I tag each scooped, curated article, and it’s becoming more and more difficult because I’m finding lines between marketing technology and marketing less relevant. Here’s the issue: technology is driving the wagon right now, and marketers are jumping onto the technology bandwagon (as they should). The whole marketing technology environment is moving swiftly, seemingly changing overnight. Staid ol’ marketing is now marketing technology and these technologies are driving strategy, i.e., technology is providing unseen opportunities to marketers. Can we truly separate marketing technology from marketing? Is it one and the same?
Marketing technology…NOW!
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Featured Marketing Automation Article
Marketing Operations: Pit Crew or Service Station? – Profs | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From www.marketingprofs.com – Today, 12:20 PM
“General Management – A good way to think about your marketing operations function is that it could operate either as a pit crew or as a service station.”
Digest…
Pit crews work offensively and defensively. And Marketing Ops, resembling a pit crew, would be proactively managing data, analytics, processes, planning, and tools that help identify customer wants and needs, decide on which markets and customers to pursue, what messages and channels to use and when these will occur, what service and adjustments are needed throughout program execution or how to modify the strategy due to unexpected changes in conditions.
Just as the pit crew needs to be prepared and equipped to perform any service from the simple to complex on the car during the race, Marketing Ops needs to be prepared and equipped to perform any service or adjustment to support the marketing team and its internal stakeholders in Product, Sales, Service, and Delivery.
A service station typically has little visibility into which customers and cars they will service that day or what kind of services they will be asked to perform. Similarly, marketing ops organizations behaving as a service station work on-demand, supporting whatever requests come their way with little opportunity to strategize or plan.
As a result, ops organizations that operate similar to service stations are better served with skills and tools that provide basic turnkey services on demand. Successful service stations and like-minded marketing ops organizations need exceptional customer service, supply/inventory management, financial management, and general maintenance skills- very different skills from the pit crew’s.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
A great article. Take a step back for a second and ask which is more important in an age of rapidly moving technology? If things were fairly stagnant, then the knowledge would reside with Marketing Op’s customers. But this whole environment is moving swiftly, seemingly changing overnight. Staid ol’ marketing is now marketing technology and the application of said technologies to strategy. Marketing Ops needs to be out front breaking down walls.
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From www.siriusdecisions.com – Today, 12:36 PM
Key points from a recent SiriusDecisions’ webcast about identifying and implementing high-performance marketing practices.
Excerpt…
Contrary to frequently held beliefs, high-performance marketing is not defined by the following metrics:
- Solid click rates. High click rates may be a component of high-performance marketing, but they are an insufficient metric on their own.
- Award-winning Web site design. Although marketing may earn kudos, the achievement is useless unless it is linked to demand creation.
- Conference or other event success. Event evaluation must be tied to specific marketing-related outcomes.
- Reliable responses to sales’ ad hoc requests. Exclusive focus on these requests can degrade the organization-wide view of marketing rather than enhance it.
- Abundant leads delivered to sales. Like click rates, this number can be relevant but does not provide comprehensive evidence of high-performance marketing.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
This is part 1 of a 2 part post. Why scoop this for you? 2014 planning KPIs, that’s why. The aforementioned is old school and doesn’t pass the sniff test. Your KPIs reflect your importance to the organization relative to its goals, and this ain’t it. Part 2 will reflect characteristics of high performance marketing.
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From www.marketingprofs.com – Today, 12:09 PM
Summary…
Experts have written about how to portray data effectively, by using simple and informed graphs to reveal the story behind the data. This article focuses on how to apply data visualization techniques in marketing operations to make a real impact.
Five categories of data visualization as it relates to marketing:
- Data Quality Assessments
- Lead Lifecycle Management
- Marketing Channel Performance Reporting
- Campaign Planning and Budgeting
- Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Obviously this does not cover the full range of data visualization options, but this article gives you a tremendous view (so to speak) of the rationale behind certain types of graphs/charts. Strongly encourage the quick read.
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From chiefmartec.com – Today, 9:55 AM
You can imagine that being the CIO at Google could be a pretty tough gig. The whole company is teeming with super smart engineers. A large number of them are under 30 millennials who are famously opinionated.
Condensed…
1. Savvy customers
First, acknowledge that your customers are savvy. Google employees, the article notes, “aren’t haplessly trying to set up their voicemail; they’re experts in technology and expect it to work.” Ben sees them as representative of a broader shift in the workforce. Your customers are far more savvy than they were 10 years ago.
2. Front-line talent
Second, to deliver on the expectations of savvy customers, you need strong front-line talent. Ben takes great pride in hiring real experts on the front line of IT support — an approach that runs counter to traditional help desk economics.
3. Everyday experiences
Third, in IT — as in marketing — it’s easy to get preoccupied with major strategic initiatives at the expense of giving love and attention to the everyday experiences that people have with you.
For marketers, it’s easy to get caught up in the next major campaign. But the majority of the touchpoints that customers have with us include far more experiences than the typical campaign. It’s all the rest of the content on our website and blog. It’s how our web and mobile apps behave. It’s the quality and relevance of what is emailed through our nurturing programs. It’s the materials we provide for sales support deeper in the funnel.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
The mass dissemination of information has had a significant impact on our ignorance: we’re all so much more alert, smart, witty than ever before. Assume intelligence before being proved wrong (don’t assume ignorance).
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3 Common Problems with B2B Marketing Personas – B2B Digital Marketing | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From b2bdigital.net – Today, 9:43 AM
Good personas are useful, but poor personas do more harm than good. Here are three common problems with the personas B2B marketers are using along with solutions for each one.
Digest…
1. The Funhouse Mirror Persona
All too often marketers end up with these funhouse mirror personas: grossly distorted and misleading views of the audience that focus attention on irrelevant features while obscuring the most important ones. Instead, personas should be like a caricature: immediately recognizable while focusing on the defining characteristics of each segment.
2. The Title Persona
You do not need to create a profile for an accounting manager, a director of finance and a CFO. Depending on your market, you might only need two. Or you might need five, in order to capture the relevant differences in their motivations and perspectives.
3. The Personal Persona
Yes, personal and professional lives are inextricably linked. But if a persona tells you more about a person’s family, pets and free time activity than their professional career and motivations, you are missing an absolutely critical part of the picture.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Don’t let the aforementioned get shoved down your throat! You’ve got to peel away layers of the onion to gain an understanding of the motivations associated with potential buyers, THEN build an MA structure that communicates with each persona. But don’t go persona crazy! Major time sink if you do.
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From searchenginewatch.com – Today, 9:39 AM
A Moz blog post gained big attention after proclaiming an “amazing correlation with higher search rankings” and quickly prompted Google’s Distinguished Engineer to debunk the overall idea that Google +1’s lead to higher search rankings.
Key excerpt…
So his belief falls in line with what a lot of SEO professionals are doing for long-term SEO success, where creating great quality content that is more likely to be shared is the best kind of strategy when it comes to content.
He does continue to reiterate that +1s and rankings are not related. “Most of the initial discussion on this thread seemed to take from the blog post the idea that more Google +1s led to higher web ranking. I wanted to preemptively tackle that perception.”
Cutts also mentioned that another SEO has been doing a rigorous study on whether it +1s lead to higher rankings are not, which he suspects will be released the next month or two. If it is providing specific examples in the study, it will be good to be the most conclusive evidence SEOs will have about whether it is or isn’t a ranking factor with concrete data to back it up.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Moral of the story: Used Google+, post to Google+, build Google+. That will positively impact your SEO. Don’t be concerned with +1’s. Focus on good content distributed over excellent channels, and let the SEO specialist worry about the other stuff.
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Why You Shouldn’t Optimize for Quality Score – Unbounce | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From unbounce.com – Today, 9:33 AM
Quality Score and Click Through Rate (CTR) are given too much emphasis by PPC agencies and advertisers. Optimize AdWords for Profits, not Quality Score.
Condensed…
Google’s documentation says that Quality Score is their system’s way of measuring how relevant your keywords, ads and landing pages are to a person’s search query. A higher quality score means your ad can be shown in a higher position for cheaper. Awesome! However, Google doesn’t pull its credit card out of its wallet and buy from you. Your customers do.
So why put all your resources into optimizing for Google’s opinion of your keywords, ads and landing pages? Shouldn’t you be putting more effort into getting sales? I’m not saying to disregard your quality score. It IS an important metric for getting more clicks for less spend. But don’t optimize for quality score at the expense of more important metrics
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
So I thought this would be in direct conflict with yesterday’s post regarding hacks to improve your QS, found here. It’s not. Quality Score is incredibly important as it reduces your CPC and thus your spending. That’s a given and supported by this post. The point is more in alignment with a recent scoop regarding email campaign profitability, found here: the objectives should ALWAYS be highest ROI, where I = $. Is QS important? Of course, but it’s not the be all and end all.
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From www.toprankblog.com – Today, 9:08 AM
The moving parts within a marketing organization often get tied up in the mastery and performance of specific tactics like content creation, search engine
Condensed…
Before a business decides how, why and what to optimize, socialize and publicize, it’s important to take a step back and ask this essential marketing question, “What are we trying to do?” The answer is usually pretty obvious: “We’re trying to get more people to buy what we’re selling!”
That’s the big picture for most companies, but practical online marketing objectives will be unique to each company’s individual situation. The role of content works across departments and the interaction between departmental content within a company can actually amplify overall business outcomes.
While there are these and more KPIs and marketing outcomes to consider, the simplest thing to do is assess your online marketing strategy for what has worked so far and what needs improvement.
To tie marketing goals to overall business goals, think about how well the web site is performing currently and what the overall online business goals are for the future. Look at each business goal whether its focus is revenue, retention or service and then decide how that translates to your content marketing plan.
Business goals can be broad, but to create actionable plans to achieve them, it’s important to break them down into the key performance indicators that communicate progress and provide feedback for optimization.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
A very timely post inasmuch as you need to think about how your 2014 budget ties into the other corporate components, and how performance could be measured. The post contains examples of KPIs for you to consider.
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Google Steps It Up With Data Driven Attribution | Forrester Blogs | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From blogs.forrester.com – Today, 9:00 AM
Key excerpt…
The Data Driven Attribution feature is only available for Google Analytics Premium users. It has several notable features worth highlighting:
- Google DDA’s approach is statistically driven methodology. Google’s DDA approach is a huge improvement over its rules-based Attribution Modeling tool (which is available for FREE for Google Analytics users). The DDA approach uses probability modeling to best estimate the values of each interaction. The approach itself is transparent, understandable, and Google is extremely open about how it calculates the value parameters.
- Google’s DDA feature can include non-Google data. Yes, you read correctly. The DDA feature leverages the Google Universal Analytics capabilities. Universal analytics capabilities allow marketers to upload a richer set of data, including offline data, mobile app data, and richer data through more accurate tracking. This enables marketers to track converters and non-converters, from online to offline —this is huge.
- Google’s DDA feature integrates seamlessly with existing Google products. If you’re a Google shop, it’s easy for you to integrate your existing data sources into the DDA feature.
- Google’s DDA’s feature is now a serious option for marketers wanting a more advanced attribution measurement approach. Google’s advanced approach demonstrates that it is serious about measuring more effectively. It’s a serious option for marketers seeking a more advanced attribution approach.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Most of us will not require this type of power, but this post helps you see where this whole analytics engine is heading, and how a powerful engine is needed to take advantage of Disparate Data.
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From www.marketingsherpa.com – Today, 8:31 AM
Summary…
Britton sat down with Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, to discuss how starting in 2010, the team took a closer look at the structure of the webinar program at Adobe and changed the overall strategy of webinar content, invites, landing pages and follow up process. Through this transformation, the team discovered by starting with a “solutions” webinar instead of a “product” webinar, prospects gained value from the best practices learned rather than product demonstrations.
In this webinar, you will learn:
- How marketers can tell if a webinar attendee is sales-ready, or not
- How free trials fit into Adobe’s webinar program
- How to provide quality content that leads to a sale
- What is the best way to invite people to a webinar
- How far in advance to promote webinars to your audience
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
It’s about 30 minutes, but I don’t think you have to sit for the full 30 to fully understand the complete makeover. Alternatively, you can download the slides to this presentation.
Sidebar: is this the same Shelby Britton?
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Innovation Excellence | The Collective Force of SlideShare | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From www.innovationexcellence.com – Today, 8:05 AM
There is much more to the SlideShare story than the ‘presentations no longer need to suck’ factor; SlideShare has opened up a distinctively new creative class of visual thinkers doing their part to make complexity disappear.
Key excerpt…
This May, SlideShare celebrated a milestone of over 10 million presentation uploads. Now, with a massive community of over 50 million unique users each month, Seeborg shared that from the beginning, SlideShare had a strong vision of their core business model and implemented an aggressive growth strategy. The early users of SlideShare were from the interactive design and user experience community. Seeborg advises others needing to grow a customer base to, “go with who you know and use your first tier contacts as your beginning base.” She goes on to say that SlideShare had a great idea and the other part of their good fortune was timing.
Meyer agreed by stating that, “it has been a perfect setup for visual communication. The pace of communication has increased, as has the need to communicate quickly and effectively. Those of us in the innovation and creativity space are continually bombarded with the new and fabulous, and visual thinking plays a role in how ideas and concepts are both captured and remembered.” Meyer continued by stating that the two main advantages of imagery are:
- The acceleration of productivity: studies show that people are 17% more productive and use 20% fewer resources when using a visual language.
- By using visual artifact, it is easier to structure a team’s thinking around the different elements of a project.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
More proof supporting the incorporation of SlideShare into the mix (and should be added to your Inbound strategy).
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Introducing a New Look for LinkedIn Groups [INFOGRAPHIC] – LinkedIn | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From blog.linkedin.com – Today, 8:02 AM
LinkedIn Groups, one of our most popular products on LinkedIn, is getting a major redesign with a beautiful new look and feel.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
FWIW. I’m assuming you’re participating in LinkedIn Groups.
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From www.myoptimind.com – Today, 7:59 AM
26 Digital Marketing statistics you shouldn’t miss with downloadable quick reference infographic.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
More stats ‘n facts to support your 2014 budgeting.
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[INFOGRAPHIC] Inbound Marketing: Tool or Tactic? | Pardot | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From visual.ly – Today, 7:54 AM
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
One of the benefits of Pardot going all basic on us is that they are re-establishing a baseline around marketing automation and marketing technology, i.e., teaching the basics. This is a great infographic that does just that (although it does not include PPC, retargeting, and a few others).
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From visual.ly – Today, 7:49 AM
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Danger when bringing two studies together to come to a conclusion, but this one reflects our current environment.
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[GRAPHIC] The Benefit of Nurtured Leads | ClarityQuestMarketing | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From visual.ly – Today, 7:46 AM
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Scooped if you needed basic, high-level stats to support your 2014 budget.
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