Marketing Governance

Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity one can read that high-value MO goes beyond automation, measurement and administration to include higher value-add tools such as cross-functional collaboration, change management, metrics alignment, competency development, predictive analytics, and the like.

According to the survey, companies showed clear tendencies to extend the scope of MO. Thus, the scope of MO typically includes fundamental, expanded, and sophisticated elements:

• Fundamental MO Scope — Includes budget management, customer relationship management (CRM), vendor management, marketing outcomes measurement, and marketing services (e.g., bill of materials, licensing, pricing, creative, production management).
• Expanded MO Scope — Expands beyond the Fundamental MO Scope to comprise marketing campaign automation, process mapping and design, best practices and knowledge management, cross-functional and behavior-rewards alignment, marketing operations management (MOM), marketing resource management (MRM), digital asset management (DAM), and marketing process metrics.
• Sophisticated MO Scope — Evolves to higher sophistication than the Expanded MO Scope to include advanced processes (e.g., LEAN Enterprise, Six Sigma, and supply chain management), marketing governance, portfolio management, customer profitability, change management, competency development, shared vision and strategic management, enterprise marketing management, metrics alignment, and predictive analytics.

The graph shows the progression over time from Fundamental to Expanded to Sophisticated practices

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In today’s market marketing teams are under more and more pressure to perform and get results. ROI is a magic word in marketing now-a-days, while budgets and resources are under pressure as well. In the meantime customers are holding back and getting less and less faithfull to just one brand. So, pressure is on for the marketing department, because you can only do so much to get better results.

There are several trends today which cause this higher pressure, says a paper by SAS.

• Consumers are more empowered then ever
• Data volumes are exploding
• New contact channels add complexity and dissonance
• You don’t control all the channels
• There’s more opportunity for confusion and noise
• Marketing organizations are drowning in data

How can marketers keep their head up in all this turmoil? How can they identify the best strategy that will deliver the best returns on from marketing investments?

Wilson Raj, Global Customer Intelligence Director at SAS shed his light on how to improve ROI on your marketing investments during a webinar sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association and SAS.  Optimization is the keyword, he says.

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The modern technology, and especially digital technology like e-mail, websites, mobile and social media, are a blessing for marketers. Not ever before were they able to gather so much data on what they do. But, this also comes with a danger. The flood of data is large, marketers are awash in data. Marketing analytics is the way to take control over this flood. In the 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report MarketingSherpa the importance of marketing analytics is addressed.

Over 1.100 marketers are surveyed for this research. It provides insight into analytics for all kinds of marketing channels.

According to Marketingssherpa the surveyed marketers provided some interesting insights, and also highlighted areas where marketers could improve in taking advantage of this valuable marketing asset.

The availability of marketing analytics data is promising with 79% reporting having average, significant and even vast amounts of client interaction data to analyze. Only 3% reported having no analytics data at all. An overwhelming majority — 97% — of marketers have some amount of marketing analytics data to work with.

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Ross Graber serves as Research Director for the Marketing Operations Strategies service at SiriusDecisions. He brings over 15 years of marketing experience with focus spanning marketing measurement, demonstrating ROI, data management, process development, marketing technology, customer marketing and sales enablement. He sheds his light on measurement tools. The web is littered with people who know best for you and your organisation. They think they know what your marketing measurement needs to be like and look like.

Measuring is knowing, people say. Theres no difference for marketingdepartments. Because when you measure your results, you measure your succes. And when you measure, you can hold people accountable.

For measuring results you need data, and theres no lack of data nowadays. Customer and businessdata is more available then ever, says Jonathan Lewis on marketingprofs.com. But the sheer volume of data increases the chance on misunderstanding and misinterpreting it significant.

According to Lewis there are five common errors that must be avoided when measuring results.

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Dmitri Dragilev says. Keep it simple is his message.

But how, do you ask?

Well this is how.  Go take over the meeting thats going on in your conference room, kick them out and tell them its time to do something productive: make a video and market some products, he says. And this is how

If there was an Insight Facebook page, it would have millions of Likes. Why have some marketers latched onto this concept tighter than a terrier with a new toy? This article explains what an insight is, why insights are essential to developing a competitive advantage, and a best practice for finding valuable customer and market insights.

What is an Insight? Kieron Monahan of Arnold Worldwide offered one of the best definitions for insight that I’ve ever heard:

a surprising truth that makes you think again.

Insights are more than an observation; they are a discovery gleaned from the data and facts we collect. Insights serve a variety of purposes from sparking the innovation of new products to driving the delivery of a better customer experience.  Read More

Organizational politics are emerging as a challenge, and through 2016 they will prevent at least one-third of business process management (BPM) efforts progressing from one-off projects to enterprisewide adoption, according to Gartner, Inc. The prediction is based on a Gartner survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2011 among 157 BPM professionals.

Elise Olding, research director at Gartner, said:

BPM is frequently successful when applied to one-off projects at a departmental level with significant benefits. However, when it comes to scaling this success up to cross-departmental programs that require collaboration and shared metrics, or that institutionalize BPM throughout the organization, efforts often stall.

For any BPM initiative to progress beyond simple process improvement projects of limited scope, efforts must be made to understand the organizations politics, and disciplined efforts undertaken to address them.

Olding:

Its up to the business process champion, sponsor or business process director to talk to stakeholders in order to understand and document their thoughts and positions, and so determine the best way of adapting the program.

Although organizational politics look set to hamper some BPM efforts, Gartner predicts that gamification — the broad trend of applying game mechanics to non-game environments to motivate people and change behavior — will stimulate BPM adoption during the next few years. By 2015, 25% of all redesigned processes will include one or more gamified engagement practices, Gartner predicts.

Although business processes are not games, they can benefit from a focus on more engaging process designs that deliver immediate feedback and encourage continuous improvement. For example, organizations can achieve better results from their process redesign efforts by increasing participant satisfaction with new processes, connecting participants to common goals, and providing immediate feedback on progress.

Gartner also predicts that, by 2016, 20% of shadow business processes will be supported by BPM cloud platforms. Shadow business processes are hidden, informal work practices, often supported under the IT radar by secret spreadsheets, emails, phone calls and face-to-face collaboration.

Michele Cantara, research vice president at Gartner, said:

BPM cloud platforms are a better and more cost-effective way to automate hidden processes than secret spreadsheets or uncoordinated email threads. A BPM cloud platform — BPM platform as a service (BPM PaaS) — can track process steps, provide insight into work item status and help manage the collaborative interactions involved in unstructured processes.

In particular, high-productivity BPM PaaS will provide shadow process owners with a more attractive and productive user experience, which will encourage them to share their shadow processes.

During the next four years, process-related skills, particularly those related to tackling organizational challenges, will become an imperative for organizations as they move from individual projects to enterprisewide process transformation programs.

Olding concludes:

Politics will be a challenge that some will not overcome, but the good news is that many of this years predictions point to a path that leads to BPM success.

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Brand content is getting a bigger slice of the marketing pie—a 13% increase, or $1,640,107 in spending for the last two years, according to a new survey, “The Spending Study: A Look at How Corporate America Invests in Branded Content for 2012,” by the Custom Content Council and ContentWise.

A thriving sign for the content marketing industry, 79% of marketers are now reporting that their companies are shifting into branded content either at a moderate or aggressive pace. Fifty-two percent of companies are reporting that they outsourced some portion of at least one type of branded content creation in 2012. Read More

Forbes Insights. Forbes surveyed 250 marketers and 2000 consumers about the perception of brand engagement from both sides. For example, 49% of marketers consider forwards or shares of ads or other content online as a strong influence on their engagement measures, whereas just 15% of consumers say they feel engaged or invested in a brand when they share an ad.

Data from The New Rules of engagement: Measuring the Power of Social Currency reveals that there are numerous similar instances of disconnect between what marketers measure and what consumers feel is important. One that stands out relates to brand recommendations. 45% of marketers say that consumers’ proactive efforts to recommend a brand is a strong measure of engagement for them. But, just 24% of consumers report feeling invested in a brand when they convince others to use it.

The only measure in which both groups agree concerns opt-in messaging (subscribing to email alerts, newsletters, or other loyalty programs), which marketers think is the most influential engagement measure. At the same time, signing up for special deals or email updates ranked as the top way that consumers feel engaged with brands. Read More