Marketing automation company Ifbyphone recently published their 2013 State of Marketing Measurement Survey. “It’s one of the most exciting research studies we have conducted in this rapidly changing sector”, says ...
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The Marketing Operations Manager
To get the most out of your marketing operations, you need three different managers, says Heidi Bullock from Marketo in her latetst blog.
The first is a Content Manager, the second a Nurturing Manager and last but not least a Marketing Operations Manager.
You will need someone who enjoys mechanics. Setting up integrations, key reports, segmentation, and flows in the system are just some of the activities a good marketing operations person will do. This is one of the most critical roles to get right because they are essential to building the technological framework. A good framework = total and complete awesomeness. A bad framework = wasted time and added expense, which we all know equals bad things. A good candidate for this is anyone on your team who enjoys technical details, has a good mind for process and how things work, and feels happy when in Excel.
So, do you recognize yourself in this picture?
SAS: How to reduce time to market?
Asia has always been a big driver in innovation and this can lead to challenges in marketing operations and keeping pace. Here Wilson Raj, Global Director Customer Intelligence at SAS talks about what companies are doing to reduce time to market.
Scandinavia on top in online presence
Businesses in the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Denmark and Sweden are more likely to be online than their European counterparts, says Warc, and so better placed to attract new customers, new research has claimed. The agency bases itself on a study cinducted by BITKOM, the German new media trade body
Top of the list is Finland. More than 91% of the Finnish companies have a website. 89% of both Danish and Swedish firms, had a website. Norway on the other hand is in great contrast with the rest of the Scandinavia countries with ‘only’ 79% of the companies being online.
The Netherlands and Iceland were ranked equal fourth, on 84%, while Germany and Austria both recorded a figure of 82%. The UK followed on 81%, then the Czech Republic on 80%.
BITKOM President Dieter Kempf noted that those companies failing to present an online “business card” were “giving away” the chance to develop a relationship with existing customers and, more especially, to attract new customers.
Within Germany, most large businesses were already online, with just 4% of those employing more than 250 people not being there, and 18% of small and medium sized enterprises.
The biggest gap, the study found, was for very small companies, those employing fewer than ten people, where just 45% had an online presence.
Kempf observed that small businesses could get online “with little effort and at low cost” in order to gain wider attention.
A separate BITKOM survey published recently found that those companies that integrated the internet into their business models were more successful than the rest of the economy.
Some 60% internet-savvy companies expected significant sales growth in the 2013 financial year compared to just 46% of industrial companies for which the internet played a minor role and 38% of service providers in a similar position.
Are marketers top daydreamers?
Think of a place I would go,
I’m daydreamin’,
Where the sycamore grow,
I’m daydreamin’,
And oh if you knew what it meant to me,
Where the air was so clear,
Oh if you knew what it meant to me,
Anywhere but here.
It’s the song by Dark Dark Dark called ’Daydreaming’ (1972). Marketers are the biggest daydreamers there are. No more then nine out of ten marketers say they daydream, according to a report by Travelodge Marketers daydream seven times during their working day with each daydream lasting more than five minutes on average.
The top five daydreamers by profession:
- Marketing
- Bankers
- Lawyers
- Estate agents
- Civil servants
Embarrassment
Over a third of marketers (36 per cent) admitted there had been occasions when they were engrossed in their daydream that they have completely said the wrong thing in a meeting. A further 15 per cent said they have made a mistake at work because they were so occupied by their daydream. A fifth stated they are regularly caught daydreaming by their colleagues on the job.
Performance
However, the research revealed many marketing professionals employ daydreaming each day to help them improve their performance and make them more motivated in the workplace. Some 32 per cent said daydreaming helps them work through and resolve problems, while 23 per cent reported daydreaming increased creativity.
Chris Idzikowski, sleep expert from Edinburgh Sleep Centre said: “This is a very interesting study, illustrating how daydreaming is a natural part of our cycle.”Dreaming during the night occurs on a 90 minute cycle and it is thought that daydreaming follows a similar pattern, however daily activities interrupt that. Dreaming in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep helps improve our memory – perhaps we need the same downtime for daydreaming?”
Bridging Finance & Marketing Using Metrics
Finance departments often criticize marketing’s inability to present a tangible ROI and use financial measures. It’s a common lament and one we’ve all heard. Rob Stuart, Executive Vice President & Publisher at CFO Publishing, in a recent conversation reminds us that CFOs expect marketers to come prepared to describe what their ROI is going to be for marketing investments. CFOs want to know how marketing is going to measure success, the key performance indicators for a conference and the ROI targets. CFOs are looking at the big picture and the organization’s overall investments.
If we want the CFOs support we need forge a stronger partnership with our finance colleagues. The perception or reality of an antagonistic relationship needs to be replaced with collaboration. And one of the best way to begin to build this relationship is to work from the CFOs comfort zone: data, analytics and metrics.
You may think that you already do. But here’s an example of how easy it is to throw things off kilter. A key source of the friction is derived from using the words with double meanings. For example, consider “brand equity”. The marketing professional uses the term to describe the health of the brand’s franchise with its key audiences; the financial professional uses it to characterize the brand as an economic asset. Whatever their differences, marketing and finance professionals need to find common ground.
Marketing and IT: How to be awesome partners
Marketing and IT… Partners in crime or are they like water and fire? In this video Billy Boyle, co-founder and president operations of Owlstone, talks about the two and how they can become succesfull partners in Marketing Automation. “The two just need each other to bring marketing to another level”, he states. “One can’t live without the other.”
Will Shopping Apps Replace Print Catalogs?
A recent article in eMarketer was headlined, “Are Shopping Apps Taking the Role of Catalogs?” The article discussed some of the findings of a December 2012 research study by Adobe . One focus of this research was the attitudes of smartphone and tablet shoppers toward mobile shopping apps. Here’s part of what the research revealed about how mobile shoppers are using shopping apps:
Two of these findings stand out to me. First, about 40% of both smartphone and tablet shoppers indicated that using a shopping app strengthens their connection with a brand. Second, 21% of both smartphone and tablet shoppers said they typically download a shopping app to become familiar with a new brand. These findings clearly show that mobile marketing in general and mobile e-commerce in particular are growing in importance. The second finding indicates that a sizeable percentage of shoppers are using shopping apps for discovery or browsing purposes in addition to actually making purchases. When used in this fashion, shopping apps perform the same basic function as online or print catalogs.
So, are shopping apps destined to replace catalogs, particularly print catalogs? I don’t think so, especially in the near future. For many companies, printed catalogs are still an important part of the marketing communications mix. Research commissioned by the United States Postal Service has shown that catalog recipients are more likely to make a purchase than shoppers who don’t receive them, and catalog recipients typically buy more items and spend more money.
The worst critics…
Women are their own worst critics, says Dove Real Beauty. In this experiment they are asked to describe themself . Other women describe them as well. Conclusion: what you think of yourself is not always the right thing. People are bad in marketing themselves. What lesson can be learned for marketing?
The top 3 objectives of a CMO
Unlike many C-level executives, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are without commonly accepted strategies and routine performance measures. This may be in part why CMO’s so often don’t get a seat at the executive table and incur such high churn. So what’s a CMO to do? In this http://www.crmsearch.com video blog post, Chuck Schaeffer shares three most important stakeholders and strategies for CMOs to deliver the greatest contribution to the company, and their own careers.
How Marketing Can Reclaim the Strategic High Ground
Late last year, Marketing Week published a thought-provoking article titled “Death of the CMO?” The article highlighted the views of Dominique Turpin, Nestle professor and president of the International Institute of Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.Professor Turpin says that the chief marketing officer position is no longer tenable because most CMOs are simply executing a communications strategy. As Turpin put it, “The chief executive sets the overall strategy, the research and development and innovation teams design the product, and the chief financial officer determines pricing and departmental budgets.” Professor Turpin argues that the CMO should be replaced by a “chief customer officer” whose primary role would be to listen and communicate the views of customers across the company.
Whether or not you agree with Professor Turpin, it seems clear that many CMOs have a significant credibility problem in the C-suite. In a study by The Fournaise Marketing Group , 80% of CEOs said they don’t really trust marketers, and 64% said they have taken away product and pricing powers from CMOs because those functions are too important for business success to let marketers control them.