What’s happening to your Marketing ROI?
Reporting live from the enterprise marketing 2.0 conference – DAY 2
9:12 So, we had a nice first day, today we will be split in 2 workstreams. B2b and b2c. I will be following most of the b2b tracks, starting with my own presentation, co-presenting with @robdenrooijen.
10:08 presentation went well I guess, good audience interaction. Interesting q+a; @robdenrooijen: in order to be allowed spending marketing money on programmes with uncertain outcome, like the Dyneema Experience campaign, the management needs to have belief in a possible success. Also @mennol: marketing is a cost, not an investment. In order to get your budgets, focus on explaining the value of your customer engagements, not on proving the ROI…
10:09 Ericson on content marketing. Content is in the people, we have the people, so we have the content. This does mean that in order to be successful with your content marketing, you need to organise and coordinate internally. Interesting example by Ericsson in co-sponsorship with mashable in the social good summit. Very successful outcome could not have happened without an internal network of social drivers, bloggers and editors.
10:25 SCORE! ( i dont believe it was actually me, but 1-0 for the ROI disbelievers): Ericsson has abandoned ROI as a marketing metric and chose a more qualitative approach, using statistical “deep dives” on a more tactical level, aimed at learning and improving. I do wonder how they defend their marketing budgets though…
11:08 dassault systemes on lead generation. Social media strategy started with customer survey, asking which social channels and networks were most popular. Philosophy: english garden model (allow for growth) not french garden (meticulously planned and cut). This is quite something coming from a french company ;-). is is clearly visible, looking at their social media portfolio, that dassault is an IT technology company. They show a deep understanding of connecting to and integrating with all kinds of external systems, like fb, li, tw…
11:29 confirmation by dassault: make sure that every campaign channel ends up with a form on a landing page. This way you can measure campaign/channel effectiveness. NB still not clear how they measure activities that have no clear cta yet.
11:32 ALAS, its 1-1 now, dassault is making a case for ROI… They are also using synthesio for social media monitoring, like carlsberg. Worth checking out?
11:53 dassault learnings: test and learn, integrate tools, value of social media is creating sustainable relationships. Integrate tools: dassault is using eloqua, but unclear how this is integrated with e.g. Synthesio or sales crm systems.
11:45 philips: when you are a big player, in social media (check e.g. The innovation in health LI group), the usual problems of being able to measure the impact of your activities are magnified as well. Interesting approach: digital marketing is bridging the gap between marketing and sales: the digital bridge. Learnings: establish agreement between marketing and sales; agree on single database; follow 360 degree approach in social media. Take baby steps, not huge leaps.
12:02 philips: how to get sales involved: lead by example says philips, success will get followers. Havent heard the word ROI yet, philips focussing on long term relationships.
13:18 restarting after yet another great lunch, compliments to the moevenpick city hotel.
13:20 SB talent workshop. On digital food printing… And how it affects the market. We are the “chefs” and need to figure out what the opportunities and threats are…
Opportunities
– scalability, not the restaurant, but the world
– new business models: license IP
– ink cartridge metaphor, new distribution channels
– Signature dishes, signature ink
– Creative freedom, new opportunities, new form factors, new experiments
– new markets, medical
– cross media integration: willy wonka
– content development, live cookbook
– less messy kitchen, less local food and health risks
Threats
– lose the experience, need to compensate
– copycats, piracy, IP infringements, liabilities, misuse
– lose authenticity, change to the profession
– slow food movement
– regulator risks (fda)
What the chefs will do:
The fast movers and the retailers will disappear. We will “own” all the ip in the market and we will use partners to bring it to market.
We will partner with a food ingredient and nutrition ink producer (DSM) and we will attach our recipes to the ink cartridges, in an exclusive licensing model, time limited
We will partner with a printer producer (philips) to produce signature printers, the printer that print haute cuisine
Our agent will get us lucrative contracts with sony/universal for recipe placement in movies or “dinner with Angelina” moments: we will do tours “chefs on the road” connected with musical bands or otjer entertainment. Here we will demonstrate how to really cook, the old way.
Our organization will simplify, no need for staff, cleaning, waiters, etc. We will have an agent, a lawyer, a small r&d department with sous-chefs and a communication jockey and of course a personal assistant.
14:45 this was a great workshop by @sbtalent!
15:32 deutsche post / dhl showing bakertweet and extensive film on dpdhl social media activities.
Dpdhl having issues with identity theft on Facebook, possible brand damage. initiatives by employees that reflect badly on the brand “(we just deliver the shit on time)”. Slow reations to “news crises” leading to brand damage. Doing nothing is not an option for DHL. Strategy rests on three major pillars: 1. Governance, 2 intelligence (monitoring) 3. Engaging.
15:53 dpdhl using local german supplier for social media monitoring because they wanted some customizations done. It seems to me that the social media monitoring market in europe is still open for all kinds of new entrants, mainly because of the language problem but also because of the need for specialised skills and even customisation. Both dpdhl and dassault choose for supplier “close to home”.
15:57 interesting approach. In order to get board support you do a board report: two weekly social media report on issues close to the heart of the board. Will get you support to do more.
16:07 dpdhl using yammer for internal social networking. They say top level support has proven to be critical for adoption success.
16:15 thanks to irina and kgsglobal to have organised this. Lots of food for thought and im sure this will lead to interesting new insight!
Reporting live from the enterprise marketing 2.0 in amsterdam – DAY 1
9:29 tension between f2f relationships and virtual relationships. Where to invest your time and resources. Jack vincent to set the scene on em20
9:32 using bono.bo social network for events, interesting concept, bringing the physical and virtual together. bonobo check it out
9:45 interesting video on social media guidelines by Zurich Financial services on youtube: zurich social
10:08 watching the electrolux #ultrasilencer multi channel campaign i cant stop thinking about owning a vacuum cleaner with built in ipod player. Replace the ugly sound by favorite music while vacuuming. Impressive buzz results. Great concept for integrating digital and physical experiences. Shame its not real yet, but who knows… Also great case to start thinking about #openinnovation
10:33 canon: email marketing very important to digital success. Why? Not conclusive, it seems to me that there a conflicting messages about email marketing: being that email marketing is still very important in the mix e.g. Marketingsherpa, others being that subscribers are leaving their newsletters at lightning speed e.g. Hubspot. Ill be asking canon about this.
11:36 Deutsche Telekom – online marketing. Making a case that in order to be successful they need to be in control of every aspect. This means getting knowledge and skills on board and not depend too much on agencies. Need for process control… Drive traffic, convert, retain. This does imply employing large teams of people with skill that are scarce. Wonder how they do that.
11:52 still at DT presentation: role of OLM in product life-cycle: paradigm is that many products a both a distribution channel for OLM as well as a revenue generating product. Ergo: the Online marketer becomes the product developer. Huge challenge for DT to get the traditional (telco oriented) product community to change their thinking towards this paradigm. From telco to internet company? That is what we would call business model innovation… DT calls it 360degree
12:06 DT really favoring the Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) kpi. I do not necessarily agree, but i do wonder how they are using it.
12:12 question how the tmobile virals are added in the olm mix? Answer: dt separates brand comms (also online) from business lead generating activities. Interesting approach but raises questions: How do they activate their brand. How do they bridge the gap between brand messaging and individual engagement?
12:17 carlsberg group: GLOCAL approach, global brand supporting local initiatives. Quote “content is still king but only if people talk about it” so who’s the real king? Its all about engagement. Content is a means to an end. An important one though… Talks about consumer passion points, sounds better than ROMI… Nice viral film: carlsberg challenge
12:41 estee lauder: digital luxury marketing. Starting with film: video sharing seems to be prime fashion these days 🙂 and very luxurious indeed. Great punch line for their marketing strategies: quote “telephone, telegraphe, tell-a-woman”, by mme. Lauder herself. Still valid today. Key fundamentals: get enough of the right people in your teams. Measure what you want to be succesful at: no need to be everywhere… Quote “its not about the money but the content and the engagement”. Even though they realise that in the end its about money or sales, Esteelauder finds that difficult to measure and relate back to engagement to their stories.
13:16 best western hotels: how to relaunch a brand that depends on inconsistency and different experiences in each hotel? “hotels with personality” From planning the trip through evaluating the stay there are many touch points, both online and physical. Every tough point gives opportunity to engage. BW has defined journeys, predominantly based on email marketing, for each of their prio segment. Pretty much hardwired processes based on triggers, but with maximal personalization. Much like canon. I wonder how they, like canon, see the future scenarios of decreasing reach and acceptance of email marketing by target audience. Data, integrating data and actually “doing something useful with it” is one of the biggest challenges to the BW team. Take away tips: be bold, customer first “dont need social media strategy, need customer strategy”, think in terms of customer journeys, not individual engagements, measure, learn and improve..
14:51 restarting after a great lunch. Interactive session by hans ruinemans. We’ve all taken a test. We are following some method from some management book. Those who know me, know how I dislike management books, but I’ll keep an open mind.
15:17 nice breakout group with dsm, beiersdorf, dell, carlsberg and also some funky people from dutch and scandanavian agencies. How do we measure social media? Dell uses radian6 but not locally because of the language problems. Carlsberg uses different tooling: syntesio where the localization problems have been solved. One has to be careful not to be distracted from the important kpis by all kinds of detailed features that give you more data, not necessarily more insight. The LEVEL of the kpi is very important.
15:49 i think we are converging on the idea that in order to fully benefit from the interactions and reactions in social media, organisational change is required, which is usually costly in many ways. … and the business case is not easily made.
15:53 interesting thoughts from my table: rewards in a campaign are overrated, it usually means that the campaign is not well thought through. People are willing to to through great lengths without receiving a reward, just as long as they can increase their social capital.
16:30 EDF on the power of content marketing. If content makes your company more human, than content marketing is about convincing others that you indeed are human? Important elements: be honest, open, disclosed, simple, helpful etc. Other important element: make your content work and repurpose everywhere, including audience responses. Tip for good video style: fast and honest is better than expensive and sleek.
16:51 edf making a big idealistic case for the Content Champion, aka the person who is the real human representing the virtual human that your companies content represent. Still following? Lightning fast high quality presentation by Carolyne Clarke, recommend to review her presentation on content marketing if you can get your hands on it. Food for thought.
17:11 DELL. Top down commitment really important, so a hand written note by micheal dell himself helps implementing social strategies. Real story: the dellhell episode in 2005 put the house on fire and with all business houses on fire, usually one of two things happen: business disappears or business rises from the ashes more successful. The latter seems the case with dell. Impressive real estate in social space… Inside information says that they have a team of 20 people dedicated to internal social media enablement (training etc.).
17:24 what is the simplest social media policy? Rule 1: though shalt be a certified social media professional in order to speak for the company. Rule 2: go to rule 1. And of course develop a certification on various topics (tone of voice, conduct, various networks like linked in, facebook etc.)
17:26 HURRAY, finally someone openly strikes through the words marketing roi! Its about engagement and loyalty. Compliments to dell for seeing and believing.
17:48 BT its up to my former colleague @wellbelove to keep us from running for a snack. – getting late :-). His key message: start with your message and accept the fact that your message is going to be talked back to. Scary thought for most marketers. Quote ” everyone can be a blogger, you can be a blogger” well i guess even i can be. But very true and again scary thoughts for most marketers…
18:00 @welbelove says: don’t use we/our/us but use third person in your writings and blogs. You never know who is going to reuse your content and where, so better be clear. Future content has to be social or else it is not going to be found and so are you…
18:18 well that’s it for today, preparing for the sushi boat ride and more to follow here tomorrow.
DUTCH ARTICLE: Integrated Customer Engagement de uitdaging voor 2012 en verder?
Beste lezer,
Klik weg, lees dit artikel even (en kom dan weer terug…): http://www.adformatie.nl/nieuws/bericht/individuele-dialoog-bedrijven-met-klanten-moeilijk/
Verrassing?
Dacht het niet… De echte uitdaging is namelijk voor de hand liggend: wat gaan we eraan doen?
Welke gevolgen heeft dit voor mijn marketing plan 2012?
Hoe kan ik dit meetbaar maken, en ook nog uitleggen aan de baas?
Welke wijzigingen in mijn organisatie, mijn processen en mijn ondersteunende tools moet ik doen? Hoe implementeer ik dat?
Meld je aan voor de ICEwebinars (www.icewebinars.com).
3 ways to cut your marketing budget and still keep smiling
More on: www.icewebinars.com
It’s planning time… The economy is not flourishing yet, to put it mildly. Companies are facing difficulties in keeping shareholders happy by reducing risks, assembling enough “armor” to shield against continued economic adversities and at the same time planning to show healthy numbers. What does this mean for the marketer? Pressure on the budgets, just like there was in previous years. Here are three tips for responsible budget cutting :
1. Apply the cutter where the expected impact is lowest.
Cutting “across the board” is simple enough: if your budget needs to drop 10% then simply cut every item by 10% and you’ll be laughing again! Big danger: some items are impacted more by the cut than others. You risk affecting the end result by more than 10%. Furthermore, you’ll find that other items cannot be cut at all: the sponsorship program that you committed to for three years or the CEO dinner party that the boss really likes. Think in terms of impact, not activities.
2. Keep a fixed part of your budget for innovation and experimentation.
Cutting “what we are unsure of” may be a sensible choice, not? If we don’t know what a particular program will bring us next year, we will de-prioritise it for the benefit of others. Big danger: you’ll be cutting away innovative programs that may be your future winners. Moreover, elements that are not as measurable as e.g. your homepage, are not necessarily bad. Your future customer may even like them! Remember that experimentation is what made online and social marketing big.
3. Take what worked well in the past and use it to justify next year’s programs.
Cutting “everything that does not contribute to the sales targets”: ahh… that’s and old one isn’t it? This easily leads to long discussions about the role of marketing (long-term?) and the role of sales (short-term?), especially in B2B. If your role is tactical sales support only, than no problem: just start cutting and lean closely towards the sales teams. But if your company depends on product innovation, if the sales cycles for high value products can be long, if long-lasting customer relationships are key to your success or if you are in a complex value chain beware: you’ll risk squandering future opportunities. Recommended action: try to find evidence of how marketing contributed to some very successful customer accounts, and still does. Create some “engagement routes” a customer could follow to grow from nothing to ambassador, plotted in time. Use this to make your case.
And of course: keep smiling, it’s just part of the job!
If you want some more tips, please check out: www.icewebinars.com
3D marketing
Sony says: “You can buy the TV of the Future now”. Of course they are referring to their new 3D bravia. This development in consumer electronics gives me mixed emotions. Or, to be precise, it gives me headaches, literally. Maybe I’m just one of those people who can’t deal with 3D, although in B2B marketing we have to deal with even more dimensions: time, message, channel, buying cycle, buyer, funnel…
These cause headaches too. Where can we buy the “marketing of the future”? Now please?
The demand waterfall
Ok, here are some snippets of info from the morning session, which proved to be very interesting. I need to digest this information more, but it seems that the Marketing Continuum is spot on….
I do worry a bit that we are looking at something only the very large and mature marketing organisations can afford to implement in their business processes. We have seen a nice testimonial from Symantec EMEA, where it took them 9 months and (estimating) at least 6fte and expensive BI software to implement a single overview of how marketing contributes to sales and the pipeline. And it takes at easily (estimating again) 300-600k yearly to maintain. Impressive results, but can you afford it? There must be something less impactful and equally effective…
Anyway, here goes.
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Closed loop marketing and sales organisations are more profitable and have higher revenue growth. Taxonomy between marketing and sales is important.
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OLD: sales, lead generation and branding
NEW: sales, field marketing and reputation development
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Gap between marketing and marketing? Lead gen functions pushing comms or pr functions out of the ecosystem…
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Nurturing and feedback loop essential to maximise your intial investment. A loss now maybe a win in the future…
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Intitial alignment between marketing and sales:
What kind of demand do we need?
What is the target market?
What is a lead (agreed taxonomy, Budget, authority, need, timeline)
What is the buying cycle
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Lead funnel is essentially a workflow, with formal handovers to marketing to sales etc.
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Seed the market, create the leads, enable the sales force, accelerate the closing process, nurture the “fall out”.
Sirius Decisions Europe summit 2010
We are @ park plaza riverbank in london, witnessing the first EUropean summit of the Sirius Decisions company. Partcipants predominantly from marketing automation suppliers and it industry. Mostly uk based, some belgian, dutch (me and my business partner) exceptions. We will be discussing issues around sales and marketing alingment, like:
Why is a b2b sales cycly 22pct longer in 2010 than it was in 2001?
Why are sales people only spending 18pct of their time selling?
The WEB generates 54pct of all leads today, growing to 71pct in 2015.
The impact of mobule devices, expecting to outgrow fixed devices as dominant web access tool.
Ill be submitting subsequent reports later today, afterwards Ill provide the links to relevant resources.
Enjoy!
B2B Marketing: the hard life
So, there you are, seasoned B2B marketer, carrying the scars of all the turf battles with the sales teams, your skin has thickened and you have grown insensitive to cynical remarks about “marketing ROI”. Your experience has grown as fast as your budgets have shrunken over the past years, you are now used to doing without the free advice of your strategic agency because it’s not free anymore, and finally you have come to terms with the fact that your (newest) boss doesn’t understand you. And still, everyday your life becomes more difficult…
You are increasingly aware that only one thing remains for you to control: your Own Performance, and it is slipping away. Why is this? You’re still putting in the effort and the hours, your commitment hasn’t diminished and you’re still good looking too!
I don’t have the answer, but I do have a theory: it is your ability to learn and grow that, by no fault of your own, has been compromised.
Over the past years marketers have been flooded by an every increasing swell of new possibilities, tools, opinions, books, blogs and (not in the least) unprompted advice – all coming from the online world, also known as the internet, interweb, web, social web and walhalla. It only takes one look at e.g. http://mashable.com/business to get a sneak preview of utter confusion. The abundance of choice has caused an enormous inflation of the Marketers Universe and at the same time left many in dismay, reverting back to what they know, back to what they can prove and back to what they are good at. It has also led to numerous erratic experiments in (e.g.) the social space and early, often misguided, conclusions and advice about what works and what doesn’t.
And to make things worse, all the channels, tools and devices you use spit out an endless stream of data, which you need to be able to digest, understand, compare, analyze and integrate in comprehensive reports, designed to convince your boss, who by definition is more critical and ignorant than you are.
In a sense there is a striking similarity with the world of the athlete. The art of improving performance when everyone and his dog is giving free advice about what (not) to eat and when, how to lose weight, how to maximize training output, what kind of training works best, which exercises to do, how to plan, how to peak, how to get sponsors, how to win, need I go on? Here too is a constant information stream about new developments, tools, kit, nutritional supplements, training programs, the good, the bad and the ugly guru’s etc. And the ones who call the shots, the bosses – the sponsors and the public – are demanding better performance all the time without any understanding of the day to day challenges. No wonder so many give up or crack at key moments. But others seems to be able to deal with this and succeed brilliantly. What makes the difference?
I’m sure there is an element of talent involved, but as an enthusiast and not so talented (tri)athlete I have come to rely on these few principles, which I mostly had to learn the hard way:
1. There is no holy grail or magic bullet, be critical, always;
2. Get a coach, he/she will shield you from the confusion and if it doesn’t work you can always get another one;
3. Don’t draw conclusions on single performances, there are too many variables and assumptions; be patient and not afraid to fail; keep your eyes on the horizon;
4. Do things that are FUN to do, it will keep you motivated to push on when it gets hard;
5. Set up a system of goals and measurement that works for YOU, not others; your ability to learn, grow and improve depends on it.
In fact, I don’t see why this couldn’t work for you too, B2B marketer. I’m not saying it will make life less hard, but it will put YOU back in control.
B2B Marketing tools
B2B web marketing platforms
Interesting debate on B2B marketing platforms on http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2010/02/08/b2b-web-marketing-the-platform-battle/
Question is: who will win this battle CRM or CMS?
I would say: none of the above.
Last week I had a conversation with a tool vendor trying to convince me that it would be best if I threw away my e-mail marketing point solution (SAAS model) and replace it by some module built in their next version of a CMS (“yes it will be there in April…”). Why would that be better? Will it make me a better marketer? Will it enable me to serve my customers better? Or will it lock me in to that particular CMS, making it difficult for me to replace it for something better that may come along in the future? No, I’ll stick with the cheap point solutions, loosely integrated through web services. Cheap, flexible and (most important) expendable.
Years of ERP and CRM faillures should have tought us that there is no such thing as a “suite” or a platform that actually offers a long term advantage over point solutions. Businesses change, customers change, markets change, communities change, management changes, software versions change – need I go on?
My bet would be to derive your current need for tooling from your current business strategies and realities. And when things change, throw the obsolete functions away, and please ignore all IT people advising you otherwise, especially tool vendors.
Use your functionality for what is was made to do and don’t customise it
Menno Lijkendijk
Think, Feel, Marketing, B2B 