http://blog.makebuzz.com/ Discussing eBusiness & Marketing Topics in today's economy, we address current events and articles related to business growth. We welcome your comments & feedback. en christopher@makebuzz.com Copyright 2012 2012-05-16T15:17:51+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/sales-lead-qualification http://blog.makebuzz.com/sales-lead-qualification#When:15:17:51Z It's amazing to me how versatile and critical customer insight and targeting capability are. Understanding who your customers are, knowing what they do, and where they live has far reaching impact, beyond just marketing. To illustrate, I'm going to discuss a subject matter I haven't touched on much lately: sales. More specifically, lead qualification.

Although my work focuses a lot on the marketing side of things, because of our heavy involvement and interest in attribution, I have frequently found myself optimizing the sales process as well.

The issue I see most frequently is this: marketing drive calls or incoming leads, and the sales people are faced with long lists of prospective clients to call back or reach out to. So how do they decide who to address first?

Over the years, I've developed some successful techniques for qualifying leads, many…]]> 2012-05-16T15:17:51+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/branding-and-direct-response-puzzle http://blog.makebuzz.com/branding-and-direct-response-puzzle#When:15:15:48Z I've worked with organizations in the past where the job of Brand advertising is in one department, and the job of direct-response (often online) advertising is in another. And while I think these things are different, they are still connected – or they should be. Yet, more often, these resources are siloed with their own budgets, objectives and agendas.

If you think about the Customer Journey in terms of five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase, and Loyalty, there should be media that addresses each of these phases and facilitates the path to purchase and repurchase. In that case the Branding media is especially useful during the Awareness phase (really all phases though) and Direct Response media helps with that final push into Purchase.

Yet it all works together to drive sales.

But how do we understand how this happens? I'm…]]> 2012-05-14T15:15:48+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/media-attribution-with-multiple-devices http://blog.makebuzz.com/media-attribution-with-multiple-devices#When:14:22:17Z I came across some interesting infographics from the end of last year pertaining to marketing measurement. What I found interesting in particular, was the obvious lack of one important graphic. Obvious to me, anyway.
 

As you can see, "Changes in consumer behavior" is one of the key issues driving the development of marketing measurement and accountability programs. These changes I assume, cover shifts in online behaviors. As in, the proliferation of devices consumers now use to access and engage with the Internet.

Yet, with all this fragmentation, I see nothing in terms of measurement 'tools' that could help solve tracking across multiple devices. I see lots about web analytics, but what web analytics tool can tell me how online marketing is driving sales for customers who search from their work desktop…]]> 2012-05-09T14:22:17+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/rim-blackberry-app-business http://blog.makebuzz.com/rim-blackberry-app-business#When:15:14:56Z RIM is using the Blackberry World 2012 conference to lure developers into creating an app ecosystem that can rival Apple and Android but this strategy will fail if the developers it attracts simply try to be like the popular crowd.
 
Many are saying that RIM licensing its platform and software signal the beginning of the end, but I think if RIM can play to it's core strengths and not be tempted to compete for the wrong attentions, they might make it through.

New CEO Thorsten Heins’ strategy keeps RIM’s integrated model intact while competing with its rivals on the app ecosystem; it will depend heavily on how many developers RIM can attract and how well these developers create something distinctly Blackberry.
 
Yes Blackberry is losing market share, but there is a growing trend inside the business community to keep personal…]]> 2012-05-02T15:14:56+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/mckinsey-social-media-report http://blog.makebuzz.com/mckinsey-social-media-report#When:15:39:02Z What does the next generation of social media a look like…for business?

McKinsey offers some perspective in a recent video but no real answers for business as far as how to prioritize and organize their efforts in the social sphere.

At one point David Court even contrasts TV advertising with Social saying that while we know everything about the former, we know virtually nothing about the latter. He cautions that flipping 50% of your budget over to untested social strategies would be a huge risk. Well… yeah.

I was hoping for some suggestion of a framework – because unlike TV we won't have the next 50 years to figure it out. Those who get social and understand how to leverage it will be the winners. That, at least, they did say.

]]> 2012-04-23T15:39:02+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/google-activate-viewable-impressions http://blog.makebuzz.com/google-activate-viewable-impressions#When:14:03:44Z Yesterday, Google announced two new metrics marketers can use to understand the value of brand campaigns. One of them, Active View, is placed to become the new standard for online impressions. (http://mashable.com/2012/04/18/google-new-online-ad-metrics/)

You may have heard the buzz around viewable impressions lately, from companies like ComScore and Adometry, but with Google's announcement, this metric may actually take a turn into the mainstream and get publishers to act upon the implications.

In case I've lost you, viewable impressions are essentially those impressions served to and seen by humans. Some companies even add in the extra requirement of 'seen by your target audience' (those matching preset demographic specifications).

Until now, marketers have used this information merely to optimize campaigns – only half my impressions are actually seen on forbes.com? Well, guess I'll go with npr.org next time. But now, with Google…]]> 2012-04-19T14:03:44+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/jcpenneys-new-cmo-rebranding http://blog.makebuzz.com/jcpenneys-new-cmo-rebranding#When:15:12:44Z Test, test again, scale slightly and test again. These are the steps towards building a marketing and media program that yields sustainable growth. I say this a lot. I think it's makes good (common) sense.

But you wouldn't believe how often I see the opposite strategy at play- at big and small companies, people are impatient. Sometimes they get lucky and the cowboy strategy works — most of the time though, it fails. And when you risk big, you fail big too.

So I look at J.C. Penney's recent radical rebranding and restructuring with interest but not surprise. They're taking a bold tact and it's not based on measured testing. It's cowboy-style, go-for-broke, all-or-nothing- and it's rushed. A recent article on the retailer (link) contrasted this approach to Best Buy and Sears, with their slow, test-and-do-nothing strategy.

I'm saying neither…]]> 2012-04-13T15:12:44+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/marketing-analytic-platforms http://blog.makebuzz.com/marketing-analytic-platforms#When:13:40:02Z I enjoyed this article on the importance of qualified people over better tools.

A recent CMO survey noted that in the coming years, companies plan on spending more on marketing analytics platforms than a dedicated analytics staff.

Speaking from experience with companies that have prioritized technology over people, this will be a disaster.

Sure, you need both, but what good are sophisticated tools that provide complicated analytics without the people in place to understand and interpret them? How will information be filtered upstream to the decision makers? Will the CEO or CMO be handed pages of spreadsheets regarding online marketing metrics?

I say: let's get our priorities straight and make sure we have the resources in place to make the data meaningful.

]]> 2012-04-10T13:40:02+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/siloed-marketing-strategies-big-picture http://blog.makebuzz.com/siloed-marketing-strategies-big-picture#When:14:36:49Z Looking through a popular aggregator of CMO-related news, my eyes glazed over a sea of articles about improving marketing efforts within specific media (Facebook, Twitter, paid search, etc). I didn't see one discussion around marketing strategy as a whole.

The best I found was an infographic for finding opportunity in Big Data - what I suppose passes for a big-picture conversation these days.

The trouble with this is that Big Data is NOT synonymous with Big Picture. Often, it is the opposite: looking down rabbit holes, attempting to aggregate mountains of discrete information, while arguing and debating the validity of This method vs That method.

If the goal is understanding where sales come from and how marketing factors into the equation, then there's an easier way. It's even a first, fundamental step towards tackling the monster of Big Data in…]]> 2012-04-06T14:36:49+00:00 http://blog.makebuzz.com/connecting-media-and-sales http://blog.makebuzz.com/connecting-media-and-sales#When:21:46:58Z In the first line of an article I read about Steve Jobs (and I recommend reading the whole thing) it says, "He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation."

This line got me thinking about connections, specifically in my own industry.

Often in Marketing, especially online, people specialize. There's the brand agency, concerned with art and design and feeling, there's the tracking company who scares you with how precisely they can catalog your web surfing, and there's the attribution firm, whose complex mathematical equations may give you a headache before they tell you where sales come from.

But who can…]]> 2012-04-02T21:46:58+00:00