Tag Archives: collaboration

09.29.15
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What is datadriven marketing? Well, it depends…

Datadriven marketing means capturing and analyzing data from the abundance of available transactions and interactions between you, your company and your market – and turning them into meaningful conversations that engage your audience.

It’s all about analyzing the data available to you with the purpose of charting patterns, volumes, trends so that marketing can make business intelligent decisions based on insights around actual customer behaviour.

If you google “what is datadriven marketing” you will find several different perspectives:

  • Using data analytics to drive marketing decisions – says IT
  • Create marketing insights based on the analysis of data about or from consumers/customers – says Marketing

There is no way around it. We have to combine forces.

The 2013/2014 CMO-CIO Alignment Survey (Accenture) revealed that digitalisation is bringing IT and Marketing together, albeit slightly hesitant. 45% of CMOs believe “more collaboration is needed” with the CIO – while 43% of CIOs believe marketing requirements and priorities change too often.

So let’s turn the discussion around – why are we really here? Both Marketing and IT must contribute to the success of the business. They are literally in the same boat. How does datadriven marketing change all that?

Profiling, marketing personas, multi-touch communications using marketing automation tools; we all use these techniques to create a strategic engagement/nurturing cycle. But we must base it on insights – on the actual available data including your social customer engagements.

The enemy of any marketing campaign is complexity. None of this works if your IT department is unable to extract the information = data you need when you need it. And put it into context.

Make your data speak!

The overall objective of datadriven marketing must be to turn data into actionable insights. Because if you look at data in isolation, it is dead. Data is merely a reflection of something that has already happened. Any transaction in your ERP is history as soon as it is captured, including any customer interaction you may have recorded in your CRM. It’s what you do next, that’s important. According to Gartner,

Data-driven marketing refers to acquiring, analyzing and applying information about customer and consumer wants, needs, context, behavior and motivations.

You should take a moment to watch the excellent video from Gartner for Marketing Leaders.

To make your data speak, you have to apply filters that create patterns of behaviour which you then use to create a communication strategy for a continuous cycle of engagement.

Tom Kaneshige on CIO.com explains how:

“Data comes from many sources but not all contribute equally. Marketers also have the unenviable task of separating the good data from the bad data. It’s a work in progress, and CIOs can help CMOs learn about the many internal and external data sources and their value to marketers. Tech vendors can assist in this difficult process, too.”

… By the way, not everybody is a fan, especially when you define datadriven as metrics-driven.  Robert Glazer  maintains that if marketers only focus on satisfying particular metrics, they may fail to capture the greater good for the company:

“Clicks, time spent, and conversion rates only describe what people do, not why they do it. If marketers rely on data to tell them what works, creativity no longer drives the message. Instead, an obsession with data leads to metrics tunnel vision, and as brands shift from their creative offensive, they neglect to consider consumer engagement.”

FT.com/Lexicon

“Data-driven marketing refers to the marketing insights and decisions that arise from the analysis of data about or from consumers.”

Author Lisa Arthur from Forbes Magazine :

“At its core, data-driven marketing centers on one thing and one thing only: propelling value by engaging customers more effectively.”

Her book on Big Data marketing contains many examples of companies that are already well on their way to becoming data-driven organizations.

09.07.15
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Marketing Tips and Tricks

The three touch engagement strategy for audience acquisitions at business events: Idea – Engagement – Push

Source: Where is everybody – where’s my ROI? Tips and Tricks to attract the right audience at your event

09.07.15
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Where is everybody – where’s my ROI? Tips and Tricks to attract the right audience at your event

If you read my previous blog entry, you may still be looking for the best way to find the golden audience that makes you best friends with the sales teams. Here are some suggestions I have collected over the years:

123image

Plan with the end in mind

  • Don’t just set a date, build a 3-touch-strategy together with your stakeholders (the sales teams in most cases).
  • The theme and message has to promote and strengthen the conversations that your sales teams are having with their target prospects. Don’t push some new message or vision down their throats if this is not what their targets are interested in.
  • Be flexible – if the conversation has moved over the 8-10 weeks of planning before the event, make sure to have alternatives ready to add to the speaker list.

Email marketing – and other channels

  • Don’t publish it all at once, when you start the invite process – build an engagement staircase with at least 3 touches.
  • Expand your email campaign with social media engagement through dedicated, branded Linkedin groups, with a short, recognizable and easy to remember hashtag to use across channels before, during and after the event.
  • Another great tip is to prepare your tweets and posts so that your colleagues across the company can share without sounding like a marketing machine.
  • Make it personal, local, fun – whatever their preference is.

For your email campaign – here are the three touches I would recommend:

Image 1

Launch the idea of an event and pre-announce the date. Get the theme out there to gauge interest from your target audience. If you have a star speaker name, don’t let the cat out of the sack just yet. Have a call-to-action button for “sign me up” or “tell me more” – and make sure there is a response on the second one.

image 2

First real invite – allowing people to sign up based on an agenda with topics and speakers that are “glocal” – have a global vision but either are local or have local recognition. Always have a button “sign me up” and “tell me more” to encourage a dialogue.

image 3

Now let the cat out of the sack. Make a big boom invite only promoting date, theme, agenda and your star.

Less is more – let people click through if they want to deep dive into agenda or speaker profiles etc. That way you can capture who is interested so that your sales teams can follow up with personal emails or telephone calls.

Still not there? Time to call the cavallery

And if all fails – if you have not met your quality registration target – go the extra mile – engage with your sales teams, show them the gap between their expectation on the attending audience and their sales target accounts.

Give them a cheat sheet with talking points about the event.  Remember, you know everything about how great it will be – but they probably don’t event know the speakers or content in detail yet. Get them excited, build a dashboard or some other gamification element to let them compete with each other (and make sure there is a decent prize for the winner, so get that on the budget from the very beginning).

Help them help you succeed.

08.25.14
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An idea becomes a movement: Why influencers influence

When something is important to you, you naturally feel the urge to communicate. Not just because “sharing is caring” but because more people sharing makes what is important -to you- important to more people. It’s called influencing.

Over the past 4 years, since entering the exciting, demanding but also enlightening world of Twitter, we have seen countless examples of individuals and companies using it as just another way of shouting. They shout about their products, their companies, their personal frustrations, politics, or strong engagements/causes. Be it football or feminism.

S.O.C.I.A.L.

But are they social? The ultimate acronym for being someone who cares (“sharing is “caring”) implies that you are sincere and communicate rather than shout. You communicate by being open and receptive to the person you communicate with. In order to be worth sharing, what you communicate must be triggered by your true motivation to collaborate around the issue. And more importantly, interested in what they need/have to say.

If and when you respond, what you say and how you interact needs to be what is truly who you are, to be authentic and therefore make a difference.

Finally, social means caring, and by showing that you care, you are likeable and will be a natural choice to follow and engage with. That is how you become an influencer. And that is what social media is all about.

A Twitter list became a movement

Last night I started collecting Danish influencers adding them to a list so that I could follow them all and engage where it makes sense. @tokeroed picked the idea up, made more suggestions and it has now grown into more than 30 Twitterers in Denmark from all geographies, all professions, both companies and consultants and self employed or out of employment. A group of people reaching out to each other to interact, share and care. Check out the list “Danish Influencers” on Twitter to meet these amazing people. I am sure, there will be more.

I cannot wait to see where this will takes us.

12.07.12
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Social – the ultimate acronym

Did you ever think about the best way to describe what social disruption is all about? To move the discussion away from the channel (not social=Facebook page or social=Twitter account) and to what really matters, I have come up with this inspired by JP Rangashwami @jobsworth :

s = sincere

o = open

c = collaborative

i = interested

a = authentic

l = likeable

There are many excellent examples of organisations, companies and individuals who can subscribe to all of the above. One great example is the Danish TV&Broadband provider YouSee

Another – from the other side of the world, Toyota

But even if you only identify yourself with a subset of these letters, I would still categorize you as “social”. Let me elaborate:

Sincere

If you don’t mean it, don’t post it. Or retweet it. Or spread it. As a company or an individual it must be what you stand for.

Open

Be open to feedback and suggestions. Make yourself approachable and transparent and make sure to engage when someone reaches out. If you don’t they will stop trying. And that was not the intention.

Collaborative

At the end of the day, you and your audience are in the same boat. If you do not collaborate on moving the boat forward, you will ride in circles. Join initiatives that make sense to the common goal and be generous in sharing them to evangelize.

I nterested

Do you care? Do you want the audience to care? Show it. Respond, engage, reflect. Don’t just retweet other people’s content. Show who you are and that you care by commenting and making suggestions.

A uthentic

Your brand equals the sum of conversations about your brand, a @Radian6 executive told us when they joined salesforce.com – and we embraced that. So we joined the conversation to listen and engage – never hiding who we are and who we work for. But we joined as individuals – being true to our selves.

L ikable

It’s easy to be angry, to criticize, to rant. But let the others do that – those who want to interact with you and your company don’t need to hear what you are upset about, they want you to share their pains, not yours. Be the kind of person/company you would like to invite for dinner and enjoy having at your table.

Social disruption means that you as an individual or as a company engage along these lines, by showing that you care, by being true to yourself, by sharing for the benefit of a common objective: Ultimately, the success of everyone involved. – that is being social.