 31% of IT execs).

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