Introducing Movéo’s Fourth Evolution

Today’s post is from Bob Murphy, Managing Partner of Movéo.

Our journey began in October of 1987. Over the past 27 years we have seen tremendous changes in our industry, and have navigated significant economic challenges. The fact that we have not only survived, but thrived, is a result of our ability to anticipate the evolving needs of our clients, and the industry.

We have re-engineered the firm three times in the past. This included — adapting the principles of integrated marketing communications introduced by Don Schultz in the early 90s; creating a robust digital offering as sophisticated marketers realized the power of the Web in the late 90s; and innovating the concept of integrated branding in 2003.

In May of 2013 we began to ask ourselves, “what’s next?”

We initiated an exhaustive discovery process to better understand the existing and future needs of our clients and prospective clients. This included secondary sources, as well as a primary study that gathered insights from 400+ senior level marketing executives.

The culmination of the process occurred at a full-day workshop in August of 2013. It was then that a new value chain was identified and the future of Movéo was again forged. Just as we re-shaped the firm in 2003, we re-structured the company around this value chain—data & insights, strategy & planning, and creative technology. The work is guided by our Consulting & Engagement group.

In October of 2013 the concept of 4E (“Fourth Evolution”) was introduced internally.  Since then everyone at Movéo has contributed to making 4E a reality. This has included:

• A new brand
• New messaging
• A new identity
• Development of a proprietary process for analytics
• Comprehensive plans/roadmaps for each of the new groups
• New moveo.com

All of this was accomplished by a passionate, hard-working team that was also experiencing the busiest period in our 27 year history.

That brings us to November 3, 2014. The launch of 4E.

Ideas are just ideas.  Making them a reality is the tough part.  It takes smart people.  People who care.  People who embody the spirit of Movéo. Over the years we have been incredibly fortunate to have these people on our team.

We are excited for the future and the added value we will bring to some of the world’s leading brands.

To learn more, visit the new moveo.com.

Crafting a Holistic Social Strategy For Your Brand

As the nights get longer and the weather gets colder, we’re turning back on the Movéo blog to reflect on key insights in digital marketing from 2014. To conclude October, we’re discussing creating a holistic strategy for social media that includes a plan for defining key performance indicators, collecting and analyzing metrics, and shaping ongoing strategy based on feedback.

Defining key performance indicators

Imperative to a strong social media strategy is selecting and defining the key indicators you look at to see how you are progressing towards your marketing goals. What are your objectives and what KPIs do you need to track to determine if you’re meeting them? Commonly, we see lead generation leading to sales as a key objective. To ensure progress in that area, the KPIs that a marketer may want to look at include subscription rate, effective subscription rate, and the effective purchase rate.

Collecting and analyzing metrics

Marketing metrics must be available, accurate, and actionable: data must be easily found, accurate enough to give you strong insights, and offer you the kind of information you can use to make your marketing strategy more effective. Think about metrics like your cost per new inquiry after you start a new campaign. A metric like this offers you insight into whether a campaign or tactic is costing you more or less than other efforts, and you can use that information to shift your marketing strategy and budget. Of course, this one metric alone isn’t going to be very helpful. Think about your goals and how the different metrics you choose compliment each other and offer you a more well-rounded picture of how your campaign is progressing.

Shaping ongoing strategy

Technology is moving quickly, and staying on top of the latest developments in data analytics and technology resources is what’s going to separate your marketing efforts from the rest. Like we wrote about in our latest white paper, the new marketing value chain leans heavily on data and insights to guide strategy.Take this to heart: while it may not be as easy as changing your metrics or looking at new data, shifting your culture to one that emphasizes data at the heart of every initiative is what will make your business soar.

Content Marketing Can Build Lead Generation – If It’s Done Right

Content marketing is central to the conversation around digital marketing, but the term is often used as a catchall. To create content that truly drives leads and conversions, first define the strategy.

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) writes:

Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it.

What makes successful content marketing?

The best vehicle for a marketing message will differ with field and target audience. Marketing success is not one-size-fits-all. Use data to determine the best way to reach your audience. What media do your targets interact with most often?

Remember the CMI definition. Your brand’s marketing content must offer value to the consumer. Don’t just say “buy this.” Teach your audience about your area of expertise. In other words, create the media your clients want to consume, instead of just running ads next t someone else’s story.

Use calls-to-action in content for B2B success.

In order to impact leads and sales, your content must include calls-to-action. While the bulk of any piece of content should be given to educational information, each piece should invite interested readers and viewers to act on what they have learned. Always include links to your website, and point the way to more information on the topic at hand. Direct visitors to the next level of engagement, such as downloading a white paper, signing up for your mailing list or speaking to a representative.

Explain the impact of content marketing on lead generation to wary executives.

Content marketing is data-driven. Once your brand gets started with content marketing, analyze the wealth of data it generate. Data can be used to make ongoing adjustments to your marketing strategy, and to put more power behind the methods that drive the most leads.

These statistics show the power of a strong content marketing strategy. What is your brand waiting for?

Photo Credit: B_Me via Pixabay Creative Commons

Moving from Data to Action: A Primer

Marketing data provide a fascinating insight into your business and its reach, but marveling at this information is not enough. To create impact, marketers need to take action.

Here are five ways that marketers can take data points and turn them into tangible actions and initiatives:

Use data-driven insights to adjust targeting.

The information from marketing data improves your understanding of who engages with your digital content and becomes a lead. Use this information to improve buyer personas and adjust marketing strategies accordingly.

Create integrated campaigns across platforms.

If your data points show that many of the same people interact with your brand through multiple digital channels, create a marketing strategy that uses these many touchpoints. Try creating a monthly theme for your content across channels, and reaching potential clients with channel-specific content that still ties back to the main theme. Implement automated emails that reach out to potential clients and nurture them through a decision-making process after they interact with content on your website.

Do it now.

Don’t wait for your marketing efforts to magically fall into place. If your data analysis shows it’s time to take action, make a change. Keep collecting and analyzing new marketing information, and your business will learn what worked and what didn’t. These insights can then drive further improvement.

“Collect them all.”

Just as B2C businesses urge customers to collect a full set of whatever they are selling, make sure your business pulls data from every relevant source. If your skip this step for some digital channels, your business won’t have a complete picture of your digital interaction. That missing information could be the difference between a successful campaign and one that makes little impression.

Continuously assess and improve strategy.

Data from digital ads, posts, videos and more clearly reveal what content engages your audience. Adjust your strategy based on these insights.

Check back Wednesday to learn more about building lead generation through content marketing.

 Photo Credit: Kyle Cassidy via Google Images Creative Commons

Analyzing B2B ROI In a Shifting Marketing Landscape

In an increasingly social landscape, sales are generally made as a result of influence and messaging across multiple channels. This can confuse analytics and cause marketers to give up on the goal of creating truly data-driven strategies.

Don’t let these challenges discourage your new data-based approach. Instead, learn to determine the value of online marketing investments through both tangible and intangible benefits.

What are your goals?

First of all, set goals for your digital marketing. This should of course include sales leads and conversions, but don’t stop there. Consider additional benefits from online marketing, including improved brand recognition and reputation, search engine ranking, public relations and client loyalty.

Some of these goals are more easily measured than others, but be sure to include all of these in any assessment of your brand’s digital strategy. Get creative: it’s easy to count website visits and page likes, but other metrics may help quantify things like brand image. For example, try monitoring your mentions on social media sites for a sense of how clients and potential clients perceive the brand.

How can you collect and analyze data?

Next, audit the tools you have available to track your brand’s digital engagement. Include website analytics, data from social networks and digital ads, and any other data collection tools your brand uses. Compare these tools. What metrics does each one allow you to track? If there are classes of data you would find useful for marketing purposes but do not yet track, explore applications that will allow you to gather this information.

Choose programs to analyze your digital data. These programs will help reveal patterns of interest among the people who interact with your brand at each online touchpoint.

Connect engagement across channels

When engaging with a client or potential client, track your interactions across digital channels. Just as your brand must maintain a uniform brand character across platforms, work to create and maintain an integrated digital experience for individual B2B clients when they connect with your business on multiple channels. One simple example is sending automated email contacts when a potential buyer interacts with certain features of your website. How else might you create a smooth and enticing multi-channel experience for clients?

Photo Credit: Simon Cunningham via Flickr Creative Commons

Data Vs. Privacy: The Great Debate

We all know that data analysis can improve our effectiveness as B2B marketers, but it’s important to balance our desire for data with a facet of digital life that’s currently in the spotlight: privacy. Now more than ever, consumers are looking for transparency from the companies they do business with, and privacy protection is a concern that extends well beyond marketing and into global news. So how can you balance the promise of data with a responsible approach to consumer privacy?

Be transparent and allow opt-outs.

Let consumers know what you’re doing. Have a terms of service agreement, so that consumers may read through it and know exactly what you want to collect from them and why. Give them the chance to opt out of reporting any data that they’re uncomfortable with as well. Even if they don’t choose to opt-out, it’s good for them to know that you and your business respect them enough to offer them that option.

Collect quality, not quantity.

Before you begin to collect data, be sure that the information you’re targeting is exactly what you want. If you’re unsure if all of the data you ask for is relevant to the project, don’t ask for it–or revisit your strategy and rethink what you’re trying to achieve. Collecting too much data does your business no good, and makes customers wonder what that data may be used for.

Trust the power of your content.

The old adage that content is king is still applicable in this context: if a consumer sees no reason to give you more access to their information, why should they? If you share content that is relevant and useful to your target, you’ll find that they are willing to share more about themselves with you.

While it’s easy to discount customers’ privacy requests, it’s ultimately detrimental to your business to operate without taking it into account. By respecting the privacy of your consumers, you position your business as the kind of marketing leader that all consumers want to work with–conscientious, respectful, and mindful of their needs.

What do you do to maintain clients’ privacy while collecting data?

Photo Credit: FutUndBeidl via Flickr Creative Commons

Understanding the Significance of Your Data

With so much data to process, it can be tempting to view the slightest variation in ROI from one channel or campaign to another as evidence for a total shift in approach. As a smart marketer, you must know when to ignore this impulse.

Data is only as valuable as your understanding of it. To know what to do with your analytics, you need to consider what they are really telling you. What information is significant and what is just noise?

Significance

For a finding to be statistically significant, it must fall outside patterns of expected variation. Statistical significance has a specific mathematical definition, which your data analysts should employ.

For marketers who are not responsible for the math, the concept is still crucial. In order to gain valuable insights from data on a specific marketing campaign, you first need a baseline reading. What does customer engagement look like before you implement a new campaign? How has it fluctuated over the past year? Use these markers as a standard of comparison for the data you gather from that new campaign.

Similarly, data from too small a sample cannot be used as a basis for larger predictions. Consider this when performing market testing of all types.

Controlling for Outside Factors

Variation in the effectiveness of your marketing can indicate a number of things. It may reveal that a given campaign successfully tapped into a cultural “moment,” or show that a campaign misjudged your audience. But your findings may also reflect outside factors. Learning to separate the things under your brand’s control from the background noise in your data is crucial.

Keep an eye on data about your competitors and the larger market, as it can offer insight into when gains or losses fit into a larger pattern or are specific to your organization.

Is it relevant?

Data can be fascinating in its own right and serve as a window into the ways people behave. But a savvy marketer must be able to spot the meaningful data points in a sea of information. Stay focused on learning about your target audience and the things that move them.

How do you interpret data insights and use them to shift your marketing strategy?

Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons

Discerning Patterns in Data: Four Tools that Can Help

Data is nothing without an accompanying analysis. While many companies partner with firms or individual consultants to gain insights into their marketing data, you can learn many things in-house by using free, low-cost and enterprise-level tools.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the essential tool for deep insights into your website’s visitors. The tool allows you to learn about and segment your audience by demographic characteristics, personal interests and much more. Google Analytics also creates visualizations of the paths users take through your site and allows you to set up goals for certain actions you want them to take. The range and depth of analysis provides powerful insights into the habits of your site’s users. Analytics are available for both websites and mobile apps.

Hubspot

Available at multiple price points, Hubspot provides an integrated solution for all your digital marketing activities, from your landing pages to your email campaigns. Hubspot provides a single place from which your marketing team can publish social posts, compose and send email to your mailing list, add SEO keywords to your website and more. With this combination of tools, you can make sense of gathered data and employ insights quickly and seamlessly across all campaigns. Then, just use Hubspot’s rich analytics to watch the ways your new tactics impact audience engagement.

Data Market

Get access to data collected around the world with Data Market, and use it as a standard of comparison for your own data. With such a range of data at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about where to begin plans for your own marketing campaigns. The program will also create visualizations of your data.

StatWing

StatWing offers tools for data analysts that allow users to  efficiently analyze large spreadsheets. The program automatically accounts for outliers and creates visual models of your data.

Do you have other favorites we should know about? Join us on Wednesday for a deeper dive into marketing data analysis, when we will discuss how to determine the significance of your data.

Photo Credit: peter via Flickr Creative Commons

The Importance of Emotion on Social Media For B2B Marketing

B2B marketing can often feel clinical and unemotional. We rely on numbers to drive results, often forgetting that behind every data point is a person. It’s easy to lose sight of what really gets your customers interested and excited about your brand and truly tap into their emotions. It’s also easy to think that data-driven marketing and emotion-driven marketing are two opposing ideas: one uses cold, hard analytics to target consumers and the other other tries to reach consumers’ hearts. But the best marketing fuses the two, creating emotionally appealing messages and deploying them based on careful analysis of customer data.

Here are two examples of successful emotional appeals in B2B marketing from this year:

Vistaprint

The customer testimonials in this ad are the key to its emotional success. Seeing the face of the consumer (and her dog!) and learning about her life show how the product has positively impacted her as a person, creating a powerful marketing narrative.

Salesforce

The emotional power in Salesforce’s 2014 campaign lies in its catchphrase: “Welcome to the internet of customers.” It invokes the idea of different people using the Salesforce system for different things, leading the target audience to think about what their clients need, how they work, and what they’re like as people. They describe the “internet of customers” as a diverse ecosystem of businesses, all working in slightly different ways, forcing one to think about the parts of this ecosystem interact. This is a powerful image, and one that transcends a data-only marketing approach to tap into the emotions of those who receive it.

As 2014 winds down and planning for the new year gets underway, we should think about how we can incorporate emotional appeals into our marketing plans. Here are some quick ways to do so:

• Create strong buyer personas. Think of the emotions of the audience you’re targeting. How do you want them to feel when they interact with your marketing plan?

• Use this information to differentiate yourselves from your competitors. How is the emotion that your product or service invokes different? How is it more powerful?

• Think about what happens when the business you work with uses your service. How will it impact their operations? What emotion will that create for them? How can you foster it.

What are you doing to infuse your marketing with more emotion?

 Photo Credit: Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr Creative Commons