Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

September 4, 2009 • 11:21 pm 1

Marketing Measurement Primer: Creating Your Reporting System

So, you are thinking about creating an automated reporting system to monitor marketing performance across all your activities: direct, website, internet marketing, social media, e-commerce.  There are all these great tools out there with shiny dashboards and promises of business insight to drive your decisions in one place.  STOP!

It is not as simple as recreating your Excel spreadsheets in a database and copying the graphs to Powerpoint.  Forget what your analysts tell you.  The data isn’t the most important thing in this process.  Your business rules governing your data is the most important.  The business rules stem from your process, your plan, and the point of view of your business.  Make sure your establish your marketing plans and business rules as the cornerstone to your reporting needs BEFORE you go right to the data.

Most business intelligence projects are emerging from mature processes and the topmost functional areas that have application systems capturing and storing data as it happens.  There is a consistency around data elements.  For instance, finance, sales/marketing, customer service all work off customer data with sales transactions and relationship inter-actions.  The reason is that the application manages the data.  Where this breaks down is in the new world of cloud computing and SaaS solutions managing micro components of your business.

Your headaches in understanding marketing performance stems from this increasingly disparate view of your activities.  Traditional marketing is housed in your CRM system (ex. Siebel, SAP).  Website marketing is house in your web analytic suite (ex. Omniture, Webtrends).  E-Commerce might be managed with your E-Commerce provider.  Interactive marketing may be managed by your ad service (ex. MediaPlex, DART) or Google.  Each of these services have their own discrete view of the world and provide you with canned reports.  First and foremost all these various systems need to be bring data into a central repository before any consolidated reporting can happen.  This is where most reporting projects begin and move right to the reporting design and implementation.

Be careful.  This is the pitfall.

What makes the reporting in these disparate systems work is the business rules and processes that generate the data.  How a campaign is set up and tracked in one system can be very different than the other.  Cost management will vary by activity as well as marketing cost may be flat fees or operate through exchange systems with different billing methods (ex: by time, conversion, packaging). You want your campaign plans enforcing the management and reporting of activity across all marketing channels.  If you have not created this framework, you risk accuracy and completeness as feeds can have issues in delivery or have conflicting data that needs to be reconciled and/or adjusted prior to reporting.

As you begin your marketing performance reporting project, bring your sample reports and spreadsheets to the table during business analysis.  But, you also want to be sure you bring your marketing plans and business rules to the table as well.  This will ensure accruacy of reporting and mitigate issues in design, development, and implementation of your new dashboards.

Filed under: business analytics, business intelligence, marketing technology, , , , ,

May 13, 2009 • 1:40 am 0

Analyst Skills are Hot

analytics and business intelligence jobs

BusinessWeek recently reported (listen to pod cast) that there are over 3 million jobs available in the US.  Of that, one of the hottest areas is for analysts. Looking at job posting trends from Indeed, even as the economy has stalled and affected recruitment, analytic and business intelligence jobs are still showing consistent demand.  In fact, even as IBM announced cuts, it has opened up job reqs for analysts to help customers identify opportunities and understand their businesses.  Don’t have all the skills, no problem, if you are an overall good fit IBM will train you.

Which brings up an interesting perspective of the analyst community.  While there are certainly the math and stat majors along with masters and PhD candidates, many of today’s analysts in corporations are self taught and accidentally landed into a data crunching career.  There aren’t many that went to college and said, “Gee, I’d like to be a statistician.”  But, somehow, many analysts have found an affinity toward analyzing data and putting it into context for gaining insight and making business decisions.

Not surprisingly, if you look at barriers in organizations, particularly marketing, and their ability to leverage data to achieve business goals, many feel they don’t have the knowledge to do so.  In fact, they may not know what they need to know to get the right person.  So, these coveted positions continue to remain unfilled, waiting for the right candidates to show up .  How long should your business wait to find the right person and what is that costing you in missed opportunity?

Finding the Right Candidates

When hiring, I’ve typically focused an one’s aptitude and capability to analyze information rather than the tools used or complexity of analysis they have done.  The first reason is that there are very few out there that would fit the bill and if they do it takes a lot of money to bring them in.  The second is that while I want analysts to understand standards and procedures to analyze data, I don’t want individuals with rigid and unimaginative thinking that can constrict their ability to look at information in a new way for better insight.    When it comes to complexity, investing in the proper training/education, and mentoring them through projects works the best.  This way their learning is specific to the business need rather than a broad based approach to statistics and analysis.  Essentially, provide the academic guidance within a relevant corporate environment and application.  Overall, candidates should be inquisitive, creative, and obsessed with data, and self starting.

I know others that have strong relationships with universities and pluck candidates out of programs that have provided applicable experiences in analysis.  This is a favorite of research organizations where they partner with professors on a regular basis.  In addition, there are associations and institutes that offer advanced research courses that up and coming analysts attend and are resources to help find those with a high aptitude for analysis.  Many times professors, leading statisticians, and research professionals teach these courses and can be conduits to finding the right candidates.

How do You Fill Your Analyst Positions?

If you regularly hire analysts, what are you looking for?  What have you found makes an analyst successful in your company?  And, what advice do you have to help those that are having trouble filling analyst positions?

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Filed under: Hiring, , , , , , ,

April 26, 2009 • 8:43 am 1

B2B Social Media – Has Marketing Effectiveness and Efficiency Improved?

How much effort do you need to put into social media before it pays off in B2B? The answer probably has to do with what you expect from social media in the first place. The problem I see for B2B social media marketing is that instead of 1) increasing marketing effectiveness by facilitating sales and deepening customer relationships 2) making marketing more efficient by streamlining process and resources, it may be doing just the opposite.

Marketing Effectiveness

In it’s ability to facilitate sales and deepen the customer relationship, time and again, marketers and sales are unable to translate awareness and conversation trends in social media to sales. In addition, I wonder if connection trends, comment ratios, and sharing ratios are really anything but another way to track existing customer relationships. I’ve narrowed down marketing effectiveness metrics to four (4) key themes. In each case, I’m looking for improvements due to social media.

  • Improve win/loss ratio – Sales may ultimately be responsible for this metric, but marketing is responsible for lead nurturing which contributes to it. The reality is that the awareness marketing that is happening in social media may not be doing anything but providing another outlet for the same content. Tactics such as white paper promotion and communication of offers may appear to increase leads, but views and registrations may ultimately be with the same people already existing within the customer database. In the end, is the social media marketing tactic really changing customer perception during the sales process to make them choose you’re solution more often? I’m not sure it does.
  • Shorten sales cycle – I pose that the sales cycle may actually be lengthening in social media marketing rather than shrinking. Social media appears to be focused more on awareness building than lead generation. This effort is at the beginning stages of the marketing funnel. In fact, because of the conversational nature of social media, it takes longer to convert a ‘getting to know you’ dialogue to a ‘let’s do business’ dialogue. So, instead of coordinating marketing efforts with sales engagement and the decision process, social media is acting more as a fishing net.
  • Increase sales – Due to an increased sales cycle, you may be losing time to help close a deal. Solely focusing on lead nurturing vs. lead conversion can have the affect of creating a state of purgatory for potential customers. Social media, in theory, should help expand your footprint within your customer base by improving customer relationships. However, all social media marketing is doing today is proving a facelift to existing customer forums, white-paper libraries, and transitioning web content to blog content.
  • Reduce churn – There is much buzz around Twitter’s ability to manage customer expectations and improve customer support. Thus, this translates to reducing customer defection. The issue here is that this isn’t happening in the marketing organization. This is a function of customer service. Where marketing fails is that customers are focused on their business, not yours. Conversations in social media marketing today are still more focused on ‘look at me Mr. Customer’. All the customer wants is for you to look at them. It is an effort for customers to utilize and participate in social networks and gather information in social media. There are still too many places the customer has to go to interact. We make it difficult to solidify relationships by managing multiple properties and outlets to connect.

Marketing Efficiency

There is a real hidden cost to utilizing social media for B2B marketing. It is the cost to do business. Due to the number of ways you can connect to customers, it requires a significant amount of effort to cover and manage all the properties. While you can write a single blog and push it out across multiple communities, the lack of diversity in conversations may hurt more than help. Each community probably has a different DNA. One message is not going to be relevant for all. Thus, you have to produce more content across more topics to be effective.

Another aspect of inefficiency is the art of the conversation. For social media to work, it requires a de-centralized communication web to interact with customers. Sales already has this in place as it is what they do every day. Marketing is smaller and has less resources. This puts pressure on the organization to have personalized attention to carry on a conversation. Marketing needs the ability to respond to comments, participate in groups in a conversational manner, and organize discussions and groups around a multitude of topics that customers are interested in. If you go to forums today, there are few that have real conversations happening. Mostly you see blogging and promotional content being posted. This is because it takes a huge amount of bandwidth to truly be interactive with your customers.

Lastly, there is inefficiency to how marketing manages relationships across multiple social media platforms. Again, the number of venues creates chaos in the ability to recognize a single customer. Efforts are duplicative and can create problems in a cohesive conversation and message. Marketing technology needs to be streamlined to better manage relationships.

What’s Next?

As social media marketing has been the buzz and huge shifts are being made to transition and leverage its potential, B2B marketing organizations need to be mindful of what their business charter is and how they meet their goals through effectiveness and efficiency. Social media is just part of the mix, and as with any marketing effort, you don’t want to put all your efforts into one tactic. If not properly monitored against key business benchmarks it can quickly de-focus your marketing efforts and lead to poor performance.

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Filed under: business intelligence, performance management, , , , , , , , , ,

April 15, 2009 • 7:49 am 1

Social Media: Back to Spreadsheets

It’s a dirty word right now – spreadsheets.  IT departments want to remove our dependence on spreadsheets and convert us over to a secure, controlled, shared, and robust analytic environment.  I would love that!  But, I have a problem, social media.

I’m managing more properties and content that is outside the realm of my corporate environment but I still have to report back and show how it is doing.  The only way I can do this is by using several analytic tools across multiple properties.  I grab the stats I need and punch that into a spreadsheet.  Then, I go to my web analytics reports, grab those stats, and consolidate them with my social media data on my spreadsheet. After that, I consolidate my lead metrics with my internet metrics for a 360° view of my marketing efforts.

It is all very time consuming and open to data entry error.

Business Intelligence is great to track internal process, but it is doing nothing to help track activities outside the corporate environment.  So, I’m stuck with spreadsheets.  Can you help?

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Filed under: business intelligence, performance management, , , , , , , , , ,

April 7, 2009 • 4:56 pm 0

Business Intelligence: Decisions, Decisions

“Business Intelligence is all about supporting business decision.”

How many times have you heard that?  It’s become the standard mantra.  It is so ubiquitous that I don’t think anyone questions anymore the validity of the statement.  It just is.  However, this is probably the hardest part to facilitate when building out you business intelligence practice.  Facilitating decisions is what makes BI stragetic.

Just what is the business decision? What does a business decision look like?

Elements of a Business Decision:

  • Purpose:  drive a business outcome – ex: revenue, shareholder value, profitability, market share
  • Position:  leads a company, division, department
  • Point in Time:  transition along a process or environment

A typical approach during the business analysis phase for BI is to at business decisions across a business process and where questions are asked to change behavior in that process.  Although, the difficulty with this level of granularity is that it is too deep.  These transition points are tactical.  Intelligence across this process and at these decision points is important, but you don’t get the strategic value of BI at this level.  You need to look at the outcome of the process and provide a platform that supports the decision of what to do next.  This is the unstated question.

Let’s take an example.  Sales management will always want a perspective on the pipeline and forecast.  This shows them how they are meeting their numbers quarter to quarter.  However, outside of conversion and volume, there are business decisions that sales managers need to make.  Should they adjust their territories to capture new opportunity or shore up existing business?  Are there changes needed in commissions to incent sales people along certain products and services to improve profitability or revenue?   BI can lead sales management with insights that will guide them to optimize their processes and management rather than just data.

Purpose:  market share, revenue, profit
Position:  sales
Point in Time:  aligned to quarterly pipeline and forecast

To align BI to the business decision it is important to include executives in the discussion.  Get beyond the reports they want to see and ask the question about how they manage their business.  Walk through scenarios of what they ask as changes in the market or the business arise and how information can help them make a decision.  The better able you are to see how they manage their business, the more valuable the BI practice will be to supporting the business.

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Filed under: business intelligence, performance management, , , , , , , , , , , ,

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