How big is B2B Big Data? Comparatively speaking, not that big.
Big Data is damn big in the B2C world: more buyers, wider channels, lots of information. For the B2B marketer, we don’t have nearly the number of buyers, prospect or even suspects. Most likely, your total market size is a minute fraction in the B2C world.
And there lies the advantage: because it’s not that big, it is conceivable that you can tie all marketing and sales data with internal financial/accounting data, and in turn integrate outside, 3rd party data, and you’ve got an engine that’s humming. And with that engine?: delivering the right content/messaging/offers at the right time. And the basis for the Predictive Life.
Marketing technology…NOW!
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Featured Marketing Automation Article
How to Use Dynamic Content for “Smarter” Marketing – HubSpot | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From blog.hubspot.com – Today, 2:36 PM
Learn what ‘smart content’ actually is and get tips for implementing it in your marketing.
Digest…
What does ‘smart content’ even mean? In simple terms, smart content is content that adapts to the characteristics of the person consuming it. The goal of smart content is to provide a more relevant experience than could otherwise be achieved through static content.
Smart content in marketing began with the personalization of email campaigns. Using data from a contact database, marketers could segment their mailing lists based on a recipient’s characteristic. Moving to personalization across channels, particularly on websites, is an important next step in meeting customers’ expectations and behavior.
You need smart rules to set the criteria for personalization and a smart content generator to pull up different pieces of content based on those smart rules. For example, a smart rule could be, “if the database says someone has already provided you with his or her company name, show them this piece of content.” Smart content generators can then generate any type of content you’d like based on that rule: images, videos, text, call-to-action buttons etc.
Before you begin personalizing your website with smart content, make a list of things that would be useful for your leads and customers. What’s useful?
- Don’t show me content I’ve already read or downloaded.
- Elevate content that fits my industry, role, or persona.
- Don’t pitch me if I’m already a customer.
- Make some data from my profile easy to find — like my account manager or my purchase history.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Call it what you want, but it’s about delivering the right content at the right time to the right person. It’s a function that is a necessary part of your marketing automation schema.
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From www.heinzmarketing.com – Today, 11:43 AM
Sales managers can use these questions to succeed with lead scoring programs using marketing automation and CRM.
Condensed…
Here are the questions I recommend Sales execs ask their Marketing counterparts on lead scoring. And for my Marketing friends, be prepared to answer these questions. The beauty of these questions is they lead to deeper discussion and collaboration.
1. Why do we need lead scoring?
2. How do we work together on this initiative?
3. How do we measure lead scoring effectiveness?
4. How do we build the lead scoring model?
5. How do we establish the lead follow up actions?
Defining lead scores is important but the follow up actions is where it fails or succeeds. Different leads require different follow up actions. Some leads require an urgent and rapid response. Others need a different touch in a different time frame.
6. What happens to leads that aren’t scored high enough for Sales follow up?
7. Are lead scores static or dynamic?
Marketing automation platforms should continually score leads based on active behaviors, lack of interaction. Lead scores should reflect the behavior and profiles on the current day, if not in real-time. Static scores really don’t take advantage of the lead management horsepower that marketing automation can give Sales.
8. How do we ensure ALL good leads are sent to Sales for follow up?
9. When can we train the sales reps on our lead scoring process?
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
If there was one unifying aspects to marketing automation, it’s lead scoring, i.e., both teams MUST be on the same page. And the Sales team will enjoy the process…because it’s in their best interests vis-a-vis their comp plan. Let the conversation lead the marketing automation features used.
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What Is Big Data? – Forbes | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From www.forbes.com – Today, 11:35 AM
Big data is new and “ginormous” and scary –very, very scary. No, wait.
Condensed…
While I fully expect your company to add its own individual tweaks here or there, here’s the one-sentence definition of big data I like to use to get the conversation started:
Big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis.
Some people like to constrain big data to digital inputs like web behavior and social network interactions; however the CMOs and CIOs I talk with agree that we can’t exclude traditional data derived from product transaction information, financial records and interaction channels, such as the call center and point-of-sale. All of that is big data, too, even though it may be dwarfed by the volume of digital data that’s now growing at an exponential rate.
In defining big data, it’s also important to understand the mix of unstructured and multi-structured data that comprises the volume of information.
- Unstructured data comes from information that is not organized or easily interpreted by traditional databases or data models, and typically, it’s text-heavy. Metadata, Twitter tweets, and other social media posts are good examples of unstructured data.
- Multi-structured data refers to a variety of data formats and types and can be derived from interactions between people and machines, such as web applications or social networks. A great example is web log data, which includes a combination of text and visual images along with structured data like form or transactional information. As digital disruption transforms communication and interaction channels—and as marketers enhance the customer experience across devices, web properties, face-to-face interactions and social platforms—multi-structured data will continue to evolve.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
So can all this information be captured using your CRM/MA platform (with integration with your accounting and production systems)? Yes.
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Just How Valuable Is Your Big Data? – ClickZ | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From www.clickz.com – Today, 11:29 AM
As people get more excited by big data, I get excited by small data. It may be small but it\’s powerful.
Digest…
If you look at the visitors who visit your websites or use your apps then they’ll fall into one of three groups:
Anonymous visitors.
Observed visitors. These visitors have visited more frequently, so there’s more data and more history, and potentially more to learn. Even though you don’t know who these people are, you can begin to build up some kind of profile in terms of patterns of behavior and content consumption. When do they tend to visit? What do they tend to do when they arrive?
Known visitors.
So, as a visitor migrates through these segments on her customer lifecycle, the data on her gets richer and more valuable. However, the number of visitors in each of these segments gets smaller. By far and away the biggest segment is the anonymous visitors. Depending on the type of business or organization you are this segment could account for between 50 percent and 80 percent of all your visitors, meaning that the vast majority of the data that’s collected, processed, stored, and reported on represents a poor return on investment. It’s just numbers making up the numbers, so to speak. The real valuable data is on the relatively small numbers of visitors who are meaningful to you. This is the data you can do something with. It doesn’t just tell you how many of them there are but who they are, where they are, and what they are like.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
If you’re a B2B marketer, odds are pretty good that you have nothing to do with Big Data: relatively speaking, your data set is pretty small. Now it may very well be large to you, but vs. a consumer bank or a retailer, it ain’t anything. So there’s the opportunity: take advantage and drive insight from the relatively small data set. Not terribly difficult. Take your web analytics, cross tab with purchasing patterns, and you’ve got a start.
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From www.clickz.com – Today, 10:56 AM
A fresh look at the email-related companies making a splash in the private sector and public markets.
Condensed…
The blog Email Expert compiled a list of email-related companies that made the Inc. 5000. I took out their top one on the Inc. 5000 list, LivingSocial, as it certainly leverages email in a significant fashion but is not an email company from my view. I view an email marketing company as one that primarily sells email marketing products and/or services. This leaves us with 11 companies that cover a wide range of the email marketing ecosystem.
- Sailthru – New York, NY #30
- LiveIntent – New York, NY #71
- Act-On Software – Beaverton, OR #172
- Marketo – San Mateo, CA #367
- Bronto Software – Durham, NC #1702
- BrightWave Marketing #1762
- Net Atlantic #2097
- Infusionsoft – Chandler, AZ #2296
- ClickMail Marketing – San Mateo, CA #2304
- Message Systems – Columbia, MD #3194
- Delivra – Indianapolis, IN #4592
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
FWIW.
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From blog.hubspot.com – Today, 9:31 AM
Read through Google’s quality guidelines, what they mean, and how it should adjust your SEO and content strategy.
Key excerpt…
Matt Cutts and the rest of the web-spam team offer webmaster guidelines, with a stated intention to “help Google find, index, and rank your site.” The site covers technical and user experience tips before delving into content quality, with a clear caveat that the guidelines aren’t intended to be comprehensive. It’s definitely in your brand’s best interest to avoid using deceptive principles just because they’re not illustrated on the list, and uphold “the spirit of the basic principles.” There’s no substitute for reading the guidelines, but the points consist primarily of the following:
- Create blog content, landing pages, and site pages for people, not search rankings.
- Don’t try to trick anyone, and don’t use any tactics you wouldn’t feel comfortable explaining to Cutts himself.
- Invest significant time and resources into differentiating within your niche, and providing value.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Or where I came from: don’t be a content knucklehead. Optimize your content? Of course. But the aforementioned really should be your guiding principles.
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4 Characteristics of Great Marketing Content – B2B Digital Net | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From b2bdigital.net – Today, 9:03 AM
Condensed…
You have experienced great content as well. You come away saying “that was excellent” or “that was exactly what I needed.” Not “that was great, but it could have been shorter” or “that was good, but I wish ….” No, there are no buts about great content.
What does content that passes this test look like? It definitely takes more than a simple content formula! Unfortunately, since it is judged from the perspective of your audience, there is no hard and fast rule you can follow. However, there are a number of characteristics great content often has.
Great content is:
- Educational (or entertaining). You come away wiser or with your cares temporarily melted away.
- Empowering. Great content is more than just actionable, it empowers you to do something you couldn’t have done before.
- Emotional. It makes you feel something, not just know something.
- Respectful of your time. It accomplishes the above without dragging on.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
And the fifth bullet: Profitable. It drives prospects into the hands of the sales team so that transactions take place.
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Why Do Content Marketing? – B2B Marketing Insider | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From www.b2bmarketinginsider.com – Today, 9:21 AM
Why do content marketing? This is a question I get all the time. Read my answer here along with 5 other content marketing questions…
Key Q&A…
Why does SAP use Content Marketing?
We employ content marketing in order to deliver on the information needs of our audience. Our goal is to help our audience find the information they need to run their business, grow their revenues and beat their completion.
We know that if we put the needs of our customers ahead of our own, that we will earn their trust and ultimately, they will come to us when they are looking for technology, services and advice on how to be innovative.
So we create content that our customers want to consume and we are proving that it I helping to grow our business. Instead of creating content that focuses on what we do, we seek to create content that focuses on what we do for our customers and what value we can help them deliver.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Learn from Michael, and we’d be wise to follow his direction. Content is about education, potentially useful information that will make the visitor smarter and more savvy so that the intelligent choice is made.
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Measuring the Profitability of Content – Duct Tape Marketing | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From www.ducttapemarketing.com – Today, 8:59 AM
Although content might pull users into your lead funnel, low quality leads that don’t turn into sales might be using up your resources.
Digest…
It is essential to check in about lead quality. I asked for a huge data-dump:
1) Close rates for just the landing pages that had form fields.
2) Cost of converting a lead to a close
3) Average time a call that doesn’t result in a sale takes. T
4) Average pay of a call center employee.
5) Average value of a new patient.
We then categorized all of their content into three categories:
1) Bottom of the Funnel – These pages drive high converting organic visits. These pages mainly consist of physician bio pages (example) and geographic pages (example). This content is all geo-targeted, conversion focused and is sometimes served to search engine users in nearby areas when search for head terms.
2) Middle of the Funnel – This type of content fulfills information search queries. The content is not nearly as conversion oriented as the bottom of the funnel content. The users who land on these pages via a search engine are usually coming in via head terms.
3) Top of the Funnel – These are the pages that we, as SEOs, beg our clients to create. They are tangentially related to BodyLogicMD’s business and are mainly educational pages with the goal of pushing a user to convert through a very long funnel.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Here’s the point: profitability metrics based on the location of the content within the funnel, and making the appropriate changes. Segmenting the basis for analysis may lead to greater insight.
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Infographic: Anatomy of a Data Scientist – FICO Labs Blog | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From ficolabsblog.fico.com – Today, 8:26 AM
Called the sexiest job of the 21st century by Harvard Business Review, the rise of Big Data has fueled demand for data scientists.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Depending on the size of your organization, you’re going to need one of these.
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The Benefits of Big Data Marketing! [INFOGRAPHIC] | IconicMind | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From visual.ly – Today, 8:22 AM
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The How-To Guide to Responsive Email Design | Litmus | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From litmus.com – Today, 8:20 AM
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
And test your Responsive design using Litmus: we do, and it’s a no brainer.
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From www.marketingcharts.com – Today, 8:18 AM
- Mobile-only (subscribers who only opened on a mobile device);
- Desktop-only (subscribers who opened only on a desktop, typically through a client such as Outlook);
- Webmail-only (subscribers who opened via a webmail service only, typically through a desktop with any free service, such as Gmail);
- Mobile-combo (subscribers who opened 2 or more times, at least one of which was on a mobile device); and
- Other (subscribers who opened 2 or more times, at least one of which was on webmail and at least one of which was on desktop).
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
It’s a mix of B2C and B2B, but the moral of the story: RESPONSIVE DESIGN. Build it with Responsive in mind, and this isn’t an issue. Get rid of the issue.
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Which Industries Are Poised To Tackle Big Data? [Chart] — Eloqua | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert
From blog.eloqua.com – Today, 8:15 AM
Big Data, Big Deal? Big Data is, well, a big buzzword right now. Solution providers are working furiously to solve the challenge of big data.
iNeoMarketing‘s insight:
Love it when I see categories such as “Services.”
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