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George Hollister

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Marketing Database Creation.

At some point in every database marketing project the ‘build vs. buy’ decision must be made. As a marketing practitioner I was tasked with building the marketing databases at two different companies. I then spent the bulk of my career on the provider side building marketing databases for clients, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of database marketing creation. As a Marketing Information Manager tasked with building a marketing database for a large regional bank, my first thought was to build it in house. After all, not many companies in those days had more computers or programmers than banks and I’d only need a small team to build and maintain the database. After pursuing this course for a while, I determined that the only way to get this accomplished in any sort of reasonable time frame and within budget was to contract with an outside database supplier.

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B2B Marketing ROI – Are You There Yet?

As the 2010 Direct Marketing Association conference (DMA:2010) wrapped up, I took a minute to reflect on the conversations I had with a wide variety of marketers over the past few days. As a B2B marketer, I have a special interest in the state of B2B direct marketing so I focused on the conversations that I had with other B2B Marketers and compared them to the conversations that I had with our consumer marketing brethren.

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B2B Sales Enablement: Using B2B Sales Optimization Dashboards

In the B2B sales world in which I live, my view of B2B Sales Enablement focuses on bringing together both internal customer information (sales, contact history, etc.) and external firmagraphic information (SIC Codes, Sales volume, locations, etc.) and presenting that in an easy to understand, access, and use format. In addition, it includes ranking of prospects by potential and by timing, allowing the rep to focus his efforts on those opportunities that are most likely to generate the highest return in the shortest time frame.

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Is Web Analytics Alone Enough to Understand Your Web Interactions?

We’ve discussed this at length in previous posts… Perhaps the fact that we keep bringing it up my elude to the fact we believe this to be critical to marketing successes in the future. The Web Analytics Association defines web analytics as “…the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.” From a web design perspective, that’s an appropriate description. However…

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Winning With Customers – B2B Playbook Review

Before we can understand how to win with customers, we need to first understand why we lose. Appropriately Chapter 2 of the book is titled “Why we lose” and delves into the six reasons why companies lose. Reason #1, in my view, is the most powerful—We lose because we don’t understand the customer’s perspective. (You’ll need to read the book for the other 5 reasons!)

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How Complex Is Your Communications Landscape?

The market will continue to invent new ways to communicate and, therefore, new channels for marketing to master. The flexibility of a multi-channel tool to adapt to new channels will be a key factor in the success or failure of marketing initiatives as the communication landscape continues to evolve.

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CMOs Need to Grow Up to Sit at the C-Level Table.

There is a general consensus that marketing is both an art and a science. With the increased importance of technology in today’s marketing environment, it’s clear that the pendulum has swung to the science side of the equation. Technology, analytics, and measurement are at the forefront and, with the pace of change expected to quicken going forward, they’ll only increase in importance in coming years. A technology-enabled CMO will help companies prosper in this new world order of marketing.

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What Does Engagement Really Mean?

Social Media as a category is certainly a communications enabler–a series of channels really–but it’s only one of many ways to engage with your customers and prospects. What’s important is understanding how your customer wants to be communicated with and choosing the communications medium that’s appropriate to the customer/prospect and to the particular message being delivered.

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CIO to the CMO – "Get Smart Fast!"

Call it “the new marketing ecosystem,” “Marketing 2.0,” or “Marketing’s New World Order.” Whatever terms used, it’s clear that CMOs need to play an increased role in the technology future of their companies and continue to evolve their tech literacy rapidly to keep up with the continually evolving technology of our current marketing environment.

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