15 authors, 15 articles. Free, yet with priceless insights.

Learn from marketing thought leaders how to engage with customers and create value for stakeholders in a complex digital world. Covers digital channels, marketing techniques, accountability and technology. Truly a must-read resource for every CMO!

One-click Download from CustomerThink.com (no registration required)

With many thanks to our producer, publisher, and my co-editor, Bob Thompson at DigitalMarketingOne.com and CustomerThink.com

And, of course, all my gratitude to our 15 authors, bloggers, consultants whose insights into digital marketing strategy make up this ebook.

• Digital channels
  • Edward Boyd
  • Eric Enge
  • Alan See
  • Kim Dushinski
  • Jim Sterne
• Digital marketing techniques
  • Ardath Albee
  • Robert Lesser
  • Chris Ryan
  • Steve Woods
  • Naras Eechambadi
• Digital marketing optimization
  • Jim Lenskold
  • Laura Patterson
  • Tom Manning
  • David Raab
• and myself for the digital strategy framework

Together, we set out to puzzle together the silo’d niches of digital marketing into one coherent strategic roadmap. The resulting strategy advice could maybe be summarized as follows (and I hope I am doing justice to all my co-authors):

1. Derive digital strategy from your overall marketing mission and the role that you want digital to play in it
2. Pay attention to the special nuances of each digital channel but also fuse the channels together into a cross-channel approach
3. Do the opportunity with digital marketing justice by making appropriate use of its biggest strength: intelligent interactivity
4. Consider the additional contribution that digital channels and analytics can have on your online-offline customer sales and marketing programs
5. Get more of what you want (e.g. revenue, budget, etc.) by investing in marketing accountability and ROI optimization
6. Derive technology strategy from your overall digital strategy

The following is cross-posted from the original at the IBM Unica blog.

—-

Exciting news for our IBM Unica NetInsight OnDemand customers and really all marketers: IBM today announced the new IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Suite which accomplishes three great “coming-togethers”. Namely, the following:

1. Combines the Best of IBM Coremetrics and IBM Unica NetInsight OnDemand

Since IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics and Unica our web analytics teams have been merged together like a deck of cards to make the best use of the combined development and best practices expertise. Our combined team now takes care of both IBM’s on demand and on-premises offerings and customers for web analytics.

And as previous competitors, it was much to my surprise that we had been very like minded in the decade leading up to this merger. Both Unica and Coremetrics had been working in parallel to make sure web analytics delivered not just reports for optimization but also provided individual customer insights for refining relevancy of marketing messages.

2. Fuses together: Customer Profiles, Analytics, and Digital Marketing Execution

The next great coming together I see for our customers in the IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite is the tight integration between LIVE Profiles, Web Analytics, and the IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Applications such as IBM Coremetrics LIVEmail and IBM Coremetrics Intelligent Offer. This tight integration is the secret sauce that enables our users to execute more relevant digital marketing campaigns driven by analytics. The IBM Coremetrics suite inherits this product design from the Coremetrics side where this combo had been available for years while other vendors were merely talking about it in Powerpoint presentations.

3. Adds a More Flexible and Open Data Architecture for Multichannel Analytics

Now, like D’Artagnan teaming up with the three musketeers, the new IBM Coremetrics Suite adds increased flexibility and openness to the trio of LIVE Profiles, analytics, and digital marketing applications. This is being achieved thanks to experience and technology assets coming from Unica NetInsight OnDemand. And it is a true 1+1 = 3 situation. Not only can marketers extend their analytical lens by combining online and offline insights (using the new IBM Coremetrics Multichannel Analytics add-on), but now they can also target digital marketing execution programs, e.g. through IBM Coremetrics LIVEmail, using the cross-channel picture of an individual’s interests.

The Result: Two Great Growth Paths for our Customers

All marketers have web metrics available to them. Competing on analytics requires us to be cleverer with our use of analytics than the next marketer.

Technology needs to be our “power arm” that helps get things done quickly that would be very tedious, expensive, and time consuming otherwise. The new IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite provides IBM customers with a “power arm” that helps them go beyond commodity web metrics and move towards digital analytics where discovering new opportunities with segments or individual prospects and customers means more strategic opportunities.

Our customers also have another growth path to go from analytics to digital marketing execution, and from there to integrations with their enterprise (e.g. to their Netezza data warehouse or their IBM Unica Enterprise Marketing Management system), and with the rest of their digital marketing eco-system, e.g. through the eco-systems of IBM Coremetrics LIVEmail (i.e. Email service providers), and IBM Coremetrics AdTarget (i.e. display ad networks).

Now the ball is in your court. How are you going to put all these multichannel analytics and digital marketing opportunities into the race for beating out your competition?

For Our Customers …

Existing NetInsight OnDemand and Coremetrics customers, please keep your eyes peeled for further information by email. Please register for the upcoming customer-only launch webinars. There is no requirement to move to the combined solution immediately. IBM plans on continuing support of the existing Unica NetInsight OnDemand and Coremetrics versions into the future, accompanied by the same industry leading service and support you have come to expect. IBM believes there are compelling components in the combined release that are meaningful and important to your business. In the launch webinars, you will learn about all the great business benefits that our Unica NetInsight OnDemand customers that upgrade will have available. For example, all customers can use their current and new release in parallel during their upgrade process.

For More Information …

Please keep an eye on Unica.com and Coremetrics.com as we will progressively publish more details in the next 10 days of about the new capabilities that our customers can expect. For now, see:

• The press release
• Summary of the IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite

Earlier on this blog I referenced an article by Steve Woods  from Eloqua on RPM, Revenue Performance Management. RPM is a relatively new term in the area of demand marketing optimization. Will it stick? As I was writing earlier, there seem to be so many terms already that describe B2B marketing automation. Why another one?

Lauren Carlson wrote a post on that topic is a good read.

So will it stick?

I like of course the idea of scientific, analytics driven, revenue optimization.

But I fear that the term is at risk because it is so broad.

Not marketing optimization

not customer optimization

but total revenue optimization.

So everybody is responsible for RPM, and if everybody is responsible the danger is that nobody takes responsibility.

For friends of analytics and interactive marketing, it is always a delight to find new technology vendors that take a fresh look at solving the problems in the market.

So, I was fascinated to learn about Whatsnexx’ and their paradigm for marketing automation: Customer State Marketing.

You will probably say that the idea of treating customers in different situations/states with different next best actions is common to all campaign management and marketing automation solutions.

True.

But the degree to which Whatsnexx elevated “Customer State” to the central paradigm is unique, I believe. And, it is one of those mental images that immediately clicks!

So, I was curious to ask Jacques Spilka from Whatsnexx’  a few questions about Customer State Marketing and their approach to marketing automation.

Did Whatsnexx’ define the term Customer State Marketing?

Jacques: Customer State Marketing is a paradigm that we have coined, and our graphic interface and approach are patented. “State” is the key differentiator between what we do and what B2C MA solution providers offer.

Did you build Whatsnexx more for certain industries than others (e.g. B2B, B2C, etc)?

Jacques: No. Whatsnexx grew out of a need to tie various applications together without the need to create a centralized database first. One of the problems that we faced at Komunik, an email marketing service provider, was the need to build a synchronization bridge with the various databases that contained the data the client required to send 1-to-1 communications. Another problem was that whenever we wanted to do various trigger-based campaigns, we always had delays imposed by the I.T. department’s existing backlog. We set out to resolve both of these problems by designing an application that allows the marketer to define their rule set (e.g. when this happens then take these actions) without regards as to where the data resides, and without having to involve I.T. to codify the rules in the local or target application.

How does the paradigm extend to the next level of detail, e.g. a regular customer browses product X on the website but doesn’t purchase it. If company sells 20 different products will they have to build 20 states to do remarketing campaigns relevant to each abandoned product? (i assume not)

Jacques: The marketer defines the granularity of the program they are designing. We have one customer who allows their members to download various white papers. Each white paper can have up to 50 “topic” tags associated with it. Currently the marketer has defined two different scenarios as they are only interested in doing an upsell for two different topics. Ultimately they could define 50 scenarios, one for each topic tag. The scenarios work as follows: each time a member downloads a white paper (a download “event”) the scenario tests to see if the tags contain the upsell topic. If so then an upsell email is sent (i.e. the action) to the member. There is then a 7 day waiting period where no more emails for that specific topic are sent (i.e. the member is in a Wait state). After the 7 days are up the member is returned to a Solicitable state.

If I may, here is a more complete explanation:

A subject ecosystem can consist of multiple scenarios. Each scenario can address a different aspect of the marketing program (e.g. acquisition, retention, cross-sell…). A scenario can contain multiple states. A subject (e.g. a client) is always in one state in each scenario, though not necessarily the same state in every scenario. This allows the marketer to create the granularity they need to enact their marketing programs. You could view the scenario states as sub-states. In the example above, a member could be in a solicitable state in one scenario (e.g. Topic 1) and be in a wait state in another scenario (e.g. Topic 2).

How does Whatsnexx connect to customers’ transactions and other behavioral data?

Jacques: Whatsnexx receives events from other systems in the form of simple XML tickets that contain the attributes (i.e. data) required to run the scenario. For example, a newsletter sign-up form would provide Whatsnexx an XML ticket that contains an email, first name, and last name field. If a customer purchases an item then the XML ticket could contain the item number, the quantity and the transaction value. The only constraint on events is the ability to detect them.

The key to this approach is to identify all of the detectable events that the marketer wishes to respond to. They then have the relevant systems create an XML ticket whenever one of these events occurs, regardless of the subject’s current state. Whatsnexx receives the event and then implements the marketers rule set according to the subject’s current state in the ecosystem.

How does Whatsnexx connect to executing marketing messages? e.g. does it spit out targeting lists?

Jacques: Whatsnexx executes actions through infogates (i.e. connectors) that conform to the target system’s API. The only constraint on actions is the targets systems API. In some cases, such as sending print messages where minimum run sizes are desired, it may be preferable to accumulate the action requests in a queue that the target system picks up on a periodic basis. The same applies if the target system is behind a firewall. In that case, the action requests can be placed on an FTP server that the target system can query on a scheduled basis.

Software or cloud based?

Whatsnexx is entirely cloud-based. There are two components to Whatsnexx: Whatsnexx Studio, the design tool that you saw in the how-to videos; Whatsnexx Gateway, the execution tool that works in the cloud.

Studio is free to download and runs locally on a Windows platform. Studio can be used to brainstorm, model scenarios and define state workflows.

Gateway is available to subscribers who can publish the ecosystems they build with Studio for execution on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

For more videos from Whatsnexx, see their resources page.

After three posts on insights for the considered purchases sector, it is fun now to see now how different the discussion is for customer marketing amd B2C. For that, just tune into Naras Eechambadi’s’ article which is next in our Digital Marketing One series for CMOs.

It strikes you that the discussion within B2B (lead management) is all about nurturing clients in leading up to a sale. The discussion in customer marketing is about the long term relationship across many transactions and towards increasing customer value over time.

Though both camps might consider analytics driven marketing “the central hub”.

Read Naras’ article carefully though.

I am amazed how self-evidently Naras includes the ways in which customer marketing has adapted to the 2010s in his writing.

“The first step to decide whether to increase investment in your customer marketing is to measure the value of your customer base and to understand the elements that drive the value. Value can be defined in different ways in different businesses—it could be a revenue or sales measure, a profit or contribution measure or even loyalty or advocacy.”, from Naras’ article.

Hey, Naras says, it is 2011 and no longer do we need to explain nor go on and on that advocacy via social media could influence whether a client should be considered high value to the company or not.

Naras pairs these up with other statements that he takes for granted as a seasoned customer marketer but that make just about any web analyst look like an amateur and makes web analytics software look like a toy.

“Next, segment your customers based on current value as well as potential future value.“

“The best way to measure the return and to conclusively prove the effectiveness of marketing is by holding out a sample (control group) of customers [...] The deviation in values over time [between test vs control group], aggregated across the entire customer base, gives you a measure of the value created by customer marketing.”

Naras is of course not just “somebody” writing about customer marketing but has deep roots in the industry. He is the General Manager of Quaero, a CSG solution. Quaero (a Unica partner of many years) delivers multi-channel marketing solutions that help companies build long-lasting customer relationships and maximize return on investment. Naras is also the author of High Performance Marketing: Bringing Method to the Madness of Marketing (Kaplan Professional Press, 25).

Check out his contribution to the article series for digital CMOs and chime in with your own comments.

Now that our Digital Marketing One series for CMOs reviewed the most critical know-how for a variety of channels, the focus shifts to digital marketing techniques.

You can apply these marketing techniques across digital channels.

And the first insights that I’d like to point readers to come from writer and consultant Ardath Albee on content marketing.

To paraphrase from Ardath’s article, the best content marketers have been able to:

1. increase lead conversion rates (e.g. by 70%!!!)
2. make it more likely that leads will respond to calls
3. and – most impressive to me – increase average sales values!!

Yet,content marketers also have the Internet awash with bezillions of “Top 10 tricks” guides and bezillions of free webinars on every conceivable topic. So, it can be really, really hard to get good marketing returns on your content.

Ardath’s article provides golden advice to strategize on your content development in a systematic manner.

Ardath‘s book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale was recently released by McGraw-Hill. Ardath is a B2B Marketing Strategist and the CEO of her firm, Marketing Interactions, Inc. She applies her business management and marketing experience to help companies with complex sales use eMarketing strategies to generate more and better sales opportunities.

I asked Ardath recently which industries (besides B2B) benefit from content marketing. Here was her response:

All industries can find benefit from content marketing. My focus just happens to be B2B companies with complex sales that require building engagement over time with lots of education and expertise and more than one person involved in the decision. Yet, the equivalent in B2C markets would be buying a house or buying a car or even life insurance or investing for retirement or to fund your children’s college education.

An example in B2C are Baby Center’s iterative emails for new parents who need to learn a lot to raise children.

I think the difference is really in the approach and type of content selected. For example, Lego would likely do well by creating content that engages kids in what they can build, creating interactive games, contests, etc. And, I’d even bet there’s a niche out there with adults who haven’t ever given them up.

To learn more from Ardath, check out the following:

• Download two chapters of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
• Download the eBook, Content is Marketing Currency

It makes sense to have a maturity model as a companion to the new digital-marketing strategy framework . (See the thumbnail of the framework below.)

What’s a maturity model?

Maturity models are well established today. Their purpose is to be a roadmap to marketers. You find your personal “You are Here” point on the map. Then you see what next steps you may wish to consider for further growth.

How does this model (below) relate to the framework (above)?

The framework proposed five major components for digital-marketing strategy:

1. Setting Digital’s mission
2. Deriving the digital strategy
3. Deriving the interaction strategy
4. ROI measurement and improvement
5. Technology strategy

The job of the maturity model below is to score different levels of maturity with each of these 5 different areas.

Here is the Maturity Model

Click to expand

How can we use this model?

Below are three examples of typical companies that you will find in the market place today.

1: Digital laggards

Typical laggards may look like the following spider chart when scored against the digital strategy maturity model. Usually there is no defined mission, or only a vague or basic definition for the contribution of the digital channel.

And everything goes downhill from there.

Sadly, many CPG, pharma, manufacturing, or book publishing companies find themselves in this boat. The reason is not ignorance at all. It is that these business models make it hardest to prove the contribution that their digital channel has on the business. They typically don’t sell directly, neither online nor offline.

These companies will need very creative business and ROI measurement strategies to unlock their digital potential.

2: Digital leaders that lack cross-channel integration

Digital marketers can get very sophisticated within their silo without yet taking a look beyond their plates. So many web teams have grown up in isolation from the rest of marketing (or sit outside marketing alltogther) so that they slide into this one-way street.

Part of the reason for the online-only silos has also been that marketers have tried to avoid their IT departments at all cost. That locked them into SaaS only technologies and clicks & cookies only views of their customers.

Again, it wasn’t for ignorance. For many reasons, IT at most companies has been ill equipped to support digital marketing. So marketers that experienced this voted IT off the island and crossed to using SaaS technologies in the past 5-8 years.

3: Digital leaders including a true cross-channel view

While still the tip of the pyramid, you now increasingly enocunter digital marketers that have moved beyond the digital silo. They are typically building data warehouses that bring together customers’ online click behavior with the same customers’ offline transactions and other marketing data.

They prioritized these (not cheap) projects because they realized a true (i.e. cross-channel) view of ROI of digital strategies was necessary in order for company leadership to take the digital channel seriously. They also use this central data mart as the basis for cross-channel marketing integration, e.g. re-marketing, cross-sales, or retention marketing. 

Even these leaders don’t necessarily apply long term analytics yet. I am thinking of analytical methods such as Kevin Hillstrom’s Multichannel Forensics. He aims to predict longer term migrations of customers across channels or products to help companies decide where they should invest now based on that forecast.

Summary

There are many frameworks and maturity models. They each have their merrits, and their blind spots. See a few good ones below:

• Dave Chaffey: Digital Marketing Strategy Planning Tool
• 64clicks: Omnipresent marketing
• Stephane Hamel: Web analytics maturity model
• Gartner (Bill Gassman): Web analytics maturity model
• Many more …

Take a look around and pick the models that best speak to your own business needs.

Here is a revised framework for digital marketing strategy.

Why the revision?

This fixes a number of shortcomings in the first version that I had proposed 10 days ago.

• For example, David Raab and Laura Patterson, members of the Founders Council of DigitalMarketingOne, caught a critical flaw in the earlier version. Namely, my placement of channels (e.g. Search, display, etc.) in the framework diagram was flawed. I placed them in specific locations of the customer lifecycle whereas they can play a role in many stages of the lifecycle.
• Additionally, I was in round table discussions at the eConsultancy peer summit in NYC, and it was a good reminder that many companies still haven’t made explicit what mission their digital channel has, i.e. how it should be contributing to the business.

Elements of the new strategic framework for digital marketing

Informed by overall marketing strategy

First of all, before CMOs think about using this framework they still ought to start with a higher level framework such as Doug Goldstein’s briliant work at MindOfMarketing.net. That global strategy needs to be in place so that the CMO can now drill-down to define the contribution of digital within the bigger setting.

Define Digital’s mission

Job one is to define how digital is to contribute to the business and to the customer life cycle across multiple channels.

Select your overall digital strategy

Based on your digital mission your CMO can now derive the overall approach in terms of presences that you should prioritize (e.g. mobile, Facebook, website, etc.) and their related “site types” or business models, i.e.

1. eCommerce,
2. lead gen,
3. customer service,
4. content/publishing,
5. or brand marketing.

Based on these decisions you can then derive the top five KPIs and targets that you should work towards. You can also form an initial opinion on the ad channels that suggest themselves for the audience that you wish to reach.

Interactivity

As pointed out in the last post, interactivity is what digital is really good at. So the new framework retains the prominent role for interactive marketing across the customer lifecycle. I removed the reference to channels (e.g. search, etc.) however since each channel can play a role in multiple lifecycle stages.

ROI measurement and optimization

The other strengths of digital are measurability and testing. This needs to be put to use towards continuous improvement. Using the insights marketers change their investments in the familiar cycle of continuous optimization.

Unlike the original web analytics cycle of continuous improvement however, the emphasis here is that the continuous improvement applies not just to web pages and advertising. But you want to apply it to your entire digital and interaction strategy.

Technology strategy and selection

Finally, your use of digital marketing technology should of course be determined by the digital and interactive marketing strategies that you are going after.

At the new DigitalMarketingOne, our Founders Council is seeking to design and explore a strategic framework for digital marketing.  

Marketing does so many things though and does them so differently at different companies. How do we put all that into a framework that makes sense to CMOs – our target audience?

Luckily, many clever people have thought about that before.

Starting from a Strategic Framework for Marketing in General

The Strategic Marketing Framework presented on MindofMarketing.net (see below) was one of many frameworks that seemed especially appropriate for a CMO audience. It should serve as a great starting point.

Strategic marketing framework, MindOfMarketing.net

It’s just beautiful how this framework:

1. Emphasizes that the job of Marketing is much more than just to be the “Hey, make this pretty and send us the leads!” department.
2. Is also easy on the eye

Evolving this Marketing Framework for Digital

There are a number of things, however, that are so strategic to digital marketing that they should be better emphasized in our framework. Namely:

1. Interactivity

While digital can’t beat traditional advertising media on reach, its unique strength is interactivity.  So, let’s expand the traditional marketing mix’s classic 4 Ps: Product, price, placement, and promotion. Namely, let’s drill open promotion to show just how much is possible within that one P in digital. Let’s add the Ps that are so key to digital marketing: persuasion, permission, personalization, multiple web presences, net-promoters, etc.

2. Ad channels

Rumors of the death of advertising in the digital age are greatly exaggerated: ads are everywhere on the net.  But there is an immense amount of unique know-how within each of the digital ad channels. We should call out the most important channels in the framework to do that justice.

3. ROI measurement and optimization

Digital media are fantastically measurable. Optimization within a channel can sometimes even be automated. That creates the illusion that it should be almost automatic to measure overall ROI / returns across digital and allocate your investments appropriately. Not so easy! Therefore let’s add ROI measurement and optimization to the framework explicitly.

The Resulting Strategic Marketing Framework for Digital

Below is the resulting strategic marketing framework with the modifications for Digital.

What do you think?

Does this framework do a good enough job to encapsulate all that goes into measuring and increasing ROI (with marketing initiatives and customer relationships) in digital?

Once we have the framework down, we can proceed to the next step and explore the details with the help of DigitalMarketingOne’ers from all corners of Digital.

….

Credits

A number of folks deserve credit for their inspiring works that went into this framework. Namely:

• MindofMarketing.net, provided the Strategic Marketing Framework starting point
• The idea of the extended Ps for the marketing mix came from Unica’s Yuchun Lee in his keynote at the 2008 Unica customer conference, MIS
• Jim Sterne, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, coined the “windows into the hearts & minds of the market place”
• The Eisenberg brothers while at Future Now Inc. developed Persuasion Architecture
• I credit Digitas for the idea of the hour glass shaped funnel since I saw it on a slide of theirs

When talking about retailers’ savings / discount cards, the first thing the analytics industry used to point out was the benefit for customer identification. The card helped tie transactions to known customers or households and facilitated the range of well known customer analytics such as: Market basket analysis across transactions Shopping preferences segmented by any demographic information that was supplied when signing up for the card Loyalty analysis in terms of RFM and latency Response analysis to preceding marketing contacts Marketing targeting analysis based on past purchases

And so Wikipedia still says: “The store — one might expect — uses aggregate data internally (and sometimes externally) as part of its marketing research. These cards can be used to determine, for example, a given customer’s favorite brand of beer, or whether she is a vegetarian.”

So we should add a point #6 to the list above, i.e. turn the customer data into a revenue generating product that the store can sell to others.

But why a savings card when credit cards help identify you anyway?

Do you recall the last time you paid cash for the weekly basket at the supermarket? Or for any clothing item or really any item above $20 at a retailer?

So, given that the use of credit cards is pervasive and the card reveals name and credit card ID of shoppers, what is the point of needing a loyalty card anymore? (Never mind whether it is an actual plastic card or a virtual card on your Smartphone that is scanned into the register).

Doesn’t the credit card identify you sufficiently anyway?

Granted, there is a law against reverse credit card append, i.e. matching your credit card number against a database with addresses and contact information. But using just the name from your card + your zip code (that you sometimes get asked at the cash register) retailers can match your data against 3d party databases to satisfactory degrees without violating the reverse append rules (see e.g.  Address Capture).

The point needs to be marketing (while analytics are only a supporting act)

The difference that remains to credit cards is that savings cards can establish permission to market. This may include:

1. Permission to contact you, if you opt-in
2. Permission to sell your data, if you opt-in

So the point is about being able to establish marketers’ ability to contact the individual with marketing messages. Then the analytics and the additional demographic data come in with the aim of making those marketing message more relevant.

Retailers can use the data directly or sell it to other markters that have essentially the same goals.

While frequent buyer cards (e.g. airline miles) enlist the customer in a rewards scheme and attitude, savings cards are just a key to getting the advertised discount in a store. So that is another reason why the burden is on marketers to use the savings card “relationship” for something useful.

How well is it working?

If the point is better marketing then how well is it being done today by marketers?

Do you feel you are getting relevant information in your inbox or mail box by the merchants where you are using savings cards?