Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

October 14, 2014 · 12:02 pm

Disconnecting On The Phone

A report this morning from Kitewheel got my attention this morning. They “examined the current breakthroughs and breakdowns in engagement with today’s connected consumer.” The results aren’t very encouraging to those of us who like to think we’re in touch with the expectations of our consumer base

They hired some folks to survey consumers and marketing decision makers with respect to consumer expectation around experience and brand execution.  A few key findings:

  • 76% of consumers use mobile devices to compare prices and read reviews while shopping, yet 51% of marketers are not currently managing mobile apps as a consumer touch point.
  • 55% of consumers state frustrations in downloading an app that offers no functional difference from a business’ website.
  • 68% of consumer respondents expect a response to tweets directed at a brand, and one in three expect a response within 24 hours. Yet 45% of marketers state it is unlikely that their company can respond to every one of these social media opportunities.
  • 73% believe that loyalty programs should be a way for brands to show consumers how loyal they are to them as a customer; but 66% of marketers still see it the other way around.

In other words, we’re disconnected from those who access our brands via their phones.  We look at loyalty programs as consumers putting their hands in the air to show they love us.  They want them to be ways in which we show how much we love them.  Doesn’t sound like the basis for a happy relationship.

Five areas of disconnect were discovered including: mobile, social media, real-time e-commerce, omni-channel capability and brand loyalty.  Every one of those five has become far more important over the last decade and yet it seems as if many marketers are living in 1999.  As the study says, the overall journey of today’s consumer is frequently a broken one, with significant misalignment between consumer expectations and brand execution.  We need to think about how to fix that misalignment and do so quickly.  You agree?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 8, 2014 · 10:30 am

The Road To Understanding

A piece from the eMarketer group caught my eye yesterday.  The headline was Marketers Can’t Avoid Technology Anymore.

Figure 1: Simple schematic for a data warehous...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Off the top of my head it made me wonder who exactly was trying to avoid it since there isn’t a single company that comes to mind where technology isn’t sort of a big deal.  As it turns out, the article was about a subset of tech, big data, and how professionals need to up marketing technology investments if they hope to make sense of this data as well as to focus on integrating technologies and data across channels..  No doubt with a big caveat.

This hints at the issue:

April 2014 research by Accenture also found big data was top of mind for the majority of executives worldwide, with 59% saying it was extremely important. Of course, technologies are needed to make sense of and combine all of this information, and Accenture noted that using such tools to understand big data could transform an entire enterprise—if done correctly.

It’s the “done correctly” part that’s the caveat.  The road to understanding doesn’t begin with technology.  It doesn’t begin with a fully integrated series of systems or a huge data warehouse.  It starts with something much simpler that’s often overlooked.  It starts with some basic questions.

  • What do we need to know?
  • Why do we want to know it?
  • Once we know it, what actions can we take to use it to grow our business?
  • How is what we have going to improve our relationship with our customers?
  • When prospects encounter us, whether online or off, which of these data points will help us convert them to customers?

My guess, based on a fair number of experiences, is that many of the aforementioned companies are just puking up data instead of using the data to develop actionable business information.  The eMarketer piece concludes this way:

Companies that avoid implementing and using marketing technology to make sense of data have an uncertain future. Nearly 80% of execs agreed that companies that did not embrace big data would lose their competitive advantage—and possibly face extinction.

I agree with that but if they don’t do the above while traveling the road to understanding and having asked some questions before they embrace and develop big data, extinction is just as likely.

What’s been your experience with this?

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Reality checks

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 7, 2014 · 11:06 am

Look Through The Windshield

Today’s wake up call comes from the good folks at Hubspot.  They do a report each year on their area of expertise which is inbound marketing.  What the heck is that?  Well, you’re sort of reading some now, since the screed is not just a way for me to blow excess verbiage out of my system but also a way for people who might need some help with their business to see how I think and where I can help.  Company blogs (yes, I’m a company) are a form as are corporate social media and SEO.  Inbound marketing is just a fancy way to describe content companies put out there to attract the right customers and to generate leads.

Hubspot’s report – The 2014 State of Inbound Report reviews how companies are using this marketing form.  It contains the aforementioned wakeup call as they discuss measuring ROI – return on investment of those activities:

Given the compounding benefits of measuring ROI, you’d assume most marketers would list it as their top initiative. Surprisingly, very few marketers — even marketing leadership — are prioritizing it. Only 15% of marketers ranked “proving the ROI of our marketing activities” as their #1 marketing priority and a little over half (53%) of marketers we surveyed are measuring ROI.

Yikes.  Almost half aren’t even attempting to figure out if what they’re doing is providing them with the desired results.  Marketers should have a clear way to measure success otherwise how can they allocate resources in a manner that maximizes the benefits of their marketing efforts?

I wish I could say I’m surprised but I’m not.  The “newness” of new media seems to obfuscate the fact that part of the benefit of digital is that it is highly measurable.  It’s not just knowing for the sake of knowing either.  As the report says, marketers that measure ROI are 12X more likely to generate a greater return year-over-year than a lower return. In other words, simply the act of measuring ROI correlates with positive results. 

You wouldn’t drive a car without looking through the windshield.  Not measuring the results of, and return from, your marketing or any other business activity is doing just that.  While driverless cars may almost be here, business activities will never become that way.  If we don’t look out the windshield we’re heading for a wreck.  Thoughts?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , , , , ,