How to make your B2B content work harder

Is content still king?

The sheer amount of content marketers put out threatens to dilute its power. Today, marketers have to make sure their content rises above all the noise and clutter.

Creating strong content is difficult in itself, but making sure that content reaches, attracts, engages, and activates potential leads takes serious skills, including data and analytics. If you’re tired of spending time and money crafting content that fails to reach its true potential, try these four suggestions for making your content work harder.

Making sure that content reaches, attracts, engages, and activates potential leads takes serious skills, including data and analytics.

Create a content strategy and document it

Ninety-four percent of marketers utilize content marketing, but only 44 percent of those have a documented strategy for the content they’re creating.

Are you part of that 44 percent? If not, you’re creating content based on a gut feeling about what works rather than real, meaningful data about who you’re targeting, what they’re interested in, and how you can reach them. The first step in making your content work harder is solidifying and documenting your strategic goals, supporting tactics, and key success metrics.

A documented content strategy provides a record of specific goals to which you can hold copywriters and content creators accountable, and improves overall content performance. This is backed up by data: 60 percent of B2B marketers who have a documented content strategy consider their organization to be effective, compared to only 32 perfect of those who have only a verbal strategy.

Target content to the needs of your audience…

High-performing content begins with a deep understanding of your target buyers’ habits, personalities, and pain points. But to create content that can truly cut through the noise, you need to go beyond typical buyer personas and use data to understand how best to reach them.

Do you know what time a top prospect opened a marketing email? Did they click on any links? Did they visit your blog or download content from your website? And if so, how long did they spend on each page? How does this behavior compare with other prospects, and what does it tell us about this particular contact’s readiness for purchase? When you’re able to answer questions like these, you’ll be equipped to tailor content to the specific needs of your buyers at every phase of the decision making process.

…and channels

If you’re posting the same exact content across a variety of different marketing channels, you’re doing your business a disservice. The stakeholders who connect…and channels If you’re posting the same exact content across a variety of different marketing channels, you’re doing your business a disservice. The stakeholders who connect with you on your blog may be very different from those who visit your LinkedIn page, and content needs to be tailored to both the unique preferences of the audience and the features of the medium. Use data and analytics to find out what’s working on each of your content channels as well as who you’re engaging with where.

Keep in mind what different content channels can and can’t do: while Twitter can help you engage with a massive audience, with you on your blog may be very different from those who visit your LinkedIn page, and content needs to be tailored to both the unique preferences of the audience and the features of the medium. Use data and analytics to find out what’s working on each of your content channels as well as who you’re engaging with where. Keep in mind what different content channels can and can’t do: while Twitter can help you engage with a massive audience, it’s not going to allow you to share in-depth knowledge in your area of expertise. An infographic on your website might not get in front of as many eyeballs, but it could have more potential to turn prospects into customers than content shared on your social media channels. Work these different strengths and weaknesses into your content strategy in order to choose the right content for the right channel and maximize your impact.

Measure your results throughout the pipeline

You may already track downloads, page views, and average time spent with each piece of our brand’s content, but B2B marketers often stop measuring their content at the point of initial conversion. This isn’t enough to gauge how content is working. You need to continue tracking content through the entire sales pipeline, to purchase and even beyond, to understand how content translates into real, bottom-line business impact. Since the B2B buying process is often lengthy and nonlinear, tracking the role that content plays in conversions and sales can be a tricky process. Clear
communication between marketing and sales teams and a CRM-integrated marketing automation solution can help.

To continue tracking the impact of your content past the initial download or point of lead acquisition, work with your sales team to understand what marketing content they use in their conversations with leads, as well as what types of content need to nurture more prospects through to sales. Then, ideally with the help of your CRM and marketing automation system, engineer a process for documenting and assessing the impact of that content in the sales process.

Choose the right content for the right channel and maximize your Impact.

Today, creating effective content needs to involve more than putting your best copywriters and designers to the task of crafting something clever and insightful. It requires a strong strategic vision and proficiency with data and analytics to develop content, target it at the right people, and track its effectiveness. Are you up to the task?

The anatomy of a data-driven brand

Today’s top B2B brands rely on digital tools.

Over the past two decades, more and more B2B marketers have seen their products and/or services commoditized, or worse yet, made irrelevant.

Many marketers face one or more of these brand-related challenges:

• Their brand is organic — not driven by their organization’s vision or business strategy and developed without structure or rules
• Their messages are ad hoc or their value proposition is inconsistent
• They go to market with a “bushel of benefits” rather than tailored solutions and they approach every target the same way
• There’s no cohesion in how they present their brand externally
• While some may have effective methods of quantifiably measuring the impact of campaigns, they have no process in place to track the strength of their brand

Over time, the practice of B2B branding has continually grown. Today, the brand is almost as important as the efforts of sales teams in encouraging a decision maker to make a buy.

But how do you build a brand that can do this effectively?

Key to building a brand that makes a decision maker want to buy is gaining insights through data that allows marketers to inform, track and continually optimize the brand. Here’s what it looks like in action.

Integrating Top Tools

“Data has been critical in helping us continually track and optimize our brand on a global basis,” said Brian Krause, Vice President of Global Marketing for Molex, a global electronics solutions provider. “Through various data sources and dashboards, we are able to measure our success in regions around the world by vertical markets and company size.”

Today’s top B2B brands rely on digital tools and platforms to quantify and model the data they collect. While many of these tools are leveraged to build and evolve brands — qualitative and quantitative research, leadership input, competitive analysis, category trends, etc. — today’s brand leaders have many more sources of data to consider.

Why? A strong brand today is more than just native advertising, online copy and print ads. Instead, B2B brands include social media, a web presence and online media. In order to keep track of these, marketers need to expand their tools to measure web analytics, marketing automation, their CRM and social media.

Data-Driven Strategy

In addition to the sources mentioned above, a strong B2B brand relies on a strategy based on analytics. Not only should data inform marketing tactics, but it must also help marketers measure the current strength of their brand and provide insights into how to develop it.

A strong B2B brand relies on a strategy based on analytics.

Social Currency is one tool useful for measuring the strength and value of a brand. Social Currency is, as defined by Vivaldi Partners Group, “the degree to which customers share a brand or information about a brand with others.” Movéo’s Kevin Randall, Vice President of Strategy & Planning, consulted with Vivaldi and MIT Sloan statisticians in creating the methodology for measuring a brand’s Social Currency.

Another KPI developed by Movéo to inform marketing strategy is what we refer to as a “holistic score:” a formula designed to measure engagement with the brand by monitoring key actions in relation to marketing goals. The scoring is determined by a formula that applies weight to each action based on importance and relevance. The score aggregates multiple marketing achievements to one comparable number and provides a holistic view of brand performance.

Internal Brand Performance

While it’s important to track your brand with external audiences, understanding the strength of your internal brand can be equally, if not more, critical.

The most common method here is an employee survey fielded twice each year. The employee survey is particularly important when building a new brand strategy. This survey is different from those fielded by HR in that it is completely focused on the brand. The objective is to clearly understand the “views and wants” of leadership, customers and employees. Also referred to as a three-gap analysis, this data enables marketers to understand the wants and needs of each audience and then identify gaps that may exist.

Finally, there’s the metric many would say is the most important when considering the strength of a brand — financial. The ability to draw correlations between the brand and business growth is what many marketers struggle with. The key is to align messages, tactics and the experiences of a brand with ultimate business outcomes and evaluate its efficiency and effectiveness to generate leads, orders and revenue.

What works for one company may not work for others. However, there is one certainty: brands must be built using data, rather than educated assumptions. This same approach must be leveraged to support the ongoing management and growth of the brand.

Bob Murphy is a Managing Partner at Chicago-based Movéo. Movéo is a fully integrated communications company uniquely built to help its clients measurably improve marketing performance. We use data-driven insights to inform strategy and guide our use of creativity and technology. This results in integrated communications solutions that attract, secure and retain profitable customers for our clients. For more information on Movéo, visit moveo.com

Content marketing for an executive-level audience

Bob Murphy, Movéo Managing Partner

Too many marketers want to reach, what they consider, the holy grail — the C-suite —through content.

You may spend months researching the most senior executives inside organizations to figure out how best to get their attention, only to have minimal success getting through — or worse, have to rely on the bureaucracy underneath them to take your message upstairs.

Getting the attention of C-level executives — and presenting them with marketing materials that actually make them want to invest in your product or service — is no easy task.

Where are marketers going wrong in compelling this important group to buy?

Today, we’ll take a look at why content marketing that targets the C-suite can be a powerful and productive endeavor, as well as what to keep in mind when focusing on this group.

Why Target the C-suite?

It’s not because going directly to the top will shorten the buyer’s cycle.

Instead, targeting C-level executives with content marketing can help you with very specific marketing goals:

Enterprise sales: If this marketing campaign could lead to a seven-figure sales opportunity, it’s worth approaching the top-level decision makers in a company.

• Long-term business relationship development: If your firm is looking to forge a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership with a company with complementary interests, the C-suite is typically the only way to go.
• Thought leadership activation: If you’re looking to get your marketing information in front of influencers not to make way for a sale, but to get them to spread your thought leadership throughout their networks, you’ll want to make the C-suite your priority.

But if you’re looking to build better C-suite relationships, you need to be prepared.

Why?

Your old marketing tactics simply aren’t going to cut it in front of this highly discerning, busy, and preoccupied group.

How They Make Buying Decisions

Chances are slim that the chief information officer you’re targeting is going to immediately agree to invest in your product.

Instead, they’ll have a specific set of buying behaviors you can expect to encounter:

• They’ll extract themselves from the gritty details. Sometimes, the best you can get from a member of the C-suite is a strong recommendation. Your relationship will often be handed off to another member of their team in order to hash out the details of a partnership and negotiate the terms of the contract.
• You’ll need to prove value. They’re not interested in the details of your product or service, but rather what you can do for them. If your marketing doesn’t provide demonstrable value, you will be out of luck.
• They don’t want to be badgered. If you’re looking to start a lengthy discussion that leads into a months-long sales process, don’t go to the C-suite. It won’t make the process move quickly. Only market to the C-suite if it’s absolutely necessary for your success and theirs — and if you can prove you’ll provide strong value with limited oversight from the senior-most level or management.

When you’re ready to begin developing your content marketing specifically for C-suite buyers, here are three ways to maximize your chances of reaching and convincing this elusive audience.

Content Marketing Tips: Revamp Your Messaging

In “Selling to the C-Suite,” Nicholas AC Read and Dr. Stephen J. Bistritz found that executives want to be sales contacts because they “thrive on fresh ideas from outside their companies.”

What does this mean?
It means you need to know what messages C-level executives are being given from inside their own company, what stale marketing propositions they’ve already heard, and what you can bring to the table that will allow them a new viewpoint on old problems.

In practice, this also means the traditional marketing messages you’ve been using aren’t going to work.

When you’re marketing to a group as successful and plugged in as the C-suite, the content marketing that engages other, lower level players won’t always work.

Instead, you need to focus your messaging on telling them something they don’t already know.

Whether that’s by commissioning independent research, crunching available data to reveal new truths, or simply figuring out an elegant way to shift the paradigm around the issues they’re currently grappling with, it’s time to take a hard look at your messaging — and whether it’s truly working.

Do Your Research

To get content marketing in front of the coveted C-suite audience, you need to know how and where they consume information.

Take a look at their company’s own marketing materials to suss out their key messages and brand values.

Look through their social media profiles to get a sense of how they not only build their thought leadership, but who they interact with publicly (and keep in mind execs are more likely to rely on advice from peers and those they’ve seen demonstrate expertise).

Use this research to build out a dedicated buyer persona for the C-level executives you’ll be targeting.

Use this persona to help craft a new message based on what information they’re lacking, and build it to contrast the information you think they’re already receiving.

Identify where you can actually provide value to a particular audience, and hammer that point home in succinct, powerful content.

Emphasize Strategy

Keep your content useful.

Not only should you be provoking thought with your messaging, but you should be providing a solution that works with their strategy, affects their return on influence, and strengthens their overall bottom line.

It’s these big-picture things that matter to executives.

Instead of discussing the variety and power of your company’s computer chips, for example, focus on how your products can cut their yearly expenditures by 10 percent.

By keeping your content marketing out of the weeds, you’re better positioned to reach the highest level of decision makers.

Be Succinct

Imagine the amount of time it takes for a mid-level business manager to make a buying decision.

Now take that amount of time and reduce it by 90 percent, and you have the period in which you need to convince a chief technology officer you’re worth spending another five minutes on.

What’s more, you don’t have time to discuss tactics in those five minutes —you need to prove your company offers a strategic, innovative solution to a problem they know they have — and convince them to take another chunk of their time to continue a conversation with your sales team.

With this in mind, it’s clear you need to convey your message quickly.

While this includes keeping content marketing to the point and free of fluff, it also means you need to keep your work channel-appropriate and engaging.

So even if your executive has only five minutes to skim your latest white paper between meetings, they’ll be able to get the gist of what you’re saying —and the message will stay with them and drive their decision-making process.

Don’t try this alone – Why integrated communications planning deserves an outside perspective

This e-book is about integrated communications planning, but it is not a self-help book. In fact, it is the opposite of a self-help book. This e-book makes the case for why it is smarter for most companies to consider working with an outside planning resource.

Why plan at all?

There are so many reasons to formally plan a communications program that every page of this e-book could be devoted to this topic alone. We’ll spare you and cover it all in one:

1. Planning brings rationality
   Planning involves determination of clear and specific objectives. The courses of action to be taken to accomplish the plan are easier to determine when they must all logically relate back to objectives.
2. Planning minimizes uncertainty
   The future cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy but planning helps anticipate it — and prepare for contingencies.
3. Planning facilitates coordination
   Planning helps avoid duplication of efforts. If everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing, they can work toward common goals with minimal redundancy.
4. Planning improves morale
   Whether it be your own staff, your agency or other vendors you work with, planning creates an atmosphere of order and discipline that all can appreciate.
5. Planning achieves economies
   Not only does planning avoid wastage of resources, documentation of what is in development can improve the opportunity to repurpose, and thus improve efficiency.
6. Planning leads to accountability
   “That which cannot be measured cannot be managed,” the old saying goes. Planning provides predetermined goals against which actual performance is compared.
7. Planning can provide a competitive edge
   If your competitors don’t plan (or don’t plan effectively), your organization will be stronger in the marketplace if your company has an effective plan in place.
8. Planning encourages new thinking
   Planning is essentially a decision-making methodology that necessarily involves creative thinking and asking “what if” questions that can inspire innovation.

If you’ve read this far, odds are you don’t need to be sold any more on the need for communications planning. You may, however, need to be sold on how you should plan.

So here goes…

Why (and where) to go outside for planning

Communications planning with an outside partner — especially an integrated communications agency — has a number of benefits.

Let’s look at why a firm of this type is so well suited to the task:

1. Avoiding tunnel vision
   Agencies can apply experience from working with many different clients to your planning. What has worked in one industry may very well work in another — yours.
2. Cross-functional thinking
   Agencies can offer a cross-functional perspective that is hard for most companies to match. This is very important in today’s omni-channel marketing world. We’ll get into this further when we talk about T-planning.
3. Fresh thinking
   Unlike companies, agencies are objective (at least theoretically). There are no “sacred cows” when they plan, and they are not beholden to legacy thinking (i.e.,“Sales says we must attend this trade show because we always have,” etc.).
4. Ideally positioned
   Agencies are uniquely positioned in a very strategic spot in the new marketing value chain. We’ll cover this idea later, but for now, please understand that leveraging this position should lead to a better plan.
5. Scalable and nimble
   Corporate America has been eliminating marketing and communications jobs for some time in a push for increased efficiencies. This can present a serious challenge to marketing departments. As a result, communications planning has become an obvious target for outsourcing.
6. Seamless hand-off
   If your agency is responsible for your planning, odds are many of the people (creative, media, etc.) who would be in charge of executing it were involved in its development. This means they are already intimate with its details and ready to get started on its deliverables.

Certainly you could hire another type of firm for planning (e.g., management consultants are entering the fray), but the integrated communications agency concept inherently provides added benefits beyond the planning function too. Namely, a synchronized brand voice, experience and cost efficiencies generated through creativity and production.

In light of all these benefits, including an outside partner in your planning just makes sense.

The role of planning in the new marketing value chain

Seismic shifts in both technology and customer behavior have given marketers access to previously inaccessible data. This has changed marketing forever, and as a natural result, has also changed the value integrated communications firms can offer.

In Movéo’s white paper, The New Marketing Value Chain, we contend that the true value of such firms today comes from the application of data-driven insight to form strategy and inform execution. If this is true, the role of planning (where strategy is born) is a defining one. It straddles the discovery and analysis of relevant information and the downstream development and deployment of communications. With such a pivotal position in this new “marketing value chain,” planning needs to be a dedicated function. There are three reasons for this:

1. Specialization
   Today, many agencies still have account executives do their planning, and as capable as these folks may be, they also tend to be very stretched with other duties (sales, program management, etc.). Dedicated planners have the expertise and bandwidth needed to do the job.
2. Experience
   Dedicated planners have been through the process many times, so they have learned how to better manage plan development. This improves process efficiency.
3. Communication
   When shared ownership of responsibility and communication exists, confusion can result while trying to develop the plan. More effective decisions can made using a single point of responsibility — a planning lead.

At Movéo, we made a decision to have a dedicated planning function several years ago when we structured our entire agency around the new marketing value chain. This investment certainly took time and energy, but it was an investment that has paid off in benefits — both direct and indirect — for our clients.

If you haven’t read the white paper referred to on this page, the third box in the diagram above may require explanation. “Application of Rules & Tools,” refers to the know-how the planning function needs to tap into at the agency when developing tactics for a modern communications plan.

More on that next.

Who said there’s no “T” in “planning”?

T-planning is another good reason to go outside for your planning, but there’s one more yet.

There are typically two types of planning challenges — strategic and tactical. Because it is an important (and somewhat rare) skill, strategic thinking gets the lion’s share of attention when people talk about planning.

Yet, tactical thinking — specifically the thinking around the appropriate marketing communications mix — is of equal importance. In fact, this type of challenge is becoming increasingly difficult for clients to master on their own.

This is because the number of channels and vehicles available to marketers have exponentially increased. Without a wide breadth of tactical knowledge, it is virtually impossible to achieve cost efficiency, maximize message impact and effectively coordinate all the moving pieces needed to effectively launch a brand and/or product. But the width of the marketing mix is only half of it. Today “T-shaped” planning is needed that demands both width and depth of knowledge. Accessing this type of knowledge requires the talents of a multi-disciplinary team in the planning process.

The graphic on the right shows just how deep a single functional discipline — search engine optimization — can go. Add that to the long list of disciplines now part of marketing and you can quickly see how the need for knowledge compounds.

It is only cost effective for the largest of companies to hire such a diverse team, but an integrated communications agency can do so economically because it can spread staff overhead across multiple clients (and multiple planning assignments).

The rise of active planning

“A good plan, executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” When General George S. Patton spoke these words, he could have been talking about communications planning instead of warfare.

Yet much has changed on the planning front over the years.

Traditional integrated communications planning, a mainstay of the marketing world for decades, is now what is under assault. The routine of analyzing existing market situations, predicting an optimal outcome, and then constructing an annual plan to capture that outcome is increasingly ineffective in a dynamic environment — like the one we’re in.

To be successful, planners must now plan using principles of agile marketing — speedy action, learning through failure and a premeditated bias to experimentation that creates feedback. This is because marketers now have an unprecedented ability to fine tune their allocation decisions while making course corrections, sometimes in real time.

To be clear, planning has in no way lost its value, however, the longer its cycle the less its relevance. What is required today is a more active type of integrated communications planning. This may be a shock to those raised on classical planning, yet the traditional way of doing things can lead to too much planning, too soon. The result can be a huge waste of resources. Movéo now plans in shorter time increments — sprints — that allow for testing and learning — after which programs scale accordingly.

In short, active planning puts more emphasis on learning than it does on the team’s ability to steadfastly follow a drawn out plan. The expectation is that once it gets started, executing the plan is more than likely to change based on what the team has learned.

While integrated communications agencies do not have a monopoly on active planning, it is an approach that lends itself to mastery with experience. For example, knowing what to test and when, and how to analyze the results.

After all, poorly executed active planning is no better than planning of any other kind.

What we’ve learned from clients

Part of being the right outside partner for planning is understanding what companies want in a plan — and what they don’t.

You do that by listening, and here is what we have heard:

1. Keep it concise
   Marketers don’t want a plan to become a science project. Unnecessary meetings and overly long decks are not the way to a client’s heart (or their head). Plans should cover what they need to cover — and no more.
2. Help them sell it
   Many plans, especially plans that involve big budgets, need to be sold up the corporate ladder. Marketers appreciate collaborating with a third party partner to develop the tools to do so. This may involve the agency providing a modified plan tailored for the C-suite.
3. Collaborate
   Marketers are the recipient of plans, but that does not mean they should be uninvolved in their development. In fact, their participation is absolutely essential at key stages.
4. Follow through
   If a company approves a plan, they expect it to be executed. Providing a timeline that isn’t kept or coming up with creative executions that ignore the plan’s agreed upon strategy and tactics are just two ways agencies can torpedo confidence — and perhaps even weaken the value of planning in the eyes of your client.
5. Prove value
   Marketers have worked hard to earn their seat at the boardroom table, but that seat has a price — accountability. A measurement framework for ROI is not a nice-to-have in a plan, it is a must-have.

So much for advice for outside planners, now we have some for the companies that work with them.

Helping your planning partner

Planning should not occur in a vacuum. There are a number of ways a company can help their outside partner during the planning process.

1. Be transparent
   One of the biggest influencers on strategic thinking is the budget, yet many companies do not like giving their agency budget figures because they fear doing so will inflate the spend. Aside from eroding trust, this is just not an efficient way to partner. While agencies might have an idea for what an effective budget should be, they can’t provide good counsel if they don’t know the real numbers. Only then can they determine how far from reality the expected investment is to achieve expectations.
2. Be generous with information
   Great plans are built on facts, so the more of these your agency is operating from, the better the plan will be. Sometimes it may require a significant effort to get the information your planning partner might ask for, but believe us — it’s worth it. Too much information is always preferable to too little. Please understand that providing such information to your agency does not mean that it should not also be doing its own digging — it should.
3. Be an active participant
   As mentioned previously, you have an important role to play in the planning process. For example, Movéo involves its clients at three crucial steps — at the beginning (so that everybody understands what will be delivered, when and how), in the middle, so that communication objectives and strategies can be vetted, and at the end where tactics, timing, measurement and budget allocation can be agreed upon.When a plan is phased in such a way, companies collaborate in the plan’s development while letting their planning consultant take the lead at the points they can provide the most value. This approach also makes sure there is complete alignment as the team moves toward implementation.
4. Don’t cut corners
   Plans are very valuable deliverables and the time and resources required to produce them are considerable. That being said, some companies still think their agencies should somehow make it up on the back end (for example in communications or media fees) and provide planning at a discounted rate. Resist the temptation to do this and you will likely be rewarded with a better plan — your agency won’t be tempted to involve fewer people or spend less time in the planning process to keep within budget.

Provide these four things and the ball’s in your partner’s court.

Choosing an agency goes beyond just planning considerations — there are other criteria such as creativity and digital savvy (not to mention chemistry) that are also important. But the stakes are too high today for strong planning capabilities to not be on your agency selection short-list, if not at the very top. Have you found our arguments for using an outside partner to do your integrated communications planning compelling?

Please share your thoughts with bdavies@moveo.com.

Customer Loyalty is King Among B2B Audiences

Bob Murphy, Movéo Managing Partner

Loyal customers can account for up to 84% of total site visits and spend 10 times more with your business than new ones. What’s more, acquiring new customers can cost up to five times more than generating new business from someone with whom you’ve already worked.

With those statistics in mind, are you doing enough to both inspire loyalty among your customers and harness that loyalty?

By ensuring that your marketing encourages repeat business, brand loyalty, and customer referrals, you’re giving your business the kind of boost that can’t come from any other source. But how do you go about instilling true loyalty in your customer base and empowering your loyal customers to do more for your brand?

This article explores how to measure and increase customer loyalty. You’ll learn how to inspire customers to interact more meaningfully with your brand and help you gain new leads.

Measure loyalty

What does customer loyalty look like? It’s a difficult metric to measure, simply because loyalty can exhibit itself in so many ways. However, you can use three metrics to measure customer loyalty:

1. Repeat customer rate (RCR):
   How many of your customers buy from you more than once? This metric tracks how long customers continue to patronize your business after the first sale. Establish RCR as a baseline metric and track it in your customer relationship management (CRM) system.Use RCR as a baseline by which to judge the success of your loyalty programs and initiatives, and track it on a monthly basis to determine what percentage of customers are coming back to you as your loyalty efforts evolve.
2. Customer lifetime value (CLV):
   This metric measures the total profit contributed by each of your customers during the entire duration of their time purchasing from your company. Use data in your CRM on annual revenue, purchase frequency, and purchase trends to predict the CLV for each of your customers.By tracking this metric, you can determine your highest-value customers and understand what practices are hindering loyalty among your lowest-value customers.
3. Net Promoter Score* (NPS):
   One of the most direct ways to measure customer loyalty, NPS elucidates how likely your customers are to recommend you to a friend or colleague. Because of its ability to simplify our understanding of the often complex relationships between B2B companies and customers, this score is an essential tool for any marketer who wants to better understand customer loyalty.To determine NPS, ask customers to rate how likely they are to recommend you on a scale of one to 10. Those who select either a nine or a 10 are your key promoters — the high-value customers who are most likely to evangelize for your brand. Take the percentage of customers who are promoters and subtract those who are detractors (they rate you six or below) to gain an understanding of the ratio of promoters versus detractors.

Any one of those three metrics will give you valuable data on how loyal and engaged your customers are; together, they provide a holistic view of your prospects for harnessing customer loyalty to your benefit.

Increase — and make use of — loyalty

Especially in B2B marketing, loyalty programs need to go beyond traditional punch cards. That tactic may work for some B2C businesses, but the B2B buying process functions differently, with a longer buying cycle and fewer opportunities for customers to become repeat purchasers. Loyalty programs must take both of those factors into account.

In B2B organizations, the success of loyalty programs hinges on your ability to collect a solid foundation of data about how satisfied your customers are with your products or services.

Consider implementing a loyalty survey to gather that data. At my company, we conduct annual surveys to see how satisfied clients are with the services we provide. From the results, we can see which of our clients are most loyal and most willing to recommend us. With that data in place, we have a solid foundation upon which to strengthen relationships and improve the loyalty of current clients.

Unlike B2C, the best B2B loyalty programs emphasize service, not product discounts. Take BlueLine Rental, a construction materials rental company formerly known as Volvo Rents. The company crunched data to determine its top-spending customers. It set out “white glove service” rules specifically for those high-value customers. Under the new rules, customers could request service at any time, day or night — empowering them and proving BlueLine’s appreciation of their business.

At the same time, BlueLine set aside a portion of its marketing budget to provide extra service targeted toward those customers who were almost at the top, but not quite. The company empowered marketing and sales employees to take that money and provide an experience for their clients, trusting those employees to make the best call on how to use it. One sales professional, for example, brought his client freshly baked cookies and trail mix, while another held a barbecue for a client’s employees. As a result of the program, the number of BlueLine’s high-value customers increased 150% within one year.

That kind of loyalty program allows marketers to bring emotion back into B2B, empowering high-value customers to stay loyal and encouraging beneficial interactions between salespeople and customers. As a result, stronger relationships are continually built and cultivated.

Grow your base through referrals

The most loyal customers aren’t just valuable because of the money they spend themselves: They also help you reach new, high-quality leads through referrals. And when 84% of B2B decision-makers start off the buying process with a referral, getting new leads through your current clientele is essential to the health of your business. These customers are your best advocates, so reward them for spreading the word about your business and getting new contacts on board.

A strong B2B referral program must be both personal and rewarding. Let your customers know that you value their insights and time spent connecting you with others by providing them with rewards that actually mean something to them.

For example, ReadyTalk, a video conferencing provider, created a referral program that worked more like a social network. High-value customers could complete online “challenges” like discussing their experiences on social media and completing surveys in exchange for points. They could redeem these points for rewards and special service.

In the first four months, this referral program garnered 190 referrals for ReadyTalk, boosted its social media and blog presence, and identified 70 advocates willing to work as sales references for the company. Of the customers referred through the program, 33% became closed deals within 60 days. The company’s typical sales cycle is twice that long.

It’s clear that your current customers are a prime way to grow business, simplify the sales cycle, and endear others to your brand. Are you doing everything you can to understand your current customers and harness relationships to grow your business?

*Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems Inc., Bain & Company Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

How CMOs Can Prove Their ROI in the C-Suite

Bob Murphy, Movéo Managing Partner

Today’s chief marketing officers are experiencing something of an identity crisis: Even after a CMO is accepted into the C-suite, a lot of confusion remains about what the CMO should be delivering and the value he or she can add.

What is the role of the modern CMO? It’s hard to define, and it varies greatly from organization to organization. CMOs oversee and manage marketing efforts, for sure, but they are also responsible for satisfying audiences — from consumers to board directors — and contributing to areas outside of the traditional marketing purview, such as product development, customer service, and sales, according to a survey of CMOs.

No wonder there’s confusion around the role of CMOs: They are being pulled in a thousand directions every day. Such a wide array of responsibility leads to 62% of CMOs feeling pressure from their CEO or board to prove the value of marketing, and 65% of those CMOs saying that the pressure is increasing. It’s clear that modern CMOs must be able to prove their value in the C-suite. But how do they do it? The answer starts and ends with their ability to demonstrate a significant, positive return on investment (ROI) in the marketing department.

To truly cement their position in the C-suite, and earn credibility equal to that of CFOs and CEOs, today’s CMOs need to understand marketing ROI, certainly, but they must also know how to prove it — as well as communicate their ability to optimize it — to the rest of the C-suite and the company as a whole.

What is marketing ROI, anyway?
For marketers, determining the ROI for any given activity can be tricky.

Though many marketing activities certainly produce direct ROI (a message is delivered, a prospect responds, clicks over to your website, and makes a purchase), the line between the first touchpoint with a prospect and eventual conversion into a contact or a customer isn’t always straight and clear. It isn’t always possible to connect the dots or to determine which touchpoint had the most meaningful impact.

Furthermore, some marketing activities, such as branding and publicity, aren’t intended to produce direct sales but are, instead, intended to build awareness and brand affinity.

So how do you translate your department’s work into financial outcomes that will resonate with the rest of your company and prove your worth?

1. Understand how you’re spending
   Accurately tracking ROI begins with an understanding of where every marketing dollar is being spent across your entire company, and then aligning that spend with the company’s strategic priorities.

   That spend should include direct monetary investments, such as advertising buys, and time costs, which can be figured based on the gross cost of your team and the time it takes the team to see a specific marketing activity through to completion.

2. Map the buyer’s journey and understand how various marketing tactics drive it
   Next, ask yourself a few important questions: How does your ideal buyer make the journey from stranger to lifelong customer? Which marketing strategies and tactics have the most impact on that journey?

   Only after you’ve developed an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s journey and the factors that affect it can you accurately track and report on ROI.

3. Choose a marketing mix and assign costs and values to each activity
   There are countless ways to reach your ideal customers throughout their buying journey. Choose your marketing mix strategically, basing it on data and analytics whenever possible, and commit to sticking with that mix long enough to track trends over time.

   Next, combine direct costs and time costs for each activity to determine your marketing inputs. Finally, determine an intended outcome for each activity, whether a rebranding effort or an online lead generation program, and assign a value to that marketing output based on its impact on sales.

4. Develop attribution and reporting models that work for you
   When calculating marketing ROI, should you credit a sale to the first touchpoint between your brand and the consumer and the last touch before the prospect becomes a marketing qualified lead (direct attribution), or distribute that credit across all touchpoints (indirect attribution)?

   The correct answer is a bit of both.

   You should develop a customized attribution and reporting model based on the unique nature of your buyer’s journey that puts weighted value on various touchpoints throughout the path to sale. Then, work with sales and other relevant departments to set up tools and measurement processes that allow you to track activity against that model in real time.

5. Optimize and improve
   As information becomes available, you’ll begin to see opportunities to optimize your marketing spend, decreasing costs, and increasing impact. Take those opportunities and report positive outcomes to your C-suite colleagues and the company as a whole regularly. Finally, as best practices come to light, instill them in your organization. Over time, doing so will make your marketing outcomes more predictable and improve the sustainability and success of your company as a whole.

It is both a difficult and an exciting time to be a CMO. Making your department accountable for every dollar it spends and proving the value of Marketing to the rest of the company is your real challenge.

Luckily, thanks to the advent of new tools and technologies, as well as a strengthened commitment to data and analytics among marketers, ROI is becoming a more measurable and meaningful metric than it has ever been.

Make achieving positive ROI and reporting it to your company your No. 1 priority. That’s how you truly earn your spot at the table.

Lead generation: 23 useful statistics

In an industry where quality leads can make or break a campaign, marketers must develop strategies to generate leads. This infographic details the importance of content marketing — as well as the challenges, trends and costs — in lead generation.

COR Value: Higher purpose means higher profits

Amateur hour or the end of professionalism?

According to urbandictionary.com, “professionalism” is any business practice in which happiness is sacrificed for success.

While tongue was likely firmly planted in cheek by the writer who came up with that definition, what is no laughing matter are the ways in which professionalism itself is being sacrificed. Before I explain, I should clarify a few things:

1. In this paper, the word “professionalism” is used primarily in the context of content — artistic creation, criticism, reporting, analysis, etc. Lawyers, architects, doctors and other fields typically recognized as professional will fall outside its consideration.
2. My definition of “professional” is someone who has learned his or her craft and has acquired particular knowledge or skills and, often, certification in the process. This is in contrast to an amateur, a person who may have little or no formal training.
3. The professionals I’m talking about most often work, albeit begrudgingly at times, with other professionals who serve certain roles that make their work possible or “better.” This may include providing patronage (i.e., support or gainful employment) and/or oversight (i.e., reviewing and/or modifying content to ensure quality or adherence to a set of standards) — a journalist working for a publisher and editor of a magazine, for example. Again in contrast, an amateur often works alone and is usually not compensated for his or her effort.

The rise of the raw

For years, the type of professionalism described previously has produced everything from great works of art (e.g., a Kubrick film) to more prosaic material (e.g., an article in People magazine). In either case, the professionalism of the content, if not its socially redemptive value, has usually never been in question. Now, much of the content we are exposed to is produced by amateurs — raw. Far from apologizing for a lack of professional “veneer,” its authors (and many of the consumers who indulge them) do not view this as a shortcoming. Many would even praise amateur content for its authenticity — as work devoid of artifice, pretense and a certain amount of bourgeois bias.

Today, such content is everywhere, from discussion boards, blogs, social media and review aggregators to photo sharing networks, video portals and fan fiction sites. Examples of amateur content on “old media” — TV, newspapers, radio, etc., are still few and far between, but on the Internet they are omnipresent. Amateurs are able, like never before, to create and disseminate content in ways that would previously have been impossible — whether due to legal restraints, financial constraints or simply good taste. As more and more of our content is consumed digitally, this has major implications — on the future of professionalism, if not the way we, as human beings, go about interacting with our world.

This observation has been well covered by a number of analysts over the years. In 2007, Andrew Keen came out with a provocative book entitled, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. In it he argues that professionals act as “expert filters,” analyzing and regulating information as it reaches us. He views this process as beneficial, and believes its circumvention lessons the quality of popular discourse (amongst other evils). While Keen may go too far when he warns of a future where “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule,” his concern about the rise of the raw is not misplaced — like him, I believe there are larger societal implications at play here.

An unedited life

In his blog post critiquing the then editor of The New York Observer, Elizabeth Spiers, Felix Salmon of Reuters writes:

“Spiers doesn’t have either the time or the money to have a layer of experienced journalists reworking her bloggers’ prose before it’s published. And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive page views. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.”

Whether you agree with this assessment or not, clearly we can all agree that the quality of content — in aggregate — has gone down in recent years. Whether you’re talking about the editorial proclivities of a major metropolitan newspaper or a cat video on YouTube, fewer and fewer people give a damn about many things that used to be highly prized — from production value and stagecraft to spelling, style and grammar.

Many companies have taken a ‘casual Fridays’ approach to their brands.

You may argue that the professionalism I’m talking about still exists, but there’s just less of it. You’d be right, but trust me, it better watch its back. Working in the communications industry for many years, I’m constantly struck by the everyday decisions made about quality. Many companies have taken a “casual Fridays” approach to their brands. While compromises have always been part of the job, in the past they were forced by deadline or budget (or both). Today, it’s something different.

Here today, gone tomorrow

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who is in the video production business. He was bemoaning his clients’ ready willingness to produce something of lesser quality — without the guilt that formally would have plagued them for doing so. He asked me why I thought this was happening. I told him that almost all content is now viewed as a consumable. Thanks to the Internet, so much of it is now needed to feed “the machine” that there is no time — or even need, due to its ephemeral nature — to worry about how professional something is. As Salmon says, it is now about quantity over quality. If content is raw, so be it.

Whether a generalized drop in the quality of content is causing some sort of societal malaise is not clear, but some disconcerting early symptoms are appearing. Americans now lead unedited lives — we pay less attention to what we’re typing on our phones due to app-imposed character limits. Text-inspired abbreviations are seeping into our long form writing. Proofread emails? Forget it. Even professional content is being affected by quality’s newfound paucity — look at how much low-grade content is now being produced, from “found footage” movies to reality TV. Ultimately, this trend is bound to influence our standards, if not our behavior — how many young people have begun to look at the cast members of shows like “Jersey Shore,” or “The Real Housewives,” as role models?

Facts, schmacts

A couple years ago a friend told me he was thinking of heading to Arizona. His departure seemed sudden, and when pressed for an explanation, he began an incredible story about the arrival in our solar system of a brown dwarf star, Elenin, and how he had read blogs and saw videos on the Internet that warned its near approach to the Earth would cause calamitous seismic effects. My friend, a usually rational person, believed Arizona might be a safer place to “ride out the storm.” This was despite the fact that the professionals at NASA claimed Elenin was simply a passing comet of negligible mass that would have no perceptible effect on the Earth.

Now of course Elenin harmlessly came and went, as so many of these types of pseudo-scientific predictions do, but the fact that my friend was actually thinking about altering his behavior due to this alarming amateur content gave me pause. The “lunatic fringe” has always existed, but today, “Many companies have taken a ‘casual Fridays’ approach to their brands. Amateur hour or the end of

professionalism? How raw content is reshaping our world. / 5 the Internet has given it both a stage and a packed auditorium. No longer do professional fact (and in some cases, sanity) checkers prevent the most outlandish of theories from going mainstream. Many of the things that we hear, from the Obama “birther” controversy to shadowy groups like “The Illuminati” controlling organizations like the Red Cross or Disney, are things cooked up by people with fewer qualifications than the average order taker at a fast-food joint. Yet, if we hear these things enough, they begin to erode something we used to have a lot more of — certainty.

I read recently about a poll that appeared to show that people are growing skeptical that climate change is really happening. To quote the poll’s lead author, Dr. Wouter Poortinga of Cardiff University, “stories questioning the causes, impacts and existence of climate change (are) eroding public opinion.” We live in an age where the average blogger has no problem challenging a Nobel-prize winner. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an elitist, and everyone has the right to his or her opinion. But I do worry about how constructive such opinions are when delivered en masse. You need go no further than a Yelp restaurant review to find out how plentiful, yet polarizing, amateur opinion can be. In fact, in September of 2013, the website for Popular Science magazine announced it was no longer accepting reader comments on new articles for this very reason. In their words, “a fractious minority [can] wield enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story.”

While a certain amount of skepticism is healthy for society, too much can turn into cynicism. A lack of trust in everything from our political system to the scientific establishment to the brands we purchase cannot possibly bode well for our future. It can undermine the very cultural consensus that is needed to create progress.

Is professionalism overrated?

If this is starting to sound like a lamentation on amateur content, it is not meant to be. It is not going away anytime soon, nor should it. Yes, I realize it was only a paragraph ago that I was cautioning about the dire social consequences its rise might engender. These are real and we, as content consumers, will have to practice greater vigilance in the future to make sure they don’t transpire. But it has always been the individual’s responsibility to separate the good from the bad, fact from fiction — even when content was produced exclusively by professionals. Why should it be any less so going forward?

…it has always been the individual’s responsibility to separate the good from the bad, fact from fiction…

As far as the dearth of quality in content, that, too, is not as cut-and-dried as it might first appear. In his book, Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt argues that professionals are actually less creative and diverse in their opinions than amateurs (which he attributes to indoctrination that accompanies most professional training). To be sure, raw content can open our eyes to what is compelling and informative in our world just as much as professional content. Yes, it is often of lesser quality, but that does not take away from its ability to entertain and educate us. What such work often lacks in polish, it can make up for in exuberance. To quote Chris Anderson’s blog, The Long Tail, “I’ll take a passionate amateur over a bored professional any day.”

Besides, why should professionals have the last word on quality anyway? Aren’t they the ones that have most to lose from this shift? The street artist Banksy goes so far as to call graffiti — the quintessential example of unprofessional art — a form of social struggle that allows individuals to “snatch power, territory and glory from a bigger and better equipped enemy.”

Peaceful coexistence

Whether or not the pendulum has swung too far in favor of the “raw” in recent years is a moot point. The fact is, amateur-produced content is not only valued by its consumers, it’s usually free. That alone is enough to ensure its prominence — if not dominance — in the years to come. Many, of course, will fight the “dying of the professional light,” but will they succeed? Should they succeed?

Maybe professionalism just needs to find the right niche — to quote a recent article by New York Times writer David Carr, “Publishers who turned out under-designed and under-edited books and magazines in the Internet age have learned the hard way that consumers expect excellence in print.” Yet another possibility is the distinction between the two will just fade away. Truth be told, the lines between what is amateur and what is professional have always been somewhat blurry. Shakespeare and Da Vinci were considered amateur artists in their time!

In a blog post in Techdirt, Tim Cushing talks about a new breed of content creators — the professional amateur: “A pro-amateur perhaps works on a project as a side-line to her day-job but she treats it seriously. Like any struggling writer, there is the work and the need to pay the rent. The difference is that the proamateur then takes her work and distributes it directly. She creates a book, an album, a TV series and just puts it out there. It only really costs her time to do it, and if it works it works. If not, she does something else.”

Regardless of what the balance is between what content is raw and what is not, the important point is that it’s not a zero sum game. In fact, professionalism and amateurism can play nice together. I like, for example, the fact that the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes offers both a critics score and an audience one. YouTube is now incorporating the whole spectrum of content creation, from amateur to professional. To quote senior director of IT at Wharton, Kendall Whitehouse, “Both [professional and amateur content] bring value. The latter brings quickness and a personal viewpoint and the former provides analysis and consistent quality. The world I want to live in includes healthy doses of both categories.” Me too. So let’s find ways to embrace both expert and raw content, viewing each in its proper light. Exploring the differences between them can make for an interesting white paper topic, but I believe its wrong to necessarily see them as existential threats to one another. That’s professionally speaking, of course.

Redefining what an “advertising agency” can be, Movéo uses datadriven insight to help business-to-business and healthcare brands quantifiably improve marketing performance. For more information, visit moveo.com

The new marketing value chain

The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.

This observation, attributed to0 Ralph Waldo Emerson, has found new relevance in the field of marketing. In fact, Movéo believes there is a new marketing value chain in which “knowing why” will increasingly be the driver of success. Before we describe this new chain, however, it’s important to take a step back and understand the old one — specifically the value it offered and how it came to be.

Marketing’s unchanging goal: Predictability

For over 50 years, many people suffering from certain autoimmune disorders have benefited from antibody replacement therapy. The precise mechanism by which this therapy works on these conditions has still not been definitively established. The bottom line is that often times it does work, although doctors cannot in any way predict the extent that it will do so in individual cases.

This situation should sound familiar to practitioners of modern marketing. The discipline does work, sometimes even dramatically. But since marketing’s inception at the beginning of the 20th century, marketers have been at a loss to precisely predict its effects with a great degree of accuracy. As a result, a certain amount of waste has been an accepted part of marketing investment. The industry at large has been acutely aware of this problem for a long time (we would insert a familiar John Wannamaker quote here but will spare you this cliché).

Some have sought to address it by making marketing more “scientific.” As far back as 1923, Claude C. Hopkins wrote in his book, Scientific Advertising, “The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact…Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest of business ventures.”

Whether or not marketing has ever achieved the status of a science can be debated. Scientists propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena they observe and design experiments to test these hypotheses via predictions. The true promise of marketing can only be achieved through better predictability. The extent to which we can foresee the impact of our marketing programs enables inefficiency (and the costs associated with it) to be minimized. It also makes it possible to accurately tie marketing with revenue contribution so that it can finally be looked upon as an investment rather than a cost.

The true promise of marketing can only be achieved through better predictability.

The old marketing value chain

A value chain can be defined as a set of activities that an organization performs in order to deliver a product or service. The concept was first popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

While Porter was talking about the activities of an entire organization, his idea can easily be applied to the marketing function alone. Like any system, it is made up of inputs, transformative processes and outputs. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits.

For most of its history, marketing has provided its value through practitioners who master a two-link chain consisting of the application of what we call “Rules and Tools.”

Rules and tools

In 1923 Claude Hopkins argued that there are rules of advertising that, as long as they were understood and followed, would make success both attainable and repeatable (predictable!). In the 1960s, advertising great David Ogilvy sought to codify his success through rules (the first of 10 writing tips he shared in an internal memo sent to all employees of his ad agency in 1982 was to “Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.”). In the 1990s, marketing consultants Al Ries and Jack Trout posited that there were 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing that must be followed to launch or maintain winning brands (“Violate them at your own risk!”). Similar claims are being made today by various players who provide guidance around things like demand generation or multichannel marketing.

Mastery of marketing tools can also be traced to the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, the state-of-the-art tools were mail order advertising and the effective use of samples. Pioneers such as Lester Wunderman (hailed as the “father of direct marketing”) carved their niche by learning these tools of marketing better than anyone else. Today, many companies take the same approach, focusing on mastery of technology platforms for marketing automation and CRM integration or channels such as social media, for example.

Combining best practices, conventional wisdom and intuition and then applying this knowledge across the latest and greatest tools and channels is how marketing delivered its value. The more you knew about such “rules and tools,” the thinking went, the more predictable your outputs would be.

Old value chain limitations

Employing a “rules and tools” based value chain can help make marketing more effective — especially compared to just “winging it” — but it falls far short of making it more predictable due to two significant limitations:

1. Strict adherence to a “rule” does not sufficiently acknowledge that most marketing conditions are NOT constant. Rules that work when certain conditions are present may not work when they are not, or when other conditions arise. In marketing today, many conditions are dynamic and outside the control of marketers (e.g., changing customer behaviors and attitudes, competitive “noise,” etc.).
2. A tool-based approach does not sufficiently acknowledge that marketing tools are also dynamic. Even the best marketing analytics software in use today is just the best CURRENT option. Evolving technology can unseat even the most entrenched tools (just ask Blackberry). What’s more, if you have the latest and greatest, there’s always someone selling a similar technology to your competitor. This can neutralize any competitive advantage brought by tools.

The more dynamic the environment, the greater the likelihood of waste occurring in a “rules and tools” based value chain. Because we live in a world that is now in a constant state of flux, this has become a serious problem. While this approach can still lead to successful marketing outcomes, the odds of it doing so have decreased as unpredictability has increased. Unfortunately the demands on marketing practitioners have also increased. CMOs are transitioning away from soft success measures. Expectations of marketing accountability have increased to the levels expected of sales performance. More predictability is required today, not less.

In short, the “Rules and Tools” based value chain is now obsolete. Luckily, it can be replaced with a far more effective one.

More predictability is required today. Not less.

The new marketing value chain

Shifts in technology and customer behavior have produced an almost infinite amount of data — a digital record of every action a customer takes online. It is the accessibility of this data that will allow for a new marketing value chain predicated on insight. Mastery of data will enable companies to predict marketing performance as never before.

Data allows for the value chain to be re-forged into three links:

Data-driven insight, the first link, reveals “why” marketing works. It discerns hidden patterns in the numbers that improve the decision making process in the other two links. Intelligence derived from data can help you find your most profitable customers, identify new business opportunities, deliver better targeted leads to the sales organization, offer realtime insights to make smarter campaign decisions (e.g., running “what if” scenarios, changing creative on the fly, etc.) and much more.

The second link of the chain — strategy — becomes newly enlightened by insight. No longer “flying blind,” companies can move away from an over focus on tactical planning and execution. Smarter decision-making will enable them to greatly minimize, if not eliminate, waste from their programs. Guesswork strategies of old (e.g.,“Say and spray” mass marketing) will be replaced with ones born of confidence and precision — the right offer being made to the right buyer at the right time. This will lead to a quantum leap in marketing performance.

As for the third link, marketers will to continue to apply “rules and tools.” More than ever they will need to identify and capitalize on the best technologies and channels available. They’ll still need to engage customers and inspire employees with powerful brands and creative communications. But data will make these things much more accountable than in the past. It will imbue both creative thinkers and marketing technologists with empirical insight about what works and what doesn’t, rather than them relying on capricious rules of thumb for such guidance.

Reinvention required

As data-driven strategies and delivery take center stage, they will become an important part of competitive differentiation.

Winners will increasingly be the organizations that leverage the new value chain, and this is already happening. A recent study of more than 10,000 marketing executives globally about the use of data found that the respondents who said that their organization highly leveraged data and analytics to improve marketing effectiveness grew significantly faster than those that did not.¹ Another study showed that companies that use advanced analytics tools enjoy higher win rates.² A third study that advanced analytics delivered marketing program efficiency gains of 30% or more.³

Mastery of data-driven insight will increasingly separate the marketing wheat from the chaff, yet putting these skills into practice has not kept pace with aspirations to do so. Marketers, as well as the agencies and consultants they hire, have found they cannot simply flip a switch and become analytically proficient. Analytics reports today are often little more than compilations of data readily available from Google. Multiple data sources — both internal and from other parties — will be needed to provide the type of insight that actually leads to “eureka” moments. Additionally, there will be a need to build sophisticated analytics models for predicting outcomes. This requires hypothesis testing and data mining capabilities that few marketing departments possess today.

The most immediate challenge, then, is to create an organization that can effectively do these things.

Our recommendation?

1. Recall Emerson’s quote — stop focusing on the “how” and figure out the “why.” The marketing function must serve as a change agent, leading the charge to employ advanced analytics that will lead to smarter decision-making. Don’t wait for IT to save you.
2. Embracing the true power of data will require you to learn how to identify, attract and retain people with the skills and special curiosity to make the valuable discoveries hidden in it. This will necessitate tight alignment with HR, as most of these departments do not have experience tracking down “data scientists.”
3. If your organization does not yet have the skills needed, or there are structural constraints that need to be removed before it can apply them, consider partnering with a firm or firms that have made demonstrable progress down this road. The right partner can serve as a bridge while your organization builds its own capabilities, or can remain an integral part of your team over the long term.

The important thing is to actually start taking the concrete steps necessary to turn marketing into the science that Hopkins promised it could be back in 1923. Then, and only then, will the new marketing value chain discussed here deliver real value for your organization.

1 Marketing2020 study sponsored by EffectiveBrands, the Association of National Advertisers, the World Federation of Advertisers, Spencer Stuart, Forbes, MetrixLab and Adobe.
2 CSO Insights
3 Marketing Sherpa

Redefining what an “advertising agency” can be, Movéo uses data-driven insight to help business-to-business and healthcare brands quantifiably improve marketing performance. For more information, visit moveo.com