From the category archives:

Marketing Strategy

Playing Nicely in the Same Sandbox

Forrester released their new study this week on The Future of Agency Relationships.* In a nutshell, Sean Corcoran, the lead analyst on the study, proclaims that marketers will need to lead their agencies to make changes in order to cope with the rise of social media, new marketing channels and a sputtering economy. For those of us who work for agencies or marketing services and analytics firms, the implication is pretty clear: we’re either not smart enough to change ourselves or we’re so bogged down in what we’re currently doing that we’re unable to change our own companies. Our clients will have to do it for us.

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Database Marketing Assessment: Targeting and Analytics

Oftentimes, our first approach with new clients is to understand their business with a Five-step Maturity framework that ranges from basic to sophisticated — we hope to objectively rate where a client’s database marketing expertise falls on a scale of 1–5 and we provide a score and a roadmap for organizational improvement. In these few posts, I’ll review the types of questions we often ask to understand where an organization fits into our framework and where the biggest opportunity for improvement lies.

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Marketing Analytics for the New Marketing Reality. Part 1 of 3

The new reality for marketers is that the old techniques aren’t working. The marketers who will break through and succeed in the New Reality will be those who can bring the traditional measurements together with the monitoring and measurement of customer engagement. In my next post, I’ll further explore the new world of customer engagement and how it affects our ability to measure what counts with consumers.

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A good place to start: Database Marketing Assessment 101

The idea of using an assessment framework to understand the maturity of an organization’s functional areas is as old as time — and it forms the foundation of most consulting firms’ practice. It’s often a wonderful way to get to know a new client, and a good way for them to get to know how you might approach their business. The outcome is often a fast-start project opportunity where everyone can win with a new relationship quickly.

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Multi Channel Marketing Ramps Up!

I am a recent prospect in a successful multichannel, integrated marketing campaign, fueled by a sophisticated data mart that operates in real-time. I was gently nurtured from conception to purchase through multiple channels: phone, print, e-mail, text and social media.

My son, Nick, a rangy 15 year old, admittedly loves skateboarding more than girls. His 3-dimensionally wired brain is constantly designing the next killer skate surface — be it a ramp, stairs, box or rail. Once he has his design firmed up, the next step is to secure funding from an institution that supplies grants to gifted individuals with promising futures.

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Marketing Analytics and Pharma — No Data Left Behind

Pharmaceutical companies are slowly winning the battle to halt the FDA’s efforts to regulate drug promotion on the internet and through social media. The Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) and Pfizer filed a brief with the U.S. District Court in April requesting to limit the FDA’s guidance to prevent the free speech of drug manufacturers on social media sites such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

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1Q Check-In: Winterberry’s Predictions for 2010

In January of 2010, Bruce Biegel of the Winterberry Group gave his predictions for 2010 to the Direct Marketing Club of New York. I thought it would be interesting to do a first quarter check-in to see if what I’m seeing in the marketplace is representative of his predictions.

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Analytics Become Fashionable

No one has popularized the benefits of behavioral analytics more than Google, and within a year of Google Analytics’ launch, many web analytics firms vanished. Anyone, regardless of technical savvy, could track activity on their website easily and for FREE! More and more apps are popping up, attracting droves of users who happily engage, providing mountains of personal preference information in exchange for an opportunity to play. LinkedIn is a fabulous example of how CEOs and students alike share LOTS of important information in exchange for being visible. Even the CEOs know that it’s no longer smart to be invisible or silent on the web.

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Creative Enhanced by Marketing Analytics

As a Creative Director, I spent 15 years working at a general agency before dipping my toe into direct marketing. I still believe that brand equity is king, but I’ve been bitten by the “Direct Marketing Bug” and there is no cure. I love the advantage that analytical insights provide when designing creative, and the opportunities they provide for constant improvement.

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What’s all this talk about Marketing Analytics anyway?

The starting point for all marketing should be benchmarking and then tracking results against those benchmarks. The very best marketing measurement practices we see today are designed around the Marketing Dashboard Concept. Dashboard measurement systems are designed to cascade down an organization – with corporate strategy guiding which metrics are measured at the top level, and subsequent managers providing metrics from their individual areas that are rolled-up into the top level reports.

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