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.

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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

From the original post on blog.Unica.com.
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Earlier this month, Unica’s development team put the finishing touches on version 8.2 of the Unica Enterprise product line. Included as part of this suite release, was also version 8.2 of the web analytics product: NetInsight.

With the new capabilities in NetInsight 8.2, our aim was to bring the kind of maturity to the web analytics industry that analytics users have long been familiar with from more traditional Business Intelligence (BI) applications.

Check out the new capabilities below.

Report Inbox and Slice/Dice Breadcrumbs

Like Samurais, NetInsight users slice & dice their way through granular web data to answer their always changing questions.

The new Report Inbox enables our web analytics Samurais to run many ad hoc reports in parallel and send the resulting reports to their new Report Inbox where they can be retrieved when ready.

Especially nice is that every slice & dice action is captured in the Report Inbox which forms a trail of breadcrumbs. So when our Samurais arrive at a nugget of insight they can more easily trace back how they arrived there.

Catch Multiple Birds with One Stone

NetInsight users are accustomed to the convenience of the drag & drop UI for ad hoc analysis. Yet, they asked for the ability to drag & drop multiple edits onto their reports before kicking off a refresh. The new Multi-Edit Mode enables just that.

Mix & Match Dashboards with Graphs, Tables and, KPI Metrics

Dashboards in NetInsight could already mix charts with KPI sections. Now, users also have the option of displaying report tables as part of dashboards. See the example below.

(click for larger view)

Enhanced Geo Location Reporting

NetInsight geo location reports are using the industry leading geo data from Quova now. Since many users of NetInsight are direct marketers, a popular request had been to add the Demographic Marketing Area (DMA) to the available set of geo location reports. Eh voila, this is now included. Also available are postal code data, and, in countries where applicable, state level data.

(click for larger view)

Overlay UI beta

Nothing like seeing metrics in context with your website! With NetInsight 8.2 we are replacing the original Overlay browser plug-in that used to require users to download and install software.

No longer! Instead, NetInsight comes with a cross browser compatible Overlay bookmarlet. This can simply be dragged from the NetInsight UI into the browser toolbar to begin seeing stats overlaid with your website.

(click for larger view)

In version 8.2, the Overlay is released as a beta for now. We encourage all our customers to try it on your websites and send your feedback to Unica customer services.

API

APIs are standard for analytics software. Version 8.2 of NetInsight makes our XML API available for the Enterprise edition of the software so that on-premises users can benefit from it as well. We also extended the API with additional flexibility for retrieving reports in multiple formats and data sets beyond the former limits.

The API adds to the multiple avenues that NetInsight OnDemand and Enterprise users have for accessing their granular web data that underlies the reports. The other options include data feeds and direct access to the open database.

Complex Parameters / Custom Values

The web is becoming increasingly rich and interactive. So, custom dimensions in NetInsight (parameters) can now be used with richer sets of data, namely lists of values. For example: SearchResults=Partner1|Partner12|Partner29 or Colors-Shown=blue|green|yellow. Previously, each custom dimension could pass only one value per server call.

Contextual Percentage Metrics

Congratulations, keyword XYZ brought you 2,000 conversions. But, is that significant or not? For context it would be good to know what percentage of total the 2,000 represent.

Well now, you can choose whether your percentage metrics on NetInsight reports will be calculated based on page totals, report totals, or time period totals. So you can put the 2,000 conversions in context vs. the rest of the page, the report, or the time frame. Additional controls allow further options on when you want to display which percentages.

Etc

No release would be complete without lots of under the hood enhancements and performance increases. Among these, one little fun fact is that users can now analyze their iPhone, iPad, and iPod visitors as separate devices.

The NetInsight product team says THANK YOU to our users. For further details, our customers can check additional videos and documentation in Unica’s Customer Portal.

Sharp, as always, Jacques Warren commented on my previous post why maturity model people always gravitate to Spider graphs?

Wouldn’t it be easier to read bar charts?

Worth a try!

So, belowe are the three examples from the digital marketing maturity model as bar charts instead of spider diagrams.

Which to prefer, Spider or Bars?

Comparing to the spider charts from the previous post, I’d say Jacques is right on. The Spider charts look more sophisticated and interesting. But the bar charts are much easier to read.

Graph masters

Dress your charts to impress. That may sometimes mean making them look fancy, but usually probably means making them meaningful and easy to interpret.

There is nothing that “sells” analytics like good visuals.

To that point, some people are just so genius that I feel hopelessly behind to their masterminds. Case in point, see for example the following Halloween costume chart by “MB“.

Happy Halloween!

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

Exciting times! The consolidation in the marketing technology industry is producing a big league of solutions providers.

Dreaming ahead into the future, what can companies hope to achieve with this new breed of marketing software and services providers?

The end-to-end conversion optimization vision that still seemed far reaching to me back in February, looks much more limited now given the new outlook today.

Disclaimer: The following perspective reflects only my personal dreams and shouldn’t be taken to represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.

Digital Enterprise Marketing++

It isn’t possible to do the coming future justice by calling it next generation analytics, campaign management, or marketing automation. The step up in caliber requires also a step up in language.

Might the following become every day terms in enterprise marketing technology in 2011 and beyond?

Marketing Mix Management (MMM)

Today’s discussion is at the level of point solutions such as search bid management tools (for PPC) and demand side platforms (for display advertising). In coming years, will we see all these combined into a single solution for MMM?

MMM would not only allocate advertising budgets towards marketing mix optimization. It would also automate the execution of these ad strategies, their testing, and the data collection into marketing performance management.

Marketing Performance Management (MPM)

Today’s discussion is at the level of web analytics, benchmarking, landing page and site optimization, social media monitoring, predictive analytics, BI, analytical CRM, social CRM, etc.

In coming years, will we see all these combined into a single MPM environment?

MPM would have to combine the aforementioned point solutions for analytics into one interoperable data environment. Users would want drag & drop flexibility to analyze across silos. Think Minority Report.

The data that flows into MPM would include in-house data marts with sensitive information. That means that we may see the pendulum swinging back to in-house software for things such as web analytics.

Interactive Marketing (IM)

IM is the successor to behavioral targeting and direct marketing. It is based on the accepted notion that marketing is more successful when it is timely and relevant. Therefore, interactions via websites, IVR, email, and any other addressable channel should take into account each user’s past and current behavior to personalize content and marketing offers.

Marketing – Fulfillment Synchronization (MFS)

The dream of automating marketing mix execution requires good synchronization with fulfillment. After all, you wouldn’t want to advertise on product XYZ if it is out of stock. And your ability to set a max PPC bid price for product ABC depends on its true margin, i.e. includes product costs and not just ROAS (ROAS=revenue/ad costs).

Companies such as Amazon have been working on creating ads programmatically for years based on inventory. MFS would take this capability to the enterprise software market.

Marketing Operations Management (MOM)

Already used by the largest marketing operations today, MOM is the successor to spreadsheets, notes on napkins, and the like. It is used e.g. at one famous furniture retailer to orchestrate the development of their catalogues. If any of the other ideas above are to become true, hordes of marketers in the organizations need to work together like a machine. Digital assets need to be created in support of personalized messaging. MOM provides project and workflow management on steroids to facilitate all that.

 …

One level down we may see practical applications that include software and services in support of specific steps in the customer lifecycle. These more confined solutions may help companies start small, prove value, and grow from there.

On-Boarding Concierge

Successful on-boarding is key for turning newly acquired customers into clients with a high lifetime value expectation (e.g. in banking). The automated concierge would connect to marketing performance management and interactive marketing in order to monitor and orchestrate what needs to be done.

Re-Marketing Optimizer

Re-marketing may be the oldest trick in the book. But it is still tricky to predict who needs just a reminder vs. who needs an incentive to come back. The re-marketing optimizer would provide that intelligence based on marketing performance management insights and connect to interactive marketing to get the message out.

Multichannel, Multi-touch Marketing Attribution

Point solutions for marketing attribution online vs. response attribution in direct marketing need to merge into one multichannel platform. Marketers should ask software vendors for more than just attribution reports. They should also ask for advice on which touch points deserve how much of the credit. Ideally, the marketing mix modeling function would also be covered by providing advertisers with a prediction as to what they can expect from placing their next ad dollar in each channel.

…

And the list could go on and on.

…

None of the above can replace good old fashioned, customer service with a smile.

But for companies that are already doing a good job at taking care of their customers and building products that delight, the next step can be to compete on Marketing.

Exciting times should be ahead for that.

For those about to rock & roll with marketing, I salute you.

The previous post had concrete recommendations for proving the ROI of behavioral targeting. Several smart reader comments brought together a pretty clear picture.

However, when I was meeting with a number of experienced online bankers in Europe recently, the question that I received was more difficult to answer than just proving the ROI of targeting.

Namely, the question was whether one can expect greater ROI from testing or targeting? Whichever promises greater ROI, shouldn’t that be where you may want to start?

Thinking about it in terms of anecdotal results

Testing tends to be much more black and white in outcomes when you first begin to optimize a website. After all, no perfect website falls from the sky. At first you can get a big impact from making changes to messaging, calls-to-acton, layout, etc.

There are case studies, e.g. from Unica web analytics customers, where website conversions were improved by as much as 1900% over time with the help of continuous testing, measurement, and improvement.

Now, I have seen many great case studies of behavioral targeting online. But I haven’t seen one where a better targeted message (via email or website or ad network) drove a 1900% increase in conversions.

Should you count on a 1900% improvement from your testing efforts?

Most web marketers when they hear these great testing case studies can be very disappointed when their own testing efforts only yield a percentage point or two in improvment. That happens a lot too.

And depending on the size of your web business, a 1 percent improvement from testing can still be a highly profitable outcome.

But, it goes to show that a mere comparison of anecdotal results that other people achieved from testing vs. targeting is not going to be enough to help you decide whether you should start with one or the other.

A better way to think about it

Testing is a key competency for targeting. As the previous post suggested, you would probably have a hard time proving the value of targeting if your organization didn’t know how to do (hold-out) testing.

Likewise, reporting is a key competency for testing. If you didn’t know how to measure and report on key metrics, how could you prove which test candidate truly drove better results?

Growth path

That is why it does make sense to follow a maturity model where the organization grows from reporting to site optimization (with testing) and then targeting similar to the diagram below from one of Unica’s whitepapers.

Just don’t get stuck in the stage of reporting and testing but make sure you continue to climb up the maturity curve when the business value that you are generating in Stage 2 begins to level off.

Behavioral analysis and targeting (for interactive marketing) has helped companies who do it well push up business value beyond the plateau that they reached from testing alone (see previous post).

It is often said that building (or proving) the business case for (site-side) behavioral targeting has been a lot harder than justifying an investment in more straightforward site optimization techniques such as A/B testing.

As a result, you can read independent industry analyst reports observing that some applications that can do testing and targeting (hint, hint) are a lot more frequently used for just testing rather than targeting today.

You can even hear from some of the best known and experienced consultants in the online optimization industry that they don’t feel convinced by the business case for (site-side) behavioral targeting because they feel it is less clear cut vs. testing.

This doesn’t need to stay this way.

The problem is that we have been asking the wrong question.

The question should not be “proving the business case for behavioral targeting”. But we need to make the question specific to the use case for targeting that the marketer wishes to pursue / prioritize.

That is to say, we need to seek the business case for using behavioral targeting technology to do one or multiple of the following things:

1. Improve conversion rates for acquiring new clients
2. Improve on-boarding of customers
3. Improve cross- / up-sell
4. Improve customer service case resolution times
5. Improve customer retention
6. Improve win-back of former customers
7. Improve satisfaction with the site’s usability, i.e. ease of finding what visitors are looking for.

When restated in this fashion the business case becomes much clearer. For example, if behavioral targeting allows you to improve customer retention by 1%, then you can calculate what that is worth to your business.

How do you prove it then?

How do you prove that behavioral targeting has been able to help you improve XYZ by some percentage though?

Simple

You do it through hold-out testing. You simply compare what happens to the hold-out group vs. the test group who are exposed to behaviorally targeted recommendations for the use case.

If you think that hold-out testing is complicated … then you have no business even thinking about behavioral targeting. Your organization needs to first learn how to do A/B testing.

Why has this been so hard for online marketing optimizers then?

My personal guess is because:

1. Despite the wonderful, 2001 emetrics paper by Jim Sterne and Matt Cutler, web analysts are – still – not thinking about the customer life cycle enough (i.e. acquire, convert, on-board, grow lifetime value, retain, etc.). Instead, analysts may be too busy optimizing ads and pages. We aren’t measuring customers but ads, pages, transactions. And frankly, web analytics tools were originally created for the latter and most do a horrible job when it comes to measuring customers.
2. We seem to have a blind spot for hold-out groups somehow. As a symptom, Jim Novo and Kevin Hillstrom have been frequently reminding their readers of this neglect. Strange though. After all, hold-out testing is just another name for A/B testing, which we supposedly master so well online.

Go figure

Web Analytics World (Manoj Jasra) just posted a free eBook on Web intelligence – tips & tricks in online strategy. Includes 25 analytics tips & tricks for this. Crowd sourced from the who-is-who in analytics. Very clever!

Download from Manoj’s site .