Embrace. L ve Triangle. The Marketing Automation. DATA

Transcription

1 Embrace The Marketing Automation L ve Triangle DATA PROCESS CONTENT

2 Preface The realistic possibility of relevant one-to-one communication continues to get closer. For the first time, marketers, IT departments and sales leaders can visualize the theoretical potential of uniting large volumes of data with innovative new marketing tactics to guide customers through a predetermined process (buying, referral, advocacy, etc.) with a greatly reduced ongoing human footprint. However, to achieve the ultimate goal of hyper-relevant communications, marketing automation project sponsors should be realistic about what marketing automation will require from a data, content and operational standpoint. 1

3 Content Loves Data Without data, content often ends up adrift and lonely, only occasionally bumping into a few relevant eyeballs amid a slew of strangers named traffic. Many marketers still don t know what types of content to create in order to properly nurture customers. Most organizations simply don t have the infrastructure to drive hyper-relevant content. Too often, content is born the bastard child of the C-level knee-jerk or belched from the gut of a bad Don Draper wannabe working at a creative agency with Ritalin in the vending machines. True marketing automation requires the types of nano-insights that help a customer make better decisions when researching a cloud computing solution or looking to address concerns about a brand s return policy. Just look at the numbers marketers hold up as good performance indicators and you ll see how much room marketers have to run in creating more compelling and relevant content. Traditionally, we ve been all too happy to back-slap each other if a display ad cracks a 2% click rate or when only 30% of our audience opens an . Marketers have ignored the fact that the flipside of these percentages indicates that messages have been alienating the vast majority of customers for a long time. For the past several decades, we have been a population of data creating and data wasting entities. The first was sent in The first web domain was registered in Since then, customers have been generating and broadcasting behavioral and demographic data about themselves in ever increasing volumes. Sadly, most of this data never got the chance to grow up and become a real customer insight. This is because there will always be a lag between the ability to collect data and synthesize insights. Further still, there exists an even wider gap between recognition or even acceptance of an insight and the strategies needed to extract value from these insights. 2

4 Relevant marketing is often predictive marketing. Understanding enough of the buyer s journey allows a marketer to anticipate a customer s needs and proactively place information in front of eyeballs. Thus, the ultimate goal of predictive marketing is to achieve the God-like power of seeing the past, present and future at the same time and bend the outcome of events to your will. To see the past, we must look backwards at a contact s profile data. This is the information that may already exist in your database. However, chances are the data is incomplete or lives in different places. To see the present, we must have the ability to set up and test scenarios or observe activities in real-time. More importantly, we must be able to take these observations and connect them to existing contact profiles past meets present. To see the future, we must have enough data connected to a customer profile to model likely scenarios of what may realistically happen next. All this data must live in an environment where it can be augmented, molded in real-time by a variety of complimentary tools and become fuel for automated action instantly. 3

5 We Have the Technology The good news is that marketers can and should take advantage of the fact that tactical marketing automation platforms, relational databases and behavioral scoring engines are finally accessible, often through a single platform. The number of people and the depth of expertise needed to collect, tie together and derive actionable insights from data has decreased significantly. Today s Marketing Technologist leverages the efficiency built into these platforms to do the job that once required a Database Architect, Business Process Flow Experts and a full suite of production and programming resources. It s getting easier every year to connect data to content. As a result, data is finally becoming the supportive, nurturing partner content has been yearning for over the past 15 years. Content loves data because it turns the traditionally broad white paper into a seven-part webinar series. Data turns product videos from expensive digital paperweights to targeted assets that Google can t keep its bots off. Data keeps coupons out of the physical mailbox and only drops them into the inbox when business rules suggest they are more likely to be welcomed. Content loves data because it provides renewed meaning and utility. However... 4

6 The Goal of Content Should Be To Make Itself Obsolete With every successive generation of content, new data will emerge. While some data can indeed be evergreen and provide insights that prove valid for many months or years, the majority of data is simply another cobblestone on the road to relevant one-to-one communication. Content that delivers an acceptable benchmark today should be the grandparent of successive content assets. Successive content assets should have messages tailored to align more tightly to sub-segments of the audience originally addressed by the first generation content asset. In this way, content strategists need to think like a chess player - two steps ahead with every move. This would be impossible without content s previously star-crossed lover - data. But the affair between content and data is not a creepy one-sided relationship. 5

7 Data Loves Content Too Data can do nothing on its own. It s the conclusion of an activity. Data loves content because content is the extrovert in the relationship. Content does what data can t - it gets to interact with customers and make more data. It s time for marketers to recognize the fact that nurture marketing has become an established best practice. scoring and automation has been around for a decade and has fully exited the experimental stage. It makes no difference if your market requires a longer-term B2B nurture or a real-time B2C strategy with a shorter cycle. The progeny of data driven content is enhanced data, more data - data that would be, in many cases, cost prohibitive to generate through traditional research. Marketers must become more accustomed to the fact that the goal of some forms of content should be simply to produce data. This is a difficult position to take when. In the face of such pressure, it s only natural to grab for the lowest hanging fruit first. Over the last few years, many of the exciting applications of big data have been focused around conversion optimization - which is somewhat understandable. Why wouldn t you chase short-term returns on marketing investments when your career lives and dies by the quarterly report? 6

8 Done correctly, the amount of data being generated with every successive campaign or marketing effort will increase exponentially, not linearly. The inevitable result of a continually maturing content marketing effort is that it evolves from a corporate project to a type of program. Here s where things can get a little messy. Unless you anticipate the operational needs of a constantly evolving content and data program, your ability to create data is likely to outpace your ability to create content to the same degree of specificity. Now your challenge to creating relevant one-to-one experiences has shifted from an insights problem to an operational problem. In other words, data and content love each other so much, they start to get out of control. 7

9 Process is A Chaperone Data-driven marketing is an iterative, ongoing process. It is never one and done. The first steps of content evolution are relatively simple. You can even get started with the data you have, a bit of tribal knowledge pulled from disparate groups within your organization, and develop a fairly robust best guess campaign. Data points birthed by content-driven campaigns have the potential for immense value. They are also, much like most children, more difficult to manage the more you have. It s time to pre-plan a process that answers two important questions: 1 2 What do we do with new data once it s created so that it can continue to add value? What internal or external resources will be needed to create an ongoing engine of iterative content creation? The first question is a data strategy question. When a hotel has data coming in from a booking engine, a spa booking engine and a restaurant booking tool, you need the strategy and infrastructure to ensure: Properly managed data flow and mapping Proper segmentation and sub-segmentation Maintenance of acceptable data hygiene 8

10 While each individual booking engine may have its own set of transactional messaging via or SMS as part of its native offering, it s better to centralize these functions within a single, more manageable platform. Some of the better marketing automation solutions can act as middleware to collect various data inputs into a single relational database and follow pre-programmed business rules to engage with customers, record behavioral actions and respond in real-time if the business rules dictate such. It s no replacement for a true master data management solution, but it can be a more affordable bridge between your current data mess and a longer term solution. The second question of resources speaks to an industry that is in the middle of a fairly impressive amount of consolidation. Whatever marketing automation software provider you choose, make sure you choose a platform that allows for smart, centralized customer data storage (or good linkage to your customer database) and centralized messaging. It may take some time and expense on the front end of this solution, but the end result should be something a mid-level marketing technologist can manage with an advanced analytics team ready to easily draw conclusions and alter/evolve campaigns. It s also important to map out which resources will be needed and how data will be passed between entities before the system is in place. This seems obvious, but it s amazing to see how many companies just make this up as they go. 9

11 Define The Human Role In Automation The average enterprise marketing organization can likely manage the relationship between data and content for perhaps two to three generations of campaign development. However, eventually the volume of data being created and the amount of content needed to continually refuel the cycle will require the addition of job roles not historically associated with marketing. Over the next five years, executives like yourself will need an army of the following roles in a mix of in-house teams and external stakeholders: Marketing Technologists to manage content aggregation and curation Brand Journalists to extract insights from thought leaders too busy to write Production Artists and Programmers to process content into its various forms for publication on the web Business Process Experts to map not only new campaigns, but the interaction of new data and efficient scaling of content creation 10

12 Get Help When You Get Stuck, Preferably Before If you feel behind when it comes to marketing automation, good marketing data governance and content marketing, you re not alone is the first year a critical mass of marketing executives have noted an increase in investment in marketing automation, so most of you are starting from the same place. If you re in the middle of planning your approach to a new marketing automation program or campaign, it s a good idea to get input from someone who has done it successfully. The publisher of this document, Big Scary Cranium, has helped plan and execute effective marketing automation programs for some of the largest companies on the planet. Don t get caught in the middle of the marketing automation love triangle. Give us a call, we re happy to answer a few questions. Big Scary Cranium is a content marketing and marketing automation agency in Atlanta, Georgia. We help midsize and enterprise businesses build and execute advanced campaigns that hand-hold customers through the buying process. Sign up for advanced tips at bigscarycranium.com. 11