InsightIQ Blog

At a keynote panel at the National Center of Database Marketing (NCDM), I made a comment that customer marketing was eclipsing brand marketing as the core of marketing's mission in many companies.  That sparked a lively discussion among the panelists.  As is to be expected among panelists at a database marketing conference, there was general agreement that this was the case.  But is it, really?  Does brand marketing still matter?  Of course, it does!

You may already have robust analytics that predict value, churn, bad debt & future customer interests.  You may also have a robust customer database that may be used to glean additional insights and make the analytics actionable.  That's great, but how do you determine which offer a customer should receive in all inbound and outbound channels (CSR, Web, direct mail,..)? 

Stayed at a hotel recently?  Each time I have I’ve noticed that the staff seem to be extra attentive, and my assumption is that it’s related to today’s extremely competitive market. Unfortunately, the extra attention has not always had the desired result.

Google recently announced the integration of real time data into their web search results page.  Real time data includes Twitter feeds, news updates, blog posts, even craigslist ads displayed up to the minute with the traditional search results.  Google has also reportedly partnered with Facebook and MySpace to incorporate other forms of real time data such as status updates into their search results.  How these changes will impact the marketing landscape will be an interesting question in the near future.

The great health care debate this past summer could be a preview of what the future of marketing looks like.  How, you ask?  For some years now, the "mainstream" journalists who have been trained to fact check and present both sides of a story have been losing their voice to an ever growing multitude of  bloggers with extreme views , strong opinions and, in some cases, a disdain for facts and sober analysis.  This blogosphere, magnified by the echo chamber of 24/7 cable news channels, hungry for controversy and content, set the tone and the agenda for the shouting match that stood in for reasoned debate on the topic of healthcare, a subject of great concern for most Americans.  Professional journalists were caught by surprise and spent most of their time reacting to these controversies rather than reporting on the substance of health care reform.  Marketers have similarly embraced social networks as a way to generate word of mouth advertising, cross over tipping points, build fan bases and encourage consumers to generate their own content.   

As more and more organizations want to extend their reach using Digital marketing, the biggest challenge they face is "how to handle anonymous users". Most organizations rely on cookie mechanism for identifying visitors and as users are increasingly deleting their cookies, typically 75% of the visitor traffic is anonymous visitors or first time visitors. This implies that organizations must develop a data collection, segmentation and targeting strategy for anonymous online visitors.

What if not-for-profit organizations (NPO) thought more strategically and mirrored their marketing efforts to those of most for-profits in terms of customer relationship management?

Donors and volunteers are the lifeline of all nonprofit organizations. Yet few NPOs maintain a reliable database to extract such valuable information as age, gender, marital status, demographics, participation activity, etc. Information collected and stored by nonprofits most often pertains to fundraising events (eg. donations generated) and not the participants themselves.  Any information relating back to volunteers and donors are often limited and cannot be analyzed over a historic period because most not-for-profits haven't properly 'married' such data with the proper CRM tools (See 'Selecting Your Marketing Automation').  Although it would make this a different kind of love story, the same is true for NGOs. But for the sake of all that is wholesome, we will not digress.

Imagine if the American Heart Association decided to put all their research dollars into CPR techniques instead of healthy diet, exercise, genetics, and heart disease treatments?  

Recently I attended the Cable Television Marketing Association Summit in Denver.   CSG has tremendous clientele in this industry and provides a suite of CSR technology, billing platforms, and other integrated customer interaction services to some of the biggest players in cable.   My team here at Quaero provides Customer Intelligence applications to drive optimized analytics-driven marketing decisions for these companies.  

Last month, I was on a keynote panel at the National Center for Database Marketing (NCDM).  The topic of the panel was "Evolving from Database Marketing to Customer Intelligence" and the discussion largely centered around the evolution of marketing into a bi-directional communication mechanism with customers across multiple channels and the challenges that brings.  An audience member asked the question, "Is technology the gating factor that prevents or slows marketers from embracing these changes?"   The panel differed on their responses.   Some felt, yes, technology was indeed an impediment to doing this well.     I and at least one other panelist disagreed.   

Honda recently caught my attention with their new social media marketing campaign - "Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda".  I found this particularly interesting because Honda is directing people to Facebook in order to participate in the experiment.  I could not recall another company of Honda's stature using a foremost social media platform for an official marketing campaign and customer engagement platform.  Interesting!

After visiting the page myself, I see that Honda has amassed an impressive network of 268,000 fans (as of Nov 2009).  Counting all of the fan's friends, this network reaches over 3.3 million Facebook users.

It's Friday night. If your household is like mine, this occurrence is synonymous with pizza and a movie, typically enjoyed in the comfort of our own home. Combining our infatuation with this magical combination of dough, tomato sauce, cheese and you-name-it in conjunction with the visual stimulation of a good flick somehow makes everything right.

Not too long ago, our pursuit of this objective involved a well-defined, perfectly timed-out process: order the pizza by phone, drive to the video rental store, select a movie, pickup the pizza, and return home with the spoils. But we live in a time of great change, when we constantly have to adapt, altering our routines to maintain, or even improve, the overall experience and perceived benefit.

AOL spins off from Time Warner while Comcast picks up NBC.... as they both look to re-brand and boost ad income.

In this tough economic climate, all companies are trying to improve their overall bottom lines. How can online and digital marketing help with this? In a recent study from summer 2009, most companies stated that the No. 1 conversion relevant to them was sales, with sign-ups and registrations a close second. What are the key tactics to improve overall conversion on site?

One of the most annoying aspects of the customer experience does not have to do with the shopping experience but with the communication experience.    A constant refrain we hear from customers across the board (whether in B2B or B2C situations) is that they get too many calls or emails but often do not hear when there is relevant news that they are truly interested in.  On the other hand, a surprising (and dismaying) number of marketers still measure their productivity by the sheer volume of outbound communications (email, direct mail, calls, touches, etc.) rather than by the quality or even the relevance. 

Naras and I are in the process of writing a book chapter for a project called Masters in Marketing.  Focused on strategic brand management, the book largely provides guidance for marketers looking to understand how to strengthen their brand in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.  We've been tasked with writing about the "focus of the CMO"...and as you'll come to see, we go slightly against the grain; while brand matters, the customer and his/her ecosystem matter more.

Below is the start of our work.  I'll publish more pieces as it evolves, but I certainly welcome your input as we build out this chapter.

I attended the recent NDCM (National Center for Database Marketing conference) in Las Vegas last week, after a gap of many years, the triggering event being the fact that I was on a keynote panel being moderated by David Frankland of Forrester Research.  Attending the event after this multi-year hiatus and, particularly,  on the tenth year anniversary of a keynote address I had given there after I had started Quaero in 1999, I was struck by the changes in the conference over the years.    It is, to state the obvious for those who have been attending for many years, much smaller than it used to be.   I would guess a fourth or even a fifth of the size that it was ten years ago.  When you consider the fact that there used to be two NCDMs a year at that time versus just one this year, that is quite a precipitous fall.  Given the revolutionary changes in marketing over the past ten years, one would have expected quite the opposite.    The NCDM has always been focused on the technology aspects of direct marketing and technology has been the driver behind many of the changes in marketing in recent years.   

Although 2009 is drawing to a close and most people are thinking about winding down for the holidays, I'm already well-ensconced in 2010 marketing plans, programs and campaign execution.  During the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time addressing the "marketing operations" side of the business; and while I've never considered myself an ops expert, my role has always included a significant amount of work in this area. 

Interestingly, marketing operations is one of those amorphous areas, quite different in every organization.  Here at CSG's Quaero, the goal of marketing operations is to improve the efficiency of the marketing function through people (resources), process and infrastructure/tools.  Most recently we've:

The debate continues.  Or resurfaces, as the case may be.  Now that ad revenue is tanking again, content publishers are revisiting their model. This pendulum has been swinging for almost a decade. The answer is not admonishing the ad model.  And it certainly is not arbitrarily walling off content.  Access to premium content...stuff you can't get anywhere else...should be paid.  And paying for it doesn't necessarily mean your experience will be advertisement free.  Engaged users who pay for content are that much more valuable to advertisers. 

In a previous blog, I had discussed how financial services companies should use web analytics tools. In the past few weeks, I've had discussions with a couple of our financial services clients and found that while many are trying to use Web analytics to address business challenges, they are struggling with some challenging technical implementation issues.  This blog will focus more on the technical side of web analytics implementation and offer up some key best practices.

Remember when the Web was brand new?   Remember all the pundits' questions about whether it was a fad, if there was ever going to be ROI... or was it little more than brochureware?   With years of hindsight, those questions seem naive today; the Web has become a key vehicle for customer interaction.

These days, I am hearing the same sort of questions about social media... even admittedly from guys like myself not too long ago.    But I am now convinced that social media will be just as important to revenue as outbound direct marketing, interactive marketing and currently en vogue inbound customer interaction management.  Social media will become another channel in the marketing mix.

I was reading the recent research from Center for Media Research and it was interesting to note that 8% of Internet Users account for 85% of all Clicks. The results indicate that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.

I'm in the middle of reading a terrific book by the late professor Randy Pausch called "The Last Lecture". Yes, I know that this was a best seller and that I am probably the last person in the country to read this book, but that's beside the point.

I just read an interesting chapter where he referenced teaming up with another professor from Carnegie Mellon University who interestingly taught Drama (Randy Pausch was an IT Professor at Carnegie Mellon). The partnership resulted in the development of "The Entertainment Technology Center" and a completely new 2 year Master's Program in which artists and technologists worked together in developing a variety of cutting-edge visual effects."

If you were disciplined as a child you are probably familiar with the following retort, "Yes, you can but you may not". What this expression relayed to the one being chastised is that just because you have the power to do something does not justify doing it. So how about we discuss something that I am sure weighs on the minds of you and your campaign developers. Should you let your campaign developers develop new campaigns in the Unica production environment? We can come back to that question in a minute. How about we first take a poll and see how many clients currently allow their campaign developers to develop brand new campaigns in the production environment, without first having them develop in a non-production environment. As the results come in I will share with you some of the arguments I hear regarding why clients develop in the production environment.

I recently read a published survey on marketers' frustrations with Web analytics solutions. In this tough economic environment, marketers are being held accountable to show increased performance with a reduced budget. This has led many to shift their budgets from more traditional media to digital. I have addressed this phenomenon in my previous blogs - why we are seeing increased spend in digital media - and this trend is likely to continue.

By all accounts, marketers are realizing that moving to digital media has tremendous upside. With the right strategy and execution in place, digital media has proven to be lot more cost effective, and scales and caters to a larger volume with faster go-to market capabilities. However, the biggest challenge for marketers has been their limited ability to measure and accurately quantify the impact and use that information to make relevant business decisions. That's where Web analytics comes in; they provide a means to measure the performance of digital media marketing.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a series of product demos for Neolane.  According to their web site, Neolane is "the only enterprise marketing software specifically designed to manage, automate and optimize programs across traditional and emerging channels including direct mail, email and mobile".  The Neolane team did a nice job detailing out this functionality and emphasizing their ability to integrate easily with numerous outbound channels.

The demos focused on three main points:

1.       Overall product offering

2.       Campaign planning and execution

3.       Technical architecture