Tag Archives: marketing operations

Big data, analyze, get personal and win

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

The evolution of marketing

In an ever changing world, marketing changes too. But marketers need the right tools. So it’s time that marketingtools change too, says Jive Software in their whitepaper ‘Marketing Transformed’. Most marketers still depend on the same tools and methods they used 20 years ago: email, meetings, phone calls and desktop apps, leading to a lot of disconnects, inefficiency and pain. But change is finally at hand. New social business technology has the ability to knit cross functional teams together and empower marketing productivity in ways never possible before.

According to a recent study of over 1700 chief marketing officers, four out of five CMO’s anticipate a high or very high level of marketing complexity over the next five years, but only half feel ready to handle it. Those CMO’s have every reason to be concerned, according to Jive. The sheer size of the task has grown, with a more diverse market landscape to master, more communication channels to leverage, and a lot more data to take account of. The expectations have grown, too. Marketing departments are under greater pressure to develop more agile and precision targeted campaigns, generate more leads and ultimately contribute more to companies’ bottom lines.

Unfortunately, Jives states, marketing methods and tools haven’t kept pace with the demands. When it comes to the human interactions and collaboration at the heart of so many marketing activities like planning and executing campaigns, creating collateral, enabling channel partners and nurturing customer relationships – marketers have been stuck using tools from an earlier age: email, phone, face-to-face meetings, on-site events, content management systems and desktop apps. A few newer collaborative tools have entered the picture, but have tended to be piecemeal and limited-purpose.

All this causes that knowledge-workers need a lot of time to do things they aren’t supposed to do. Just think of all the effort and frustration that goes into fruitlessly searching for information, sorting through email, managing disjointed document revision cycles, struggling to keep all team members on the same page etc. etc Jive states. According to McKinsey Global Institute the average knowledge worker spends 19 percent of the day searching for information and expertise and another 28 percent of the day processing email.

Read More

CMOs Will Outspend CIOs on Technology by 2017

How do today’s marketers truly view their ability to harness and leverage big data to produce measurable results?

That’s the question posed by the team at Teradata. And the answer may be found by diving into the extensive new Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey 2013.

The global results offer an in-depth look at some key issues, including marketers’ perceptions of how their companies use data to guide marketing decisions, perceived barriers to using data to drive marketing, and where marketers’ expect their organizations to place data-driven priorities over the next couple of years.

Customers may test you, EMM helps you rise to the challenge

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.

Read More

How to Save Budget and Increase Sales with Marketing Operations

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 or contact MRMLOGIQ for more information.

Great Marketing is Global and Local

Harvard Business Review blog , Jerry Wind, Stan Sthanunathan, and Rob Malcolm argued that great advertising is both local and global. The authors contend that global enterprises have traditionally faced an unattractive trade-off when it comes to advertising. As they put it, “Global brand advertising can rarely reflect the idiosyncratic characteristics of every market, but the alternative – locally designed advertising – often sacrifices a consistent global message and misses out on economies of scale.”

To avoid this trade-off, the blog authors say that enterprises should pursue a glocal advertising strategy, which they define as, “locally adapting a universally embraced core idea that will resonate in any market anywhere in the world.” As an example of effective glocal advertising, the authors described a 13-year advertising campaign used by Johnnie Walker to reinvigorate its Scotch whiskey brand.

The Johnnie Walker campaign was based on the recognition that men around the world, regardless of culture or nationality, want to advance their lives. The creative expression of this theme was “Keep Walking.” This universal theme was localized through the use of inspirational quotes from multiple cultures. For example, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” by Lao Tsu was used in Asia. Over the life of the campaign, more than 100 “local” quotes were used.

The blog authors contend that an effective glocal advertising strategy has three core components:

  • A global concept that embraces a universal human emotion
  • A global brand vision combined with localized creative delivery
  • An organizational architecture (including corporate culture, technology platform, and necessary resources) that facilitates effective collaboration between global and local marketers

In my view, the points made by Wind, Sthanunathan, and Malcolm about advertising apply equally to virtually all aspects of global marketing. Today, multinational enterprises must pursue both global brand consistency and effective localization simultaneously across all marketing tactics and channels.

Coordinating global and local marketing activities is especially important because the Internet largely erases geographical boundaries, making many consumers both global and local. For example, consumers in Japan or India increasingly expect marketing messages and materials that are culturally relevant and appropriate, but those same consumers can also easily access marketing content that is primarily intended for consumers in the US.

I also agree with the blog authors that both organizational culture and technology play critical roles in effective glocal marketing. Enterprises must nurture a close collaboration between marketers in the central marketing department and those in regional or national marketing offices around the world. Enterprises must also deploy the technology systems and tools that will enable geographically dispersed marketers to collaborate easily and efficiently. Without the right technology tools, timely and effective collaboration is all but impossible to achieve.

Marketing operations according to a genius

We all know Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Arent they the most famous cartoon figures in history? They came out of the mind of Walt Disney.

Disney, a simple guy with a great talent. After joining the military during World War 2 he found a job as an artist. After starting his own studio, together with his brother Roy, he found out he wasn’t an animator. Soon he discovered he was the man with ideas. He knew what he wanted, what was possible and how much time things took. So he hired the right people to do things for him. Disney and his team created Mickey Mouse and the rest is history. Disney does roughly 36 billion US-dollars a year now.

Isnt the guy a genius? And how simple a good (marketing)plan can be, shows this drawing of Disney, showing his idea on the Disney Company. An early thought on marketing operations?

Creating a Next Generation Marketing Organization

George Bailey, a senior advisor to Sony and a MarketShare Advisory Board Member, addresses the struggles many marketing organizations are having with todays data explosion, and the secrets to successfully integrating marketing analytics.

Lets all think about marketingcampaigns

What do you see when someone asks you how marketingcampaigns are created. Creative people doing all kinds of stuff to get inspiration. Locking themselves up in an office, taking a walk or just going to a bar for a drink and look around? That is a common image. An image that can change quickly in the near future. We all can think about campaigns, crowd-sourcing is the new game.

Unilever plans to expand its use of crowd-sourcing to create more relevant marketing campaigns for all its brands. A partnership with eYeka will see the co-creation platform based in France use its online community to develop new campaigns for the FMCG giant across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Russia and South Africa.

Rahul Welde, Unilevers vice-president (media) for Asia, Africa, Middle East, Turkey and Russia told Campaign Asia-Pacific that the company intends to engage more fully with its most creative consumers. The objective is to build a great creative product working very closely with Unilevers agencies, and create a stronger ecosystem and platform, he said.  Ultimately, this agreement will accelerate the development of a culture of co-creation and collaboration that drives innovation and creativity, he added. For eYeka, crowd-sourcing can give major brands a considerable competitive advantage by turning to consumers for ideas. Francois Petavy, CEO of eYeka, said: Brands and their agencies are opening up to creative ideas from more diversified sources such as communities of consumers. We believe in a new open model where brands and their agencies collaborate with consumers and other non-traditional players on a sustainable basis, he added.

Petavy argued in a recent blogpost that crowd-sourcing was an idea whose time had come and it was set to take off in 2013. He said it was capable of solving real business problems and that ROI could be demonstrated.

And the Innovation Excellence website listed six partnerships, including the Unilever-eYeka agreement, that it said proved that crowdsourcing was going mainstream.

The others included Deloitte and Kaggle, Sony CEA and Mofilm, Edelman and Poptent, Booz Allen Hamilton and Innocentive, ADK and eYeka.

How Digital Asset Management Helps Marketing, Creative and Sales Teams

Digital Asset Management (DAM) technologies have emerged as a strategic necessity for businesses and organizations of all types to operate more efficiently and effectively. Watch this video to learn more about how DAM solutions are used by marketing, creative and sales teams to (1) improve efficiency of marketing operations, (2) increase brand consistency, and (3) increase return on marketing investments.

This short video from Widen Enterprises tells the story on how DAM systems are used by marketing, creative and sales organizations. Learn more at www.Widen.com