Five Tips for Successful Multi-Channel Conversion

With smartphone use growing and tablet sales set to hit 126 million this year, it’s all too easy for marketers to become overwhelmed by the challenges of multi-channel retailing and e-Commerce. But multi-channel commerce need not need be complex if we remind ourselves that it’s for people that interact with brands, not algorithms or stats on a dashboard.

These five tips, gleaned from our work with leading multi-channel brands, will help make the challenges of multi-channel retail surmountable, by bringing users into focus.

1. Act on Insight and Data, not Hype

It’s all too easy to get carried along by technical hype. Although this can be exciting and enjoyable, it’s fraught with danger if you don’t measure impact and base your business decisions on data, rather than what’s cool.

In a recent Forrester study this conclusion rings very true: “that in spite of technology advances and more sophisticated marketing techniques — nothing has really changed when it comes to what drives people to buy online.”

2. Do as Little as You Can for Tablets

You probably need to do very little to optimize the user experience for tablets. Just identify the big usability problems and fix them — such as removing Flash and adjusting presentational elements that may prove fiddly. And don’t yawn next time your tech team reminds you of the importance of standards compliance.

3. Focus Smartphones on Existing Usage Patterns

Smartphones need more attention. Let your existing data guide how you tailor for this touch point: are users primarily searching on smartphones and purchasing (later) on another device (e.g. tablet or pc/Mac)? We’ve observed this pattern in the fashion sector in particular.

The good news is you can already compare usage patterns between smartphones and fixed web using your web stats package by filtering by device type.

4. Think About Donald Rumsfeld when Choosing Your Data Analysis Tool

As touch-points multiply it’s tempting to seek out an analysis tool that can help make sense of this multitude of unstructured data by applying some form of sentiment analysis. But, as exciting as many of these tools are, they tend to only reveal “known-knowns.” We’ve never heard of a single client reveal a single “unknown-unknown.”

You’re probably better off talking to your call center staff for an hour each week — since they, as humans, can interpret other people’s sentiment better than machines.

5. Observe Your Customers

There’s no substitute to observing behavior: be that in-store, on-line or on a mobile. Whether it’s in a usability lab or conducted remotely getting into the heads of real users completing tasks (using whatever touch point they’d like), this will be a great source of qualitative data to see how to optimize each of your channels.

Image courtesy of CLIPAREA/ Custom Media (Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: Interested in reading more on multi-channel marketing? Check out these tips from @kevinc2003: Multichannel Marketing in 2012: 3 Key Insights
 

About the Author

I founded WhatUsersDo so that organizations can base digital design decisions on UX insight (and not hunches).

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Eloqua Introduces AdFocus to Manage Display Ad Targeting

This morning, Eloqua announced AdFocus — a tool that allows marketers to manage their display ad targeting within Eloqua's marketing automation system. The release of AdFocus gives marketers a way to monitor and manage their paid marketing alongside other marketing efforts such as email and affiliate marketing.

The ability to monitor display ad targeting within Eloqua's marketing automation system is useful since display ads are a growing area of focus for business-to-business (B2B) companies. According to a recent Forrester report, this paid media is expected to make up 36 percent of all interactive media purchases by 2016.

As the focus on display ads grows, it will be important to narrowly target personalized display ad content to a niche target audience. And the using the data kept in a marketing automation system to personalize ads can help marketers pinpoint their target audience.

AdFocus Helps Create More Personalized Display Ads

Most display ads fail to reach their intended audience. A recent study by DemandBase, a personalization and targeting platform, estimates that 67 percent of all display ads are seen by the wrong audience. AdFocus is designed to help marketers reach their audience more effectively by using prospect data, such as their current lead score, already stored in the marketing automation system. Eloqua's AdFocus can use this information to serve up a personalized ad for the intended audience via DemandBase.

For instance, AdFocus allows marketers to display certain ads solely to prospects that are in the lead nurturing phase. For these individuals, marketers can display an ad with a call to action that is educational in nature and send them to an informational page rather than a sales page. Meanwhile, marketers can target existing customers with ads with an upsell offer rather than asking them to purchase a product they already own.

Screenshot of Eloqua AdFocus display ad rules.

AdFocus also allows marketers to directly display personal information about prospects (e.g. the Account Manager that operates their account) directly within an ad. This kind of individualized approach to display ad targeting provides a more direct approach to speaking to any prospect which, Eloqua believes, improves the success of lead generation efforts.

A final feature of AdFocus is that it allows marketers to automate their display ad targeting efforts. Traditionally, marketers have to go out and research websites and industry publications they'd like to use for their display ad targeting and then manually target those publications. DemandBase can automate this process by analyzing and selecting which websites and publications are the best fit for the prospect profile marketer wants to target. After that, marketers can use AdFocus to immediately start displaying ads based on the defined rules for the ad.

AdFocus Helps Compare Marketing Efforts in a Single System

By logging all of this information in a single system, marketers will be able to compare and contrast the return on investment of their marketing efforts side-by-side. With comparisons of earned, owned and paid marketing efforts in a single system, marketers can get a better grasp on what works for them and how their earned and owned efforts can work in conjunction with paid marketing efforts like display ads.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Marketing Automation: From Lead Generation to Sales Management

B2B selling organizations today rely on marketers to generate the leads necessary to start their efforts, and marketing organizations rely more and more on technology to generate those leads. But it's time now to connect the dots between marketing and sales.

The technologies marketers use include behavioral analysis tools (tied to dynamic site content), mass emailing engines, campaign management workflow and lead scoring dashboards. The next step is bringing together these technologies with those used by sales organization to ensure end-to-end sales and customer management.

Moving Outside of Email

“You gotta get out of email. It's getting less and less effective,” said Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua in a recent interview with Direct Marketing News. Eloqua is one of the leading providers of marketing automation software and a vocal advocate for alignment of marketing and sales organizations.

Most marketing automation vendors today have a strong focus on email marketing. And while email isn’t going away, neither is the frustration with campaign generated email, legitimate or spam. When marketing departments send out large “blasts,” they typically have no relevance or context to individual sales cycles being nurtured by sales. Those blasts could be responsible for “channel conflict” and be delaying sales success.

Time for Sales and Marketing to Meet

Sales people don’t live in the marketing world and most wouldn’t know how to. And marketing people don’t live in sales and usually don’t want to.

This disconnect has been resolved by a few vendors. Eloqua offers integration with Salesforce.com (SFDC), Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle/Siebel CRM On Demand. Partdot, recently acquired by ExactTarget, integrates with SFDC. So, what do these platforms do that sales can see?

Pardot scores contacts and leads in SFDC. It also shows marketing activity for contacts directly inside contact records. Even more impressive though is how Pardot campaigns can be managed directly from within SFDC. Most CRM applications are weak in this area, even a heavyweight such as SFDC. Of course for such magic to occur, users of SFDC must install a Pardot AppExchange app and this is where eyes start to glaze over for all but the most sophisticated companies.

Marketing automation vendors seem aware they are lacking in sales integration. Eloqua focuses on campaigns based on sales pipeline stage. It’s either build or buy and buying seems to be a way beyond email. Recently, ExactTarget acquired Pardot. And Teradata scooped up German firm eCircle.

Perhaps the real sign that marketing automation is seriously transforming will be its step into sales technologies.

Image courtesy of Vaju Ariel (Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: To read more by Steve, check out The Need for a Simpler Enterprise CMS Sharing Interface

About the Author

Steve Youngblood is the CEO of Salestrakr, a SaaS based CRM application focused on small to medium businesses. Steve is also a regular contributor to CMSWire. Steve has been a founding member of a number of software companies and has launched new applications across the world. Steve's expertise is in product creation and sales and has deep interests in user experience, social crm and web collaboration.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Getting Ahead of Twitter Trends, Advertising Potential for Digital Marketers

Social marketers keep a close eye on the topics that are currently “trending” on Twitter. But what if you could predict those hot topics with 95% accuracy, 90 minutes before they hit the trend list?

MIT Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student Stanislav Nikolov say they have developed a proprietary algorithm which can in fact predict what topics Twitter’s own proprietary trending algorithm will place on the trending list an average of 90 minutes before they get there, and up to four or five hours in advance in some cases.

How It Works

Twitter’s own trending algorithm selects topics automatically based on overall number of tweets and recent changes in tweet volume. Shah and Nikolov’s algorithm works based on the “machine learning” principle of taking a sample “training set” of Twitter data that both trended and did not trend and searching for patterns. The algorithm tracks changes in the number of tweets about new topics to changes in the number of tweets about every topic in the sample set, with sample topics that are similar to the new topic weighted more heavily. Based on how sample data performs in comparison to new data, the algorithm creates an estimate of whether new data will trend.

Shah and Nikolov say the algorithm can be scaled according to computational resources (meaning it can be divided among multiple servers for greater processing power) and also becomes more accurate as the size of the training set of data increases. In experiments with a training set of Twitter topics that did trend and 200 that didn't, the algorithm predicted trending topics among live tweets with 95% accuracy and a 4% false positive rate. 

Taking Advantage of Trending Topics

For Twitter, the new algorithm developed at MIT could potentially allow the social media provider to charge a premium for ads associated with developing trending topics. For digital marketers, advance knowledge of trending topics could greatly assist efforts to perform real-time social marketing and ensure that Twitter promotional messages are timed ahead of trending topics, rather than developed in response to them.

In addition, Shah and Nikolov say the algorithm can be applied to any set of data that follows trends and varies over time, such as stock prices. It could also be applied to detect content trends on other social networks such as Facebook and Google+. 

Forecasting TWeather

Shah and Nikolov are not the only ones attempting to forecast what’s hot in the world of Twitter. A recently launched service called TWeather is designed to give reports on what is emerging on Twitter — the “clouds and patterns” of tweets on different topics, providing 10-minute “weather” updates on popular trending topics in Twitter. From the home page, users can select any one of the top 10 currently trending topics or a link within featured topics such as politics and music. From there, the user is brought to a “TWeather report” that displays a cloud of constantly shifting keywords relating to the topic. The larger and closer to the right of the screen a keyword is located, the more “hot” it currently is.

By selecting a keyword, users can see related tweets. Reports are updated every 10 minutes and users can scroll back to see previous reports. Thus TWeather presents tweet trending data in a way that makes it easier for users to detect and track patterns than they can by scrolling through topical Twitter timelines. Users can subscribe to TWeather reports from their Twitter accounts, and once a user subscribes to five different reports, they can create their own TWeather reports.

Targeting ‘Hipsters’

BostInno interestingly points out that a marketer using Shah and Nikolov’s algorithm might have particular success in applying it to targeting “hipsters,” the young urban demographic that specializes in irony and keeping up with the very latest trends. BostInno points out that the algorithm successfully predicted the popularity of #NoShaveNovember, a hipster-friendly topic about a month long facial hair contest that is currently trending on Twitter in Boston, hours before it popped up.

“This sounds like an ideal algorithm for the hipsters out there,” states BostonInno. “They can discover what’s cool before it is cool. Just know, Twitterverse, once the trend surfaces, the hipsters will be on to the next underground fad.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Ensighten Adds Real-Time Tagging for Mobile Apps

The popularity of mobile apps has been a boon to interactive marketers. But how can tags in those apps be modified without requiring a rebuild? To address that issue, Ensighten is now offering a real-time tagging system for mobile apps.

The new tagging capability is available in version 2.0 of Ensighten Mobile, announced this week. The tag management vendor said that a single line of code enables real-time tagging of any mobile app without the need to compile the tags into the app, and that 2.0 supports all major enterprise Web analytics.

Removing the Mobile Analytics Silo

The company noted that analytical data from mobile apps has typically required mobile-specific tools — partly because when the tags were modified, the app needed to be recompiled and then resubmitted to app stores. But Ensighten said that those days of mobile data living in its own analytical silos are over, since data from all channels can now be aggregated with the same tools.

Ensighten Mobile requires only a single line of code embedded in the app source code, and does not involve an SDK. With real-time management, the company said, A/B tests can be conducted, and tags can be controlled based on conditional variables such as network, provider, battery threshold, screen or device/platform.

Tag Management's New Frontier

The modification and management of mobile tags, without requiring app rebuilding or re-submission to app stores, is one of the new frontiers in tag management. For example, tag management vendor Tealium announced Tealium IQ, its mobile app management solution, which would similarly allow marketers to make changes on the fly — without the need for app rebuilding or app store re-certification.

Both vendors note that the ability to make immediate tag changes in mobile apps mean that brands can now quickly adapt to user activity, new marketing campaigns and other changing conditions.

Tags are employed for user tracking, affiliate marketing, personalization, SEO, shopping comparison engines or display advertising, among other purposes. A tag management system (TMS) provides tools for adding, modifying and removing digital marketing tags on a Web page, mobile app, mobile web site or video, through an on-premise or hosted solution.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Making the Most of Your Marketing Funnel #rdm12

The impact changes in the consumer marketplace and technology are having on the marketing funnel and how marketers can adapt were major themes in early sessions of the Revenue Driven Marketing Summit hosted by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

New Technology Empowers Customers, Creates ‘Hidden Sales Cycle’

Trip Kucera, Senior Research Analyst, Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy for Aberdeen opened today’s program with an introductory talk about what marketing is experiencing today. “There are new technologies, new mediums and new targets,” he said. “You’re engaging with empowered customers in both the B2B and B2C marketplaces. “

In response, Kucera said marketers are “digitizing processes from the top of the funnel to the topline. There is much more data, and more buzz around Big Data but probably more action around predictive analytics.” In addition, Kucera said a “hidden sales cycle” has entered the traditional funnel of lead generation, lead management and opportunity management. This hidden cycle, which often occurs later in the buyer’s journey, consists of influences like social media, communities, content and peers. “You need to put your listening ears on,” advised Kucera.

Turn Your Funnel into a Pipeline

Following Kucera’s remarks, Russell Fujioka, VP of Enterprise Solutions and Business Marketing, Dell, urged marketing and sales executives to move beyond current best practices in order to reshape their funnels into free flowing pipelines. “If you’re at best practices right now, you’re probably behind,” stated Fujioka. “If you haven’t met a mathematician lately, you need to go hug those folks.”

Fujioka said there is so much data now available, tools alone cannot do enough to uncover actionable information. “Algorithms can determine cause and effect,” he said. “Some tools can’t answer why certain things work. But there are some people at MIT that probably can.”

Fujioka said that by changing its marketing model from quickly providing customized hardware to delivering full-scale IT solutions and developing ongoing customer relationships, in three years Dell has increased marketing-led revenue by 125% every six months and increased the growth of social media-driven dollars in the marketing pipeline by 20% every quarter, among other results.

Fujioka also focused on the funnel and how marketers can alter its shape from a typical “cannoli” (he gave a nod to the world-famous Mike’s Pastry in Boston’s traditionally Italian North End neighborhood) to a more streamlined “pipe.”

“The key part is the fulcrum,” he said. “What are the pressure points, amplifiers and things getting in your way? If you keep filling the left side with fuel and your win rate doesn’t improve, you won’t be more successful but will spend more money.”

In addition, Fujioka said marketers must closely analyze the right side of the funnel. “Those things that made it through got there for a reason,” he said. “Predictively analyze why they did.”

By properly analyzing what happens in the fulcrum and why some leads are converted, Fujioka said marketers can create an “aspirational” funnel where targeting is so good the lead-to-success ratio can wind up being “something like two to one instead of 10,000 to one.” And in the future, “the right side will be wider.”

Fujioka gave two final pieces of advice to marketers seeking to create an aspirational funnel. One is to create the position of vice president of customer success. “If you don’t do that, you don’t have a chance,” he said. The second is to remember that word of mouth always has been and always will be the strongest influencer on consumer decisions.

“It doesn’t matter what the audience or product is,” he said. “The difference is we now have tools to amplify word of mouth so instead of telling two friends who tell two friends, you can go on LinkedIn and pretty quickly spread the word to 25 million contacts.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Keeping Your Marketing Customer-Centric #rdm12

As the world moves from a product-centric economy to a customer-centric economy, marketers must move in tandem to ensure the customer experience is always at the heart of their efforts. Tim Gilbert, Chief Marketing Officer of Campus Management, a provider of enterprise software for the higher education industry, addressed this issue during a session at today’s Revenue-Driven Marketing Summit
held by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

Appropriate for a presentation involving college, Gilbert took the stage to the strains of hard rock superstars AC/DC and began his explanation of customer-centric marketing by using Apple as an example. “Apple used to be a product category for graphic designers in the art department,” he said. “Now I don’t know an executive who doesn’t check their iPhone regularly.”

Gilbert said Apple made this marketing breakthrough with an iterative process that kept the needs of customers at its core, developing services such as iTunes as well as devices such as the iPhone to provide a complete branded experience.

Marketing in the Age of Self-Advocacy

In the customer-centric economy, Gilbert said the entire experience from seller to buyer has changed. “There must be a meaningful interaction,” he advised. “We’re in an age of self-advocacy. Complaints go on Facebook. And our customers must compel college students. It’s a strange relationship where the customer pays a lot of money, gets judged every term, and incurs a lot of debt when they’re done. Colleges are having trouble maintaining that relationship.” (also read: Customer Experience: Serving the Customer, Building the Brand)

To help higher education clients place their customers (students and parents who often foot part or all of the bill), Gilbert said Campus Management helps them create a single, unified view of a student across all channels of interaction. In addition, since rejecting applicants is not good for the school’s brand (although necessary), Gilbert said Campus Management software helps colleges locate, attract and maintain relationships with the “right” students who possess the “right” qualifications, such as SAT scores in a specific range.

In a specific example of how colleges can put the customer at the center of their marketing efforts, Gilbert said the University of Ottawa collects testimonials from current students in the local area of a prospective student and compiles them in a personalized e-book.

CRM Case Study: Ball State University

Gilbert concluded his remarks by reviewing the CRM objectives of Campus Management client Ball State University in Indiana, perhaps best known as the alma mater of late night talk show host David Letterman:

• Enhance recruitment/admissions efficiency by X, Y and Z within 12 months.
• Improve student experience by A,B,C.
• Train and empower non-IT users to do segmenting, prospecting and targeting of prospective students via automated and integrated marketing communications programs.

“Job number one is buy-in from C-level executives,” stated Gilbert. “Dream big, then write it, When you budget it, get real. Know the risks and prepare for the ‘domino effect.’ Use small steps rather than a ‘Big Bang’ approach. Set milestones and celebrate success. And always be transparent, whether good, bad or ugly."

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Limelight Launches Orchestrate Platform for High-Tech Marketers

B2B technology marketers have a new set of tools they can choose. This week, Limelight Networks introduced its Orchestrate for High-Tech Marketers, a platform for delivering a digital presence across channels to business-oriented buyers.

The new solution offers web content management, online video publishing, mobile publishing, web and mobile acceleration, web personalization, content targeting, social media integration and SEO. These tools are intended to assist marketers in enhancing customer relationships, driving brand awareness and increasing sales conversions.

Single Interface

The new Orchestrate’s features include the ability to utilize a single interface for managing and publishing web and video content, for segmenting visitor data in order to direct messaging to the appropriate prospect, and for re-purposing assets across web and mobile domains in order to simplify workflow, publish more quickly and maintain brand consistency.

The platform automatically optimizes web and video content for best viewing on the target devices. The company said that the tight integration between the new platform and email/marketing automation systems allows easier synchronization with email campaigns.

Technology buyers, the key business users targeted by this platform, typically seek out online sources of product information and peer recommendations before making a business decision, according to unspecific studies cited by Limelight.

The company said that this due diligence on the part of the buyer goes beyond the information found on the sites of product vendors, and includes research on third-party sites, blogs, professional social networks such as LinkedIn, RSS feeds and other sources.

Selling to a Tough Crowd

These business-oriented buyers can be a tough group with high expectations, according to Limelight. Jeff Freund, Limelight’s CTO of DPM Solutions and VP/GM for the Web Content Management Group, said in a statement that, to reach these business technology buyers, “high-tech marketers must provide rich, fresh content,” such as whitepapers, webinars, data sheets, research reports, videos and animation across a variety of channels.

He added that doing so requires an “integrated, easy to use solution that allows them to update their collateral content and video assets without IT support.”

Based in Tempe, Arizona, Limelight Networks specializes in Digital Presence Management, provided through integrated suites of cloud-based applications to manage and optimize online presence across web, mobile, social and large screen channels.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

This Week: Failing Your Marketing Data + SharePoint 2013 - The Good, The Ugly

Data. It overwhelms us.

Most marketers say they're failing to use it optimally. A recent survey showed that most people are not leveraging analytics well. Another study found a lack of analytical minds and skills in key roles.

Getting Good Data
Good data is step one and Forrester recently evaluated Tag Management Systems — looking at this evolving role of data capture.

Analytics vendors play a key role too and are constantly facing new challenges. This week we saw Webtrends improve measurement of both web and social activity.

In September we'll focused on how marketers can better use their data to make decisions and optimize digital experiences. Stay tuned.

SharePoint 2013 - Disappointing, or Not?
SharePoint's evolution is pleasing many (see SharePoint 2013: 7 Features Users are Going to Love). But worth a read is SharePoint 2013: Not Quite What I Expected.

This week we also checked out SharePoint 2013 workflows and social networking and climbed up for a 35,000 foot view of SharePoint 2013 for Designers.

Forrester: The New Rules of Social Knowledge Management
Join Forrester analyst Kate Leggett on Aug 29th. Get the scoop on how enterprise knowledge is going social.
> Register for the Free Webinar

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Featured Events (all events | post your event)

• Aug 29 — Webinar (The New Rules of Social Knowledge Management)
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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Webinar Redux: Rethinking Web Engagement - Leading with Content Marketing

Digital marketing is being disrupted. New technologies, including social media, and increased consumer sophistication are requiring digital marketers to rethink how they engage their audiences.

As detailed in CMSWire's August 8th webinar, “Rethinking Web Engagement - Leading with Content Marketing,” by changing their approach to a content- and journey-centric marketing strategy, marketers can weather this change and distance themselves from the competition.

Read on for a recap of the webinar content and to access the full recording of the event.

The event featured presentations from Robert Rose, a 15-year content marketing veteran who authored the book, “Managing Content Marketing”, and is a contributing senior analyst with Digital Clarity Group and Ian Truscott, VP, Product Marketing, SDL Content Technologies Division and director at CM Pros Association. Barb Mosher Zinck, CMSWire's Managing Editor, served as moderator.

Marketing Processes Change

Robert Rose began the webinar by describing how marketing processes have changed in recent years. Media filtering technologies such as Netflix, Spotify and Twitter allow consumers to pinpoint what information they receive according to their specific interests, weeding out advertisements and extraneous information.

In addition, years of exposure to these technologies has trained consumer brains to serve as media filters, meaning a consumer looking at an online or physical environment full of marketing messages will only see the ones that meet a particular interest at that moment. 

IT Strategies Must Also Change

In response to changes in marketing processes, where consumers can now effectively filter out any message they don’t want to receive, Rose said IT strategies must change as well.

Where content was once delivered in the 1990s through desktop publishing and in the 2000s by Web Content Management Systems, in this decade it must be delivered via combination of tools and process often described as Web Engagement Management.

 
“We must facilitate the buying journey,” said Rose. “It’s more important to get IT involved as the way we implement (Web Engagement Management) tools becomes more technical and complex.”

Rose said the marketing and sales teams must align as part of this process to understand the “buyer’s journey” and the personas of the consumers they are targeting. “It’s not enough to facilitate the sales process. We must look at the journey holistically. Web Engagement Management is delivering value to the customer every step of the way.”

IT can support this holistic view by helping deliver value to consumers through functions such as landing page management and delivering content through social and mobile channels.

Rose cautioned that in addition to communicating with consumers to ensure the engagement process is buyer-focused, marketers must clearly communicate their needs to the IT department, and must understand which systems the IT department care about (and will interfere with) most.

“IT guys don’t care which analytics you select,” he said. “At that point they’re busy playing World of Warcraft.”

Engagement Cycle Disruption Produces New CXM Model

Truscott then initiated his portion of the webinar by offering thoughts on how the traditional consumer engagement cycle has been disrupted. “Engagement used to be a linear process,” he said. “The customer would see and respond to messages.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com