mommyjenlin

Content marketing is becoming a primary strategy to solve the challenges of massively scaling and diversifying marketing channels. But content does not naturally support both scale and diversity at the same time. The only thing that scales as endlessly and cost effectively as the digital world is data. As a result, data marketing is on the rise and will ultimately inherent the throne as the core strategy for modern marketing. What is data marketing? It's using interactive data to directly influence or add value to your prospects, customers, and partners. Think of it as content marketing without the editorial. Data marketing is already fueling the rapid growth of content marketing. The best pieces of content marketing are typically wrapped around a compelling piece of (static) data. The key is that stripped of editorial, data must become interactive and not only deliver personalized insights but capture and bring user input back.  Modern business solutions are increasingly...

There is no arguments that the cloud software industry is currently top of mind for many, in fact enterprise companies are even receiving their share of  love . While the industry as a whole has our attention, what about marketing departments at these companies.  How are CMOs at these fast growing cloud organizations managing their marketing budget? What are they worried about? and what are their priorities for the rest of the year? Within IDC's 2013 Marketing Barometer survey we received answers from marketing leaders within cloud organizations. In this presentation you will see the high level findings comparing these cloud marketing departments to more traditional  2nd platform  companies. I would love to hear your thoughts on these initial findings and how your marketing organization is working to compete in this fast growing market (whether as a pure play or just one of many product lines).   For an extended dec...

The stigma of social media is something I have been fighting for years. As someone whose education and career has mirrored Mark Zuckerberg's ( minus the dropping out of an ivy league school to build a multibillion dollar company and taking it public…so really when I say "mirrored", I mean we are approximately the same age ), I feel an affinity to the social networks that have matured as my own career has moved forward. Because of this I have found myself defending the merits of different social networks' "tangible" value to relatives, colleagues, and random people on the subway. So, when I received an email stating I had $100 free Twitter ad credits, I jumped at the chance to see where Twitter has taken their ad platform. While that $100 was great to boost my twitter followers ( speaking of which follow me here ), retweets, and ego it didn't really answer my questions around how creative B2B marketers are utilizing social networks. To dive in deeper I ta...

I attended FutureM in Boston a few weeks ago and the main take away was: Marketing is changing quickly and organizations must grow and adapt, otherwise they will fall behind . IDC’s CMO Advisory Service has been advising this for some time, but as I read more blogs and attend more marketing based events like FutureM, the reality of overarching change is becoming obvious. IDC’s data points to this as well; investment in Digital Marketing within the Enterprise Tech industry has increased from 12.6% of budgets in 2009 to 29.2% by the end of 2012 * - we expect this trend to continue. Below I have outlined 3 sessions that did a great job of highlighting the change that is taking place. I then took particularly interesting or relevant quotes and expanded on them. The Future of Social is Action and ROI “Social has to be collaborative between agencies and the brand – It has to be done for consumer insight and you cannot do it for the sake of just doing it.           ...

Data analytics was the big winner in the 2012 US Presidential race. In fact, 11:17 PM (US ET) November 6th was the moment data analytics went mainstream. This was when Ohio was officially projected to go to Obama. It was the ultimate validation for Nate Silver and his data analytics approach to election forecasting. To much fanfare he accurately predicted the results of the election in all 50 states without doing any of his own polling. He used sophisticated analytic models based on data from as many third party polls he could find. To this he added the secret sauce of data analytics - a keen understanding of how different types of data from different sources relate to one another in context. His FiveThirtyEight blog drove as much as 20% of the web traffic to the New York Times website - the 6th most visited US news site on the net - leading up to the election. As a result, data analytics is officially mainstream. Any business leader at any level that does not immediately embr...

A few days ago Facebook announced that their active users surpassed 1 Billion . This is a huge number and like it or not, as a Marketer, you cannot ignore a community of this size. At this point, it is irresponsible to write Facebook off as a fad. Its user base covers all demographics and geographies – chances are, as a business, whoever you are selling to is on Facebook. While I certainly do not advocate for suddenly changing your advertising mix to a 25% Facebook Ad spend or hiring a brand new agency to build a Facebook Page that rivals Coke or Jet Blue , I do believe there are plenty of good ways to start dipping your toes into the giant ocean that is Facebook. I readily admit that the standard thinking is Facebook is a B2C tool - Facebook is great to reach consumers, however I believe there is something for everyone. B2B marketers need to think creatively, manage expectations and take learning’s from similar communities (think LinkedIn). And if you’re worried that you might be be...

At their annual Dreamforce shindig last week Salesforce.com announced the formalization of their marketing capabilities as the Marketing Cloud. Essentially it is a coupling of four key pillars of Salesforce.com's front end: Customer intelligence: Data.com enriches contact and account information with fresh feeds from sources such as LinkedIn and many others. Enables both sales and marketing to create detailed contact profiles for segmentation, targeting and campaign management. Social advertising and content management: The recent Buddy Media acquisition provides support for a wide range of social channels (social, web, mobile) and formats including contests, videos, and photos. Users can coordinate their publishing and advertising activity and measure impact throughout the social sphere. Social listening and analytical tools: Radian 6 monitors popular social services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as blogs, forums, communities and more. Supports 17 langua...

Personalization is fast becoming a de facto customer expectation. In the old days of B2B marketing (i.e. today) people go to your web home page, scan for links, click around and hopefully find their way to the most relevant information. That model is quickly being replaced by the social-mobile model in which information finds you based on your interests. Not only should it be delivered to you, but wherever you go on the Internet content should be designed around you. In effect, digital engagement is transitioning to a Google Adwords model where everything is specifically targeted and customized for every single visitor. This is a very challenging transition for B2B marketers. It means you have to identify as much as you can about a web visitor and serve content to them dynamically in the amount of time it takes for your web page to load in their browser. The implications for web infrastructure, content development and management, and data structures are significant. A key to making vis...

IBM released the findings of their Global CMO study yesterday and one of the primary conclusions is that CMOs feel unprepared to address key challenges. The most surprising thing is how consistent the feeling is across regions and vertical industries. CMOs generally face the same issues and report very similar levels of "unpreparedness" in the face of them. Top challenges include: data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics, among others. The findings are based on 1,734 structured in-person interviews with CMOs in large organizations conducted between February and June of 2011.Regional and vertical representation was reasonably well balanced. The sheer scale of the effort and the willingness of so many CMOs to participate indicate a role under siege. In our research, IDC has learned that marketing is undergoing fundamental and painful transformations on several levels: new and expanding datasets, new channels and form...

The old two-step marketing and sales model for customer creation is dead. Today we have a three part model: Socializing, Marketing, and Sales – with socializing taking on increasing importance and marketing being redefined in the process. That’s a good thing for customers but it makes the market more competitive for sellers. Companies have to seek out and engage with both existing and potential customers in radically new ways outside of explicit business contexts with resources previously not thought of as customer facing. This activity is going on today at a furious pace, but it is highly fragmented. With the introduction by Salesforce.com of Data.com and the social ready rebuild of Database.com at Dreamforce, as well their Chatter and CRM capabilities, customer interactions will come together in what is emerging as the Customer Cloud – the first killer app for the social enterprise. The Customer Cloud will evolve into the source of record for all account and contact data because it c...

The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well. However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles. The Need for Alignment The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule:...

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 mana...

I've posted a couple of blogs recently about the rise of the social media function and how BtoB companies can best leverage social media. A common theme has been the need for marketing to provide guidance, guidelines and infrastructure without stifling the power of this new channel to reach customers, prospects and influencers. To help with your journey, I've included below a list of social media guidelines that several companies have published: Adobe Acrobat Users: http://www.acrobatusers.com/blog_guidelines Cisco: http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/ciscos_internet_postings_policy/ Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&1=en&s+corp&~section=019 Mayo Clinic: http://sharing.mayoclinic.org/guidelines/for-mayo-clinic-employees/ BT: http://richarddennison.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/bt-social-media-guidelines-mar09.pdf eBay: http://ebayinkblog.com/2009/03/06/new-social-media-guidelines-for-reporting-company-information/ HP: http://w...

Many opportunities exist for B-to-B marketing organizations in the social media space. . . .and they're not all limited to what you can do with Twitter, Linked-In and YouTube. Just a few of these opportunities include: Establish a direct, relevant connection with your customers as a source of voice of the customer for new product development (e.g., through an on-line community) Improve customer satisfaction (e.g., enable customers to share experiences on-line by creating a self-running community where customers can interact with and learn from their peers) Increase the speed for troubleshooting and R&D by reducing the distance between customers and engineering Join the on-line technical conversations about your products that your customers are already having, by either leveraging your own community or listening to and participating in other companies' communities Best-in-class organizations are adding a new social media role to their organization to capture these opportunit...

For decades marketing has been desperately trying to connect with their customers in a controlled, one-way fashion. We had control of the brand, all marketing content as well as the traditional channels that were used to communicate with the market. And even on occasion, we cautiously exposed our executives and engineers to our customers while all the time holding our breath that they didn't say the "wrong thing" that would hurt our image, costing us millions of dollars in marketing investment and countless hours including nights and weekends executing our marketing strategy. It reminds me of a time when I was a product marketer in the semiconductor industry. I would visit customers quite frequently with our lead engineer. In one meeting this engineer exposed our greatest product flaw to one of our key customers. As I cringed in my seat, I expected the ROI from millions of dollars of investment into the brand value of this product to be instantly destroyed not to men...

How do you get busy marketers in a room for 2 hours to discuss some of their interactive marketing practices? One way is to offer them breakfast, exposure to several leading marketing organizations and industry experts, and introduction to a couple of digital marketing vendors. BtoB did just that this morning in Waltham, MA. Panelists included John Smits, Global Dir. Dbse. Mktg. and Segmentation, EMC; Leigh Day, Sr. Dir. Corp. Comm, Red Hat; and Paul Gillin of Paul Gillin Communications. Vendors included Brightcove and ZoomInfo. Here are a couple of key takeaways from the meeting: How do you avoid "campaign collisions" [EMC insight] Problem : multiple BUs and regions were sending communications to the same individuals (e.g., CIOs) about different EMC events on the same day Solution: "Deliver the most appropriate information, to the most relevant audience via the user's medium of choice" [sounds easy, no?] - "Centralized Demand Center" created a couple...

B2B marketers have not been well known for their advertising creativity and innovation in the past 10-15 years. Yes, there are a few great examples; especially from the multi-billion dollar companies that have large advertising budgets and can afford those large agencies. However, this is certainly one area that we lag behind our consumer marketing counterparts. After all, we're marketing to engineers, software developers, CIOs, CTOs and other "left brain" people. Think "logical", "sequential", "rational" and "analytical". They won't be fooled by our flashy marketing tactics and colorful images. Right? Well, maybe this is another area that we need to rethink as we shift into the age of digital marketing. What are some key drivers of this shift? The cost to create video and more advanced graphics has dropped considerably. We've learned that video and other graphical communication methods can be powerful in communicating c...

Well, our 2009 IDC Tech Marketing Barometer results are in; and if you missed the Telebriefing two weeks ago, here are some of the highlights: Marketing Investment: 0.5% Growth for Global IT Spending in 2009, while Average Tech Marketing Investment Drops 10%. Larger companies (>$1B in revenue) will take the greatest hit in marketing budget as they wrestle with significant revenue drops in key parts of their portfolios and continue to improve efficiency. Growth areas still exist within: enterprise social media, security management, mobile data, SaaS, Internet advertising, business analytics and IT outsourcing & BPO to name a few. (source: John Gantz's presentation at IDC's recent Directions event) Marketing Mix: The pendulum of investment swings to demand generation, with sales enablement closely coupled to this priority. (awareness building takes a "back seat", yet remains a key part of healthier companies' portfolios) We've been all talk as an industry...

The press is filled with stories about the demise of traditional advertising and the in-person, public trade show. Sounds quite similar in fact to the predicted disappearance of the "brick-and-mortar" storefront, and the emergence of a new on-line world where we can do all of our shopping in our slippers from the comfort of our home. Well, IDC CMO Advisory's recent 2009 Barometer study does continue to indicate that our traditional marketing mix is in the process of permanently changing. In fact, almost 70% of technology marketers indicate that they'll be increasing their program investment in digital marketing in 2009, while 72% of companies will be decreasing their in-person events spend and 60% decreasing their advertising spend (print, broadcast and corporate sponsorships). What are the top digital marketing initiatives for technology companies in 2009? Corporate web site: No longer simply a marketing billboard, the corporate web site has become the window to...

Working with technology marketers on a daily basis, I hear much about the need to develop more relevant content based upon a solid knowledge of your target customer segments and their needs at different stages of the buying cycle. In fact, in our 2009 Tech Marketing Barometer study (results to be announced in the next week or two) marketers identified "content development" as one of the highest priority areas for improving sales enablement. However, are we as marketers getting the "biggest bang" from our content development investment?. . . . leveraging this content across multiple delivery vehicles and channels? With this in mind, I thought it would be valuable to hear a bit more about how to best leverage content from IDC's VP of Go-to-Market services, Laura Nurzynski. Take it away Laura. . . . My colleagues from IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice expect digital marketing investment to rapidly outpace investment in much of the more traditional marketing vehicles. (ID...