Generating useful information from raw data has been a challenge from the first days of business computing.  The evolution of more and better sources of data over the decades has been a two-edged sword:  As the diversity and quantity of data increased, the challenge of linking and correlating raw facts to distill new learnings grew exponentially.  Marketing often had a voracious appetite for anything these initiatives could yield.

Relatively new technologies (e.g., network ubiquity, digitalization, sensing mechanisms) generate transactional data about human activity that are orders of magnitude larger than anything seen in the past.  At the same time, some of that new data lacks traditional structures that our spreadsheet-oriented culture is familiar with (words, fields, discrete values, precise mathematical representations).  We now have mountains of visual and audio data (pictures, videos, recordings) to contend with as well.

Coping with and making sense of the onslaught requires new tools and ways of thinking.  This is what Big Data is about.  The old challenges, tools and processes are still there, but we shouldn’t think of them as Big Data.  The scale of Big Data makes it a different animal.

So what does this mean for marketing?

Marketing has always been, to a large extent, data-driven.  Big Data simply offers unprecedented opportunities to understand prospects and customers in ways that were not possible until recently.  Consider these data sources, some of which did not exist a decade ago:

• log data from websites
• feeds from a support administration system
• social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs)
• external suppliers (e.g., Acxiom, Census, Alexa)
• paid sources (e.g., Google AdWords)

And now consider these older and well-established data sources:

• feeds from a CRM (sales) system
• feeds from a support administration system
• marketing campaign responses
• offline activities (e.g., tradeshows)

By themselves each data source provides some information, but not enough to produce any significant insights or breakthroughs.  Imagine the power of linking and correlating these sources; and maintaining them with real-time updates.  That changes the rules of the game.  Two very popular uses of Big Data are customer insights and predictive analytics.  They help to answer these kinds of questions:

• What real-time offers do prospects prefer?
• What are the best web pages to serve based on an identified prospect’s interests?
• What is the probability of closing a sale with a potential customer who just filled in a web form?
• What promotions work best at particular times of the day?
• What is the probability that a prospect targeted by a nurturing campaign will make a purchase in the next six months?

Marketers understand that their biggest challenge is communicating the right offer at the right time in the right channel to prospects or existing customers.  To that end, digital interactions (email, SEO, paid search, display advertising, social media) with a target audience are far more valuable than offline equivalents.  Those transactions, if corralled and used intelligently, enable businesses to build sustained relationships with while supporting behavioral modeling and probabilistic forecasting.

Platforms and tools for managing Big Data enable companies manipulate large multi-channel datasets for such insights.  Examples of such vendors are AsterData, Netezza and Greenplum.

If you’re just starting out as a data-driven marketer, try mastering “small data” before tackling Big Data.  You’ll learn, through experiments and practice, more about your precise needs.  This clarity will serve you well when the time comes to move to the next level and commit a larger amount of effort and money.

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We therefore think these roles in the demand generation process are (or will shortly become) critical for success. Note that these are role descriptors, not necessarily job titles.

• Content Developer:  This is, essentially, an in-house journalist.  This person creates and edits compelling textual material (e.g., whitepapers, blogs, web content) that captures and holds the attention of anyone in the prospect-to-customer sales cycle.
• CRM Administrator:  Even though a CRM system is a sales platform, the administrator should sit in marketing and be responsible for configuration, maintenance, customizations and vendor management.
• Data Analyst:  This person is the marketing data custodian and skilled in extraction, reporting, interpretation and analysis.  The ability to handle overwhelming volumes of data from numerous marketing systems is a requirement. This role may also be part of a more broadly-defined Business Analyst title.
• Process Analyst:  He/she will define marketing processes and associated metrics.  This person will enable continuous improvement in the organization. This role may also be part of a more broadly-defined Business Analyst title.
• Integrated Marketing Manager:  This person defines target segments and the tactics for establishing relationships with prospects in each segment.  He/she will execute campaigns for those segments using multiple communication channels.  The metrics and results of these campaigns will be ultimately consolidated into a reporting dashboard.
• Social Media Manager:  The primary responsibilities for this role will include defining a social media strategy to solve business challenges, creating tactical plans, and executing those plans.  This person will be primarily responsible for running social media campaigns.
• Technology Analyst:  This is not unlike a typical job that was formerly in the IT domain.  This person’s primary responsibilities will be to:  respond to automation requests (including replacement of existing solutions); define the needs; create RFPs; evaluate solutions and vendors; drive the selection process; and ensure a complete implementation.
• Web Marketing Analyst:  This person is primarily responsible for the company’s website.  Included in those responsibilities will be design, development and updates.  In addition, he/she needs to manage web analytics, SEO, SEM and PPC.  Measuring, analyzing and optimizing online effectiveness is paramount.
• Nurture Campaign Specialist:  Lead nurturing is a subspecialty within the broader funnel management framework that is becoming very complex.  The creation of content, landing pages, scoring algorithms, drip campaigns, etc. are now highly specialized tasks.  Expertise with focused nurture tracks is in demand.
• PPC Manager:  He/she will have deep expertise in paid advertising via search engines, social media, relevant web properties, and so forth.  The responsibilities will include all target geographies and languages.  Optimizing advertising spend based on metrics will be another accountability in this position.

Job titles may or may not resemble this nomenclature.  But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the title is – it’s about the skills and knowledge that people bring to the table.

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First – and most important – keep your finger off the “reboot” button.  New executives sometimes feel a compulsion to clean house and start with a blank slate.  Don’t do that.  In spite what you heard in your interviews, offline gossip, etc., you may not fully understand your team’s fundamental issues or the company’s expectations.  Making changes without a substantial period of listening and observing is a high risk approach that has a relatively low probability of success.  Your new team is a rich source of information.

Take a deep breath, play a soothing melody in your head, and make the obvious rounds:  CEO, VP of Sales, the sales team, customer support, and product teams.  Find out what’s working; what’s not; and as much as possible about perceptions.  Some questions to keep in mind:

• Are marketing’s objectives aligned with those of other organizations, especially sales?
• What’s the state of metrics reporting and dashboards, particularly where ROI is concerned?
• Are workflow processes organized and documented; and are accountabilities for executing those processes clear?
• How strong is the existing marketing team?  Who are the top performers?
• What financial controls are in place?  (For example:  budgets, advertisement versus event spend)

Answering these questions will provide a clearer picture of your organization’s status and allow you to define precisely the gap between the current and desired future state.  Equally important is understanding the executive team’s expectations.  This includes the official line AND the not-so-visible agendas that exist in every company.

Your next step is to develop a strategic plan to bring the organization to that desired state over the longer term.  Next, focus on tactics to bridge the gap, e.g., short term wins and steps to boost morale.  Review these strategies and tactics with the management team first.

After locking in full management support, present the overall plan to your inherited team.  This is a critical step because their unconditional backing and engagement will make or break your effort.  Focus on quick wins to enhance your credibility, which in turn will allow you more flexibility to make changes, bring in proven performers, and so forth.  Use this period to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of everyone in the team.  Ensure that each individual is accountable for deliverables that suit his/her skills and talents.

Two areas need special attention:  You must have good people on the team who can define, generate and report metrics.  As well, you need one or more people who can produce high quality written content.  Get them in place quickly if they aren’t already there.

The next step should be evaluating your external providers, e.g., public relations, SEO consultant, SEM agency, design firm, website consultant, and content writers.  There may an opportunity to reduce costs by consolidating.  Even more important:  You may want to bring some of these tasks back into your organization to enable more hands-on control.  The resulting flexibility and speed may be worth the extra expense.  For example, having an in-house website manager allows your team to make frequent and rapid changes without worrying about bureaucracy and ongoing incremental costs.

One of the last steps in your assessment will be an evaluation of tools and technologies that support your organization’s processes.  General guidelines for this process are difficult because each context is unique.  There may be some opportunities to automate manual processes; but nowadays it’s just as likely that an organization may have the wrong – or too many – software solutions.  Or the tools may be unconnected or operate in spheres of isolation.  Don’t get lost in the details.  You may need broad and out-of-box thinking to revamp those investments for improved productivity or reduced costs.

Don’t confuse poor processes (or the lack of defined processes) with the poor implementation of tools.  In the same vein, you may not able to assess the efficacy of a solution (or set of solutions) until you find a way to measure its performance.  Strong opinions, often disguised as blame, are rarely good substitutes for hard facts.

Finally, never forget this point:  You must focus on defining and refining marketing processes on a continuing basis.  A marketer is also a scientist:  You need to experiment constantly with channels, content and programs to understand what’s effective, what scales, and what “sticks”.  There is no substitute for ongoing testing and measurement.

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Although the fundamentals of marketing apply to all businesses regardless of size, specific processes and supporting automation solutions don’t always scale up or down.  We think these are salient factors when considering the differences between small and large companies:

• Sales cycles for complex products and services are longer.  Usually – but not exclusively – complex offerings come from larger companies.
• Enterprises have more dedicated marketing staff as well as well as dedicated subspecialists with deep expertise.  By the same token, smaller businesses typically have people who are marketing generalists or who may wear many functional hats.
• SMBs depend more on automation to scale their marketing efforts because the incremental cost of personnel and external contractors is more burdensome.
• Small businesses often value speed over process, while the opposite is frequently true for enterprises.

What do these differences mean in practical terms for SMBs?
We think one consideration overrides everything else:  An SMB marketer must constantly test demand generation tactics – in a focused manner and on a small scale – before making big commitments.  Here are some ideas for narrowing the scope of such experiments:

• Segment your marketplace; then test on a single segment.
• Try one channel at a time.
• Use different lead nurturing cycles and methods.
• Alter your content and try it with a specific audience.

Changing one or very few variables with each test will make key learnings clear and allow you to refine larger-scale efforts.  Define the essential metric(s) before you start.  Keep in mind that failures – as well as successes – are a good thing.  Any information you glean from experiments is ultimately useful.

We’ve come to understand that comprehensive turnkey marketing automation solutions are better for SMBs, even at the expense of flexibility or functionality.   In contrast, enterprises have the luxury, by virtue of their size, to evaluate and choose best-of-breed tools for specific processes.  Key functions of a compact all-in-one solution will include:

• list management
• campaign management
• content provisioning
• prospect behaviour tracking
• lead scoring
• CRM integration

Marketing fundamentals are the same, regardless of the context.  Tactics and tools necessarily differ according to scale.  You can’t be successful at demand generation without keeping this in mind.

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Let’s review the obvious tactical remedies.

• Segment and focus like there’s no tomorrow:  Your marketplace is not homogenous.  You need to carve it into pieces that distinguish themselves from each other by virtue of characteristics pertaining to unique needs and purchasing proclivities.  Your content, messaging, style – in other words, everything – need to be tuned for a particular segment.  The process is tough, but shortcuts usually generate inferior results.
• Get the process religion:  If you haven’t defined your lead generation processes, you can’t measure them.  And that means that you can’t tune them in a methodical manner.  Your sales funnel is, essentially, out of control without defined processes.  Of more importance:  The people who work for you can’t do their jobs properly without process documentation.
• Get the measurement religion:  You can’t improve what you don’t measure.  Metrics underpin funnel management and, ultimately, demand generation success.
• Test – Adjust – Repeat:  If you don’t experiment and test on a limited basis before scaling up a campaign, you are not a real marketer.  You risk losing a lot of money on big bets that may or may not yield desired results.  Lists, content, offers and calls to action require constant review.  Think “survival of the fittest”.  Ruthless pruning may be required.

Here are more strategic therapies.

• Get the right staff:  Effective people trump experienced people.  Quality is more important than quantity (be it years of experience, amount of education, or whatever).  If you have mutual trust with proven associates from previous jobs, use those people.  They can make you look good quickly.  Remember to delegate effectively, communicate frequently, and operate transparently.
• Build good lists:  You can’t have effective marketing campaigns without good lists.  Maintaining list quality today is more complicated due to the explosive growth of sources and data types.  Use external lists, outreach and subscriptions to improve the quality of your in-house lists.  Devise new ways to encourage people to subscribe to your content.
• Use appropriate performance measures:  Marketing organizations typically evaluate themselves based on the number of leads they pass to their sales organizations each month.  That’s a reasonable service level agreement for newer or less mature companies, but this standard focuses on quantity rather than quality.  Mature businesses or businesses operating in saturated markets should reverse those priorities by implementing lead scoring systems and mapping those probabilities to actual sales.  Use a feedback loop to improve your scoring algorithms.  If implemented, this helps immensely to align marketing and sales.
• Build relationships through lead nurturing:  Sustaining and measuring extended relationships with prospects is a delicate process.  You need to maintain awareness, measure interest, and ultimately lock in a preference over a lengthy period.  The lead nurture process is not a “one size fits all” proposition.  You need to define and use segment-specific nurturing tracks, while scoring prospects dynamically, to glean clues about their propensity to purchase.

Sick funnels cannot be cured overnight.  But a faithful application of the doctor’s orders described above can, over the long term, restore a patient to good health.  That funnel will run triathlons and be the engine that drives great sales performance.

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What went wrong in that example?  These questions may reveal underlying deficiencies.

• Did you identify your target prospects?
• Did you understand target market?
• Did you build a precise profile of a prospective customer?
• Did you customize your offer to preferences of each segment?
• Did characteristics of the target segment drive the selection of marketing tactics?
• Did you test on a small scale to decide which channels and campaigns to scale?

Sometimes we need to go back to Marketing 101.  It’s important to remember these basics before investing time and resources:

• Know the target segment well BEFORE starting.
• Content is the foundation of everything.
• Test before scaling.
• Measure and monitor constantly.  Cut your losses if warning signs appear.

 
Some underlying problems are frequently subtle and not so easy to identify at first glance.  You may need to explore these questions:

• Do you have a funnel management process?  If so, is does everyone understand and embrace it?
• Do you employ enough people to run that process?
• Is your content segment-specific?  Do you understand the message and objective for each piece of content?  Is it clear?  Is it compelling?
• Are you nurturing leads that are not ready to purchase immediately?
• Are you building enduring relationships with customers AND prospects?

Perhaps most important:  Marketing and sales must jointly own the problem identification process as well as the cure.  This is critical.

I’ll talk about treating the patient in the next post for this series.  As well, I’ll go beyond the simple absence of illness.  We want sales funnels to be fit enough to run triathlons!

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These changes demand new skill sets.  We think there are five of them that modern marketers should master.

Search Engine Optimization

This is obvious – it’s the way all of us do research on the Internet.  You need to ensure that customers can find you easily.

Social Media

You may think this doesn’t matter, but guess again.  Technology has obliterated old barriers to mass expression, collaboration and so forth.  Whether you like it or not, people are discussing your business, products and services in new digital venues.  It’s important to be aware of and to participate in those conversations.

Apps

Apps are lightweight software tools that can be assembled quickly and inexpensively; and they operate at relatively low cost.  You can create them for internal use, or they may be used in customer-facing contexts.  Mashups, a common type of app, brings together other apps, data sources and services in unique ways to deliver actionable information or new services that could not have been derived in another way.  Examples of enabling technologies are:

• application programming interfaces (APIs);
• widgets (pre-built pieces of a graphical user interface);
• software as a service (SaaS), otherwise known as “cloud computing”; and
• programming languages such as Javascript.

You don’t need to know how to build something using these technologies, but you must understand the opportunities they create and how to form reasonable expectations.  Without that knowledge, conversations with developers will be difficult, if not unproductive.

Websites

Web technology has advanced dramatically during the last several years.  Pages with static content, coded only with simple HTML, seem old and less appealing.  Dynamic content is what’s “hot”, but underneath the hood are many advanced tools.

Familiarity – not proficiency – is the key to managing the power unleashed by these tools.  These technologies are the lingua franca of the user-facing portion of the Internet, and you need to be able to speak intelligently to web developers.  Comfort with the underlying concepts is critical for extracting the most from your development team.  Without that familiarity, you’ll suffer misunderstandings, delays and ultimately credibility gaps.

Demand Generation

Do you maintain a sales funnel?  If so, do you and your team understand those maintenance processes at all stages, including how to fill that funnel with prospects?  Do you measure what you do and continually refine your campaigns based on that data?

The sales funnel concept is an old one, but demand generation today is a scientific endeavor that uses process analysis and metrics to bind marketing and sales to each other.  Understanding this is mandatory.  The age of functional silos and “throwing it over the wall” is over.  Integration and alignment across organizations are prerequisites for success.

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Our team recently spent time pondering common threads pertaining to broken marketing departments, CMOs who fix (or try to fix) them, and how executives in other functions perceive their performance.  Some blog posts and articles from GigaOM, Tippingpoint Labs, and Marketing Week fueled our discussion of this complex set of issues.

It’s no secret that the average CMO tenure is short relative to those of other executives.  What accounts for this?  That’s not an easy question to answer, but here are some of the usual suspects:

• poor sales performance
• perceived CMO’s contribution value is low in the overall profit-loss context
• inability to tie marketing investments to specific sales or improved productivity
• CMO’s emphasis on more abstract values (e.g., branding) instead of the concrete (e.g., metrics)
• dependence on technology instead of fixing behaviors and processes

Note that we’re not assigning blame.  The list represents perceptions, which are usually more important than reality.

Forbes contributor John Ellett is writing a series of CMO profiles and recently interviewed Kimberly-Clark president Tony Palmer.  (Palmer was promoted to that position after an outstanding six-year stint as CMO.)  In that article, Ellet distilled his wisdom about CMO departures to four causes:

• They failed to meet expectations and were asked to leave.
• The boss failed and was replaced; and the new boss cleaned house.
• They attained their goals, became bored, and sought a new challenge.
• They had a dramatic positive impact on the business and earned a promotion to president, CEO or COO.

Here’s another interesting (if tangential) facet of this discussion:  Adrian Ott, in a Fast Company blog post, reports on career expert Kathryn Ullrich’s new book that describes career paths to the CMO/VP Marketing position.  It turns out that only 1/3 of individuals who arrived there did so by virtue of their marketing experience.  Significant numbers of these folks had other backgrounds, e.g. domain expertise, sales, analytic/strategic.  The analytical background might be a surprise, but it makes perfect sense with the current emphasis on search engine marketing and social media.

New CMOs typically face difficult challenges.  If a predecessor was great, matching that level of performance will be the minimum expectation.  And in some cases, the bar will be even higher.  On the other hand, landing in a broken organization is fraught with peril.  Meeting the “miracle worker” standard – always implied, if not stated explicitly – can be very tough.

Would an immediate investment in the latest marketing technologies and tools – if none are in use – yield significant improvements quickly?

We are (obviously) huge technology fans and believe in the power of automation and the Internet to dramatically improve marketing effectiveness.  That said, we do not recommend undertaking a technology implementation without a thorough review of a new environment.

Where does one start?

We’ll explore that question in subsequent posts.

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We view a funnel as a sales process owned jointly by sales and marketing. Both organizations – as well as contributors in other places – fill it at the top with prospects. The journey to the end of the funnel (conversion to a customer) involves filtering, nurturing, intelligence-gathering and traditional sales techniques. The nature of these processes weed out, at various stages, those prospects who are least likely to buy.

The steepness of funnel walls may be viewed, conceptually, as a health indicator. It’s something like measuring a person’s body temperature. For example, if those walls are too steep or too narrow, lead velocity may be too high. Key funnel processes may be operating poorly, or not at all.

Whatever the nature of the malady, sales and marketing together are accountable for curing the patient.

Does your funnel show any of these symptoms?

• lead volumes too small
• lead volumes too large
• slow velocity through the funnel
• lead-to-sale ratio below industry standard

Symptoms from outside the funnel may include:

• lack of accuracy in reports from CRM and marketing automation systems
• prospects complain about duplicate emails
• many duplicates in the CRM system
• can’t generate useful lists from the CRM system

Let’s look at an example that illustrates some of these symptoms.

You are trying to sell an enterprise class network security solution to Fortune 100 companies. You invested in offline advertising (billboard, TV, print) as well as online channels (SEO, PPC and a social media campaign). Over a six week period, you drove over 10,000 visitors to your website. In spite of your large marketing expenditure, no sales close.

What went wrong?  How do you go about isolating and fixing these problems?

I’ll explore the diagnosis and treatment of sick funnels in subsequent postings.

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But more often than not, basic guidelines of content marketing are forgotten and rules flouted, undoing the value of the entire effort. Look closely at various forms of content marketing that you read every day: articles, websites, webinars, newsletters, whitepapers, and even ads and demos.  You are likely to find mistakes that content marketers have committed unwittingly.

Here’s a list of mistakes that we think are all too common:

1. Blowing your own trumpet: This is probably among the biggest mistakes content marketers make. If every piece of content that comes out of your system sounds like a sales pitch, more often than not, you will scare the prospect away. How many of us love door-to-door salesmen intruding into our space, boring us with their sales talk, and causing us to stop listening—even to information that might be valuable? Hard-selling, self-promoting content can have the same effect.

2. Offline only please: Many organizations still prefer to spend their big bucks on offline marketing. Despite the pervasive presence of social media and various content-sharing tools available online, our ‘love-the-offline-world’ CMOs continue to allocate larger budgets to TV, print, and radio. Although a hybrid mix of content marketing channels is recommended, it is time to explore the various tools that are available online to share and leverage the brilliant content you produce.

3. Overkill: You develop content for purposes that include lead-generation, thought- leadership, introducing brand language, direct selling, or improving customer relationships. Too much content bores your audience members. They may never want to look at your blog, website, or newsletter again. It is important that the content communicate a message concisely. The message needs to include a call-for-action that induces the prospect to become progressively more engaged with your company.

4. Forgetting the larger picture: This happens all the time not only with respect to content marketing, but also with running businesses and even with running our personal lives. It is important to analyze and understand what you want your prospect to glean from your content and do in response to it. It is also crucial to understand the messaging that is required by your marketing strategy and then develop content that communicates this message across media: blogs, tweets, press releases, videos, presentations, etc. The message needs to be coherent and support the larger picture.

5. Quantity over Quality: Jumping onto the social media bandwagon and creating accounts on a large number of social media platforms can be a waste of time. Activities such as achieving a goal of posting five blog articles each week, producing white papers just to meet a quota, and communicating the same message in different formats are of little value (and may even be detrimental) if the quality of these efforts is poor and if they are repetitive. To ensure quality, often less is more.

If you have a good marketing plan, and if you avoid these five common mistakes, your communications will have a much greater probability of supporting your plan and bringing you the desired results.

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