Aug 12, 2010
MediaPost, 8/12/10
Marketing executives are being asked to contribute more to their companies’ growth, but they are feeling ill-equipped to do so, according to a new study from Accenture.
“[Marketers are] being laden with more responsibility and greater responsibility for profitable growth than they were before the recession started,” Kevin Quiring, the senior executive leading Accenture’s North American marketing transformation practice, tells Marketing Daily. “That’s posing new challenges for them, and it means they have to do some things differently.”
According to a survey of 400 senior marketing executives in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, the top strategic objectives were improving operational efficiency, increasing profitability, and responding to change. However, they are hampered by inefficient business practices (21%), inadequate funding and resources (17%), poor integration with other business units (15%), a lack of required skills (13%) and lack of access to necessary customer data (6%).
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Jun 23, 2010
6/23/10, Ad Age
‘Social Media Enables the Conversations to Happen Faster, More Globally’
Dell has been an aggressive technology marketer around the world for more than two decades, but recently the company changed its global point of view. Before a major reorganization 18 months ago, Dell was organized into three worldwide regions. Now the company is organized into four product divisions, and each one is global.
Erin Mulligan Nelson, senior VP-CMO, is leading the global marketing charge and helped launch the company’s first global campaign under the new global viewpoint, a small and midsize business effort called “Take Your Own Path.”
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Jun 14, 2010
6/14/10, BtoB
The past 10 years of b-to-b marketing have been a tumultuous ride for those in the industry, marked by the dot-com crash, the explosive growth in inter-active technologies, media fragmentation and the Great Recession.
During this time, many marketing trends have come and gone, from the short-lived e-hub craze of 2000 to the emergence of social media and the explosion of new networks from Facebook to Twitter.
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May 17, 2010
Rich Vancil and Joseph A. Ferrantino
IDC, May 2010
As the economy continues to recover and so do marketing budgets, most of the increased funding will flow into digital marketing. According to IDC CMO research, company websites, digital events, search, and email are expected to do well.
Today, digital marketing requires a shift in focus from activity tracking (pageviews, messages, and registrations) to business impact. This change starts with identifying strategic business metrics and demanding business results inside and outside a company.
Download a free abstract here.
- © 2010 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.
Mar 15, 2010
Rich Vancil
I have just returned from the Bay Area where last week I moderated a panel of senior marketers on the topic of Social Media within the complex B2B marketing mix.
The more I think through the potential for this area, the more excited I become about the contributions that Social Media will eventually make to marketing.
What is most promising is that “Social” will help to transform marketing communications into what it should be: a two-way interaction between buyer and seller. Presently, much of our marketing communications is just the opposite: a one-way push of the vendor’s voice.
But Social Media is not Marketing…Yet. Mostly, it’s a jumbled mass of dialogue with a lot of static to sort through.
Social Media will become marketing when two things happen. First it needs to contribute to the “inbound” side of marketing. Web 2.0 conversations about your company’s product and services need to be mined and gleaned so that they become valuable components of your product management decisions. The litmus test here is that your product managers start to depend on those contributions.
The second thing that needs to happen is on the “Outbound” side of marketing. The litmus test here is that Social Media needs to become a primary preference for how buyers inform their decisions. IDC research shows that buyers almost always prefer to receive information from independent third parties and from their peers. So, Social Media should really shine in this application.
There is important work ahead to make it this happen. It’s all about how to operationalize your marketing organization to reap the benefits of Social Media. “Operationalize” doesn’t make it through your spell-checker… but it is on the lips of the best marketers in tech, today. Only with operational depth will Social earn its way into the marketing mix. In our latest survey of CMO’s less than one-half said that they were making “significant” progress on this task – and that’s from an audience who tend to self-rank pretty high.
Here are three operational Best Practices that I see marketing leaders taking, right now. These leaders, by the way, are moving quickly on these. My sense is that they know that these basic operational tasks need to be completed well before the inbound and outbound marketing benefits can be realized.
1. Centralize. If you have followed the IDC CMO area research, you know that we are not great fans of heavy-handed corporate marketing. But in this case we are pressing hard for this. The issue is that (Congratulations, by the way) everyone in your company is now in marketing! Well-meaning engineers are merrily blogging about a new technical advance. Your sales reps are tweeting about a local seminar that they are setting up. The problem is that we are creating the perfect environment for a major breach of data. A privacy issue will be violated; an important confidentiality will be disclosed. When this happens, the blame I think is going to wind its way back to the marketing department, regardless of marketing’s role in the breach. So, corporate marketing needs to have the basics of governance and policy in place.
The second opportunity for centralization is for shared service creation. One of my clients has five major development groups and the lead developer in each group took a separate initiative to construct a community site for the development community and their most engaged customers. Couldn’t the deployment of a master community site with five sub-divisions have saved money? Yes. And wouldn’t it be easier to then deploy a single mining tool across those sub-divisions? Yes.
2. Train. I don’t think that there is a lot of good external “courseware” for how to conduct Social Media Marketing. But wait! Remember that everyone in your company is now in marketing?? I would bet that for every 100 people who are involved in Social conversations, that you have two or three real sharp-shooters. Find those two or three, and have them train the rest.
3. Measure. Poor metrics can give good marketing activities a bad name. One of the basic faults in metrics development is measuring activities and not results. Measuring the number of Tweets or enumerating the cast of your Followers are stark examples of these errors. Measure how many buying decisions you influenced. Measure how many customer service issues you identified and passed on to the right area for resolution. It seems basic but I am surprised at how many marketers still measure just the volume, the activities. Why? Because it’s easy. You have to be willing and able to do the harder work.
“Operationalize” for Social Media. An important initiative for 2010.
Jan 22, 2010
1/22/10, ClickZ
Before we delve into my column, I want to welcome my new co-columnist in the Paid Search Strategies category, Andrew Goodman, who has been doing paid search almost as long as I have and is also a fellow author, having written “Winning Results with Google AdWords.” Those of you that get the ClickZ e-mail newsletters on search marketing will get columns from each of us on alternate weeks.
Now, on to the topic at hand: CMOs and their crazy, often unscientific marketing budgeting process, particularly as it relates to online marketing and SEM. Marketing budget allocations between media channels are totally screwy at nearly every company I’ve had an opportunity to talk with. There’s little or no science or math applied to the task of determining where to spend the first, last, or next dollar. I’ve been waiting for this to change ever since getting into traditional advertising out of grad school in 1992. I’m still waiting, but at least there’s been some movement in allocating budgets more effectively between online options. But that’s a discussion for another column. The bigger problem is that the large offline budgets in traditional media (television, radio, print, outdoor, etc.) for the most part have not migrated online to follow the consumer’s attention.
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