Data-Driven Techniques Transform Marketing into an Analytics-Ready Organization

Marketing Relevance Rises with Business Intelligence and Big Data

There once was a time when the typical marketing strategy was “if you throw enough against the wall, eventually something will stick.” Marketing budgets were huge, and the volume and size of campaigns were even larger. Not all of them were successful at generating qualified leads and ultimately deals; however, when you’re not tracking those metrics, you’re not observant of failure. But marketing budgets are not limitless anymore and marketing teams must make every dollar count.

Today, there are lots of tools to increase visibility into marketing strategies and their effectiveness. CRM software can capture lead sources and track them through to opportunities and wins/losses. Website visits and downloads can be tracked by the millions, allowing companies to see the exact paths visitors take online. Customer sentiments are also traceable—including where they voice them and what they say, whether positive or negative. Marketers have more powerful methods to segment their target audience and focus specific content and programs towards that audience.

Marketing Automation Tool with Website Tracking

Despite these capabilities, marketing departments typically do not have the application development or business intelligence (BI) skills necessary to take advantage of all this data. As a result, failed marketing efforts become more apparent without the ability to clearly identify why they failed. But it does not have to be this way. By leveraging the expertise and offerings from big data and analytics services providers, you can put in place a process to systematically monitor, measure, and react to big data insights. This will allow you to gain critical visibility into your prospects and customers, offer them targeted marketing programs, and help drive revenue.

For example, some of Chateaux Software's senior consultants are currently working on a project for a large printing and imaging company to help them gain better visibility into sales and marketing data from a variety of legacy and online data sources. Their goal is to increase the speed of data analysis and identification of new opportunities. In addition to deploying customized BI solutions and providing BI expertise, we are also helping them build a roadmap for an Analytics Ready Organization. This includes understanding the dynamics of the organization and current BI skillsets, identifying critical BI roles and responsibilities, and building an actionable plan that will enable BI usage to evolve and grow.

Investing in the right BI tools, Big Data, and organizational readiness will enable your marketing teams to have a more measurable impact on your business and will keep you ahead of global competitors.

NOTE: I originally wrote this for Chateaux Software's blog, where I am consulting on several projects: http://blog.chatsoft.com/2013/09/05/data-driven-techniques-transform-marketing-into-an-analytics-ready-organization/

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Customer Engagement - The Ultimate Measure of Product Success

If a customer is not really using your product, are they really a customer?

I've seen this a countless number of times, where an organization purchases a product only for it to sit on their IT shelf after only a handful of usage. Every now and again it is dusted off to do something, but then is placed right back on that shelf.

I don't believe you can call someone with this pattern your customer. Unless that minimal use is extremely important for the customer, you either have the wrong product or sales has sold them this product for a quick buck (which does of course happen, but will ultimately hurt your brand). Sticky products translate into higher long term value (LTV) and harvest true champions for your business.

What could be missing? Perhaps your product is too complicated to understand. How about some self-help videos? Is your documentation up-to-snuff? If you don't have an MVP (minimally viable product) yet and there are necessary capabilities which are not there, have you established workarounds? Does the customer have other products installed which provide similar capabilities? These should all be danger signs that you must be visible to, and have plans in place to correct. Check-in on a regular basis with your customers and have open conversations, much like special advisers do in large organizations for their highest-profile customers. In this day and age where customer service is an important differentiator among a sea of competition, it's very important to connect often to show that you are a partner in your customer's success.

Without a sound platform for measurement, you will never help yourself uncover the customers that require assistance. Today there are many SaaS solutions that can help measure customer engagement:

• Marketing Automation: Track and nurture the online behavior of leads and customers (among other automation capabilities). Solution providers include HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.
• Gamification: The use of game theory within your SaaS apps to increase engagement. Solution providers include Badgeville, BigDoor Media, and iActionable.
• Customer Engagement Management: Track SaaS application usage down to particular features. Solution providers include Totango and Apptegic.
• Don't forget your CRM system. It should be used to provide one unified view of your customers, from visit logs to payment patterns and purchase history.

This technology can be used to help you analyze millions of data points and come up with real-time ways to optimize and increase product use (can you smell Big Data?). In addition, content marketing is not only effective prior to the sale but also after the sale to ensure your customer always has the right information at the right time during their use of your products.

If you want to retain your customers and convert them into champions for your product and company, you need to raise their usage. That means regularly connecting with them to understand their pain points and usage patterns, and providing them solutions that adapt to their natural tendencies. The ultimate goal is to produce products that matter most to customers and the market. If your target "customer" is not getting consistent value from that product, then you really don't understand your target customer or market.

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