CMO Corner

CMO Corner – DMA 2011: Real-Time Data

Filed under CMO Corner

By ReachForce

on October 5th, 2011

Guest Post by Joe Cordo

I just came from DMA: 2011, and this year’s theme was Real-Time Marketing. Of course, there can be no real-time marketing without capturing data in real-time. The whole “real-time” thing is increasingly important, and it just might yet make social media truly relevant to how marketers move from driving engagement to actually producing revenue through this channel.

However, what I heard most from marketers at the show was the very notion of just making the data they have work for them, whether it was captured in real-time or not. Many marketers are still struggling with the fundamentals of driving revenue performance and applying the growth of their data to driving buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle.

To many, real-time marketing is the optimal way to drive 1:1 customer interaction throughout the customer life cycle and optimize revenue performance. But real-time is highly complex, costly, and its transactional nature is not directly applicable to many industries, products, and services.

Marketers need to evolve toward their real-time goals by first dealing with the fundamental data issues they have today. One way to do so is to evolve toward embracing driving revenue performance at the right time in the customer life cycle using multi-channel marketing.

Right time multi-channel marketing focuses on the aggregation of customer behavior over time, and takes a very deep, analytical approach to customer interactions, based on behaviors and a multitude of market dynamics. The customer intelligence derived from these interactions guides an optimized revenue strategy that focuses on markets, accounts, and buyers to spur specific buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle (Full disclosure: Our white papers at Extraprise provide some great guidance on right time multi-channel marketing).

Instead of looking at data as a massive avalanche, and hearing the rumble in real time, marketers are better able to leverage the data they have at the right time, and continue to accumulate, by driving a data strategy that is applied to the customer life cycle, marketing channels and their use of customer intelligence. Taking this approach moves marketing along a continuum that drives more highly qualified leads, nurtures opportunities into real sales faster, and ultimately creates customer retention that increases the top and bottom lines.

What’s the real definition of real time? It’s the old adage, there’s no time like the present to get started right now to make your marketing more effective. Just do it based on the right time.

Joe Cordo is CMO at Extraprise, the leader in right time revenue optimization services. For more information about Extraprise you can contact visit www.extraprise.com, or contact Joe directly at joe.cordo@extraprise.com.

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Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

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The CMO Corner – Data Quality 2.0

Filed under B2B Lead Generation, B2B Marketing Ideas, CMO Corner, Database Marketing

By ReachForce

on August 24th, 2011

Guest post by David Raab

Marketing data quality used to be simple: the more comprehensive and accurate a data set, the higher its quality rating. That made sense when most marketing programs were targeted at known individuals. Knowing exactly who you were reaching (accuracy) and reaching as many qualified people as possible (coverage) were the keys to success.

But today, many marketing programs reach people you don’t know. They’re targeted through locations, Web behaviors, search terms, social networks, and by other methods that isolate useful groups whose members remain otherwise anonymous. The quality of those data sources is measured in new metrics that vary considerably depending on the particular marketing program.

Consider speed. Identifying changes quickly was always a part of the traditional accuracy measures, but elements like name and address don’t change very often. By comparison, a marketing program based on location may need to react instantly to someone walking past your physical or virtual storefront. So it’s critical to measure how quickly a data source acquires location information, transmits it, and lets you respond with a relevant message.

Other new measures include:

Reliability: many of the new data sources involve real-time or near-real-time data connections. A source that is frequently unavailable or suffers unpredictable lags in transmission time may be significantly less valuable than another that is more dependable. Reliability often interacts with speed: data that is sometimes current but other times late may cause expensive gaffes – like paging Elvis after he has left the building – that are worse than not delivering the message at all.
Consistency: this is a close cousin to the traditional measure of accuracy. The difference is that many new data feeds are themselves aggregated from multiple sources of varying quality, so you need to watch carefully to see how the average accuracy changes over time and for different sub-segments. For example, information that infers consumer interests from the Web sites they visit may be very good at identifying people in the market for a new car but less effective at isolating heavy users of packaged consumer goods.
Specificity: how precisely does the source allow you to target? It’s one thing to identify book readers and another to find people who are interested in Civil War history. Similarly, location-based targeting might be as broad as a metropolitan area or as narrow as a specific street corner. As with all quality measures, the level you require will depend on how you’ll use the data.
Clarity: you can’t always tell what a particular attribute actually measures. Proprietary scores for “social media influence” are one example – even if the vendor explains how they’re calculated, it’s often not obvious what to make of them. Seemingly concrete classifications can also be fuzzy: what, exactly, makes a sewing machine “portable” or a company “small”? The answer matters because decision rules may be based on assumptions that are incorrect.

These new measures are more closely tied to specific marketing programs than the traditional, general measures of accuracy and coverage. Indeed, many new marketing programs are only viable if their data sources meet specific standards. This program-driven approach expands the challenge of picking the right quality measures. But it also simplifies the calculations needed to identify the financial impact of quality improvements. The resulting clarify may lead to a new golden age of data quality – if we can develop the tools to measure it.

David M. Raab is a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analytics. He is author of The Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit and B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool. See www.raabguide.com for more information.

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Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

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The CMO Corner – Big Data, Big Revenue Goals

Filed under CMO Corner, Marketing and Sales Funnel

By ReachForce

on August 10th, 2011

Guest Post by Joe Cordo

Or is it the other way around? I’m seeing enough trends crisscrossing marketing about how to drive revenue that it’s no wonder CMOs are looking for simple solutions. You hear it all the time – revenue performance management, revenue marketing, and even right-time revenue optimization – something we’re guilty of promoting at my company Extraprise.

Let’s start with a basic reality – CMOs and their marketing organizations are going to be continually tied to revenue goals. Not raw lead goals, but real revenue. And it doesn’t matter whether you are a B2B or B2C company. The terms might be different, but the reality is the same. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Q1 2011 GDP was revised downward to an anemic .4%, and Q2 came in at a scant 1.4%. The rest of the developed world is no better, and emerging markets are slowing down – check out the trend in China. Hitting revenue targets rules.

Now contrast that sobering news with a different reality that represents an opportunity for CMOs. A recent IDC study (Extracting Value from Chaos, IDC, June 2011) states that digital information is doubling every two years. That kind of information growth is what big data is all about. It means information about buying behavior across many, many channels (from social media to customer service and beyond) represents real opportunities to engage potential buyers in different ways to drive revenue across every stage of the customer life cycle at the right time. The operative phrases there are every stage and at the right time, because that’s what increases the likelihood of CMOs hitting their big revenue goals.

The driver to achieve those revenue goals is not marketing strategy. It’s the big data that drives the strategy. Unfortunately, the connotation of big data is anything but simple. However, when you transform big data into customer intelligence, and then leverage it across multi-channel marketing, the opportunities to drive revenue throughout the customer life cycle become enormous. And it doesn’t simply crate an opportunity for CMOs to leverage customer intelligence for competitive advantages. It also helps to identify and define what markets and customers represent the highest revenue and profitability potential, how to build more brand loyalty and tie that to profitability, and, ultimately, how to find, win, and keep more valuable customers.

Creating valuable customer intelligence is certainly not without its challenges. But embarking on driving a wide variety of marketing strategies, while leveraging everything imaginable in your mix, creates an overly complex, inefficient and ultimately a self-perpetuating failure. Simplify achieving your big revenue goals by starting with customer intelligence and ground your strategies on what your customers, market and business tells you. I’d love to hear about your challenges and successes, and we’ll be happy to share some of ours.

Joe Cordo is CMO at Extraprise (www.extraprise.com), the leader in right time revenue optimization services. For more information about Extraprise you can contact Joe directly at joe.cordo@extraprise.com.

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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

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The CMO Corner–Sales and Marketing Alignment

Filed under CMO Corner, Sales and Marketing Tips, VP of Marketing Corner

By Mike Emerson

on July 27th, 2011

Once the total combined headcount of sales and marketing exceeds two (assuming that at least some of these individuals are in sales and some are in marketing), sales and marketing alignment becomes an issue for the company. And while the differences between the two sides may not be quite as bad as our 2011 congress, I have been at this long enough to know that the two sides have different personalities, different viewpoints, and a different flair to getting their craft done. Both sides want to succeed and deliver value, they are just different.

While this first opinion may be self-serving, it is also an opinion that was formed long before I arrived at ReachForce. Data is one of the keys to harmonious alignment between the two functions. To use a phrase made famous by the dairy industry, “Got Data?” is a pretty good way to build bridges across this critical aisle. Accurate and well-targeted lead data makes sales people happy. One good lead that is accurate and has a deliverable e-mail will connect sales and marketing far better than any powerpoint deck or process flow diagram. I have heard pro basketball players talk about the simplicity of great play. Good lead data is like that.

I like to think of this alignment by data at two levels: strategic and tactical. At a strategic level, marketing must understand the types of targets and audience segments that get results. Profiling the accounts that deliver revenue is the place to start in sourcing more leads that will perform in the future. I recommend a monthly review of data and a connection between the head of sales and the head of marketing to go through the results. I also suggest that every head of sales spend some time each week listening to sales professionals who are on the front line. While analytics will give some insight at a macro level, nothing beats the quality of what is really happening at the point of contact between your company and the marketplace.

At a pragmatic level, it is all about accuracy of contact and deliverability of the e-mail. E-mail has become so important to B2B sales and marketers that deliverability is a huge issue for all data. At ReachForce we look at three major points of value for data: inbound, outbound, and database. Inbound leads are extremely valuable, but depend on a customer to give you information. Because your visitor is probably more motivated to get your content than he is to give you contact information, scrubbing that data is key to making it useful. And once data is in the database, it deteriorates about as fast as hard butter in the summer time.

Of course, building and maintaining sales and marketing alignment is challenging. But remember what I have learned–deliver on the promise of high performance data and you’ll go a long ways towards success.

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Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

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The CMO Corner – Building a Differentiated Message

Filed under CMO Corner, VP of Marketing Corner

By Mike Emerson

on June 6th, 2011

90% of small companies start out without much thought about message. They either identify an audience that needs something (good probability of success but probably not a quick homerun) or they have a great product idea that is so good that it blows away the market with a whole new approach (think Google). To grow, companies begin to think strategically and one of the key turning points is awareness of the importance of building broad relationships with customers.

ReachForce has done a great job of identifying an audience with a need—B2B marketers who understand the need for better data. We have developed some of the very best technology in the world to meet that need. One of my first challenges at ReachForce is devising and executing amarketing strategy that begins to build the need for a broader and more extended ReachForce relationship. Our new messaging will emphasize our broad solution and look at the multitude of needs that we can address. Watch our website for the emerging story!

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Monday, June 6th, 2011

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