From the category archives:

Marketing Technology

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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Online and Offline Consumer Insights, Analytics and Data-It’s time to get these two together!

Suppose you are a consumer goods company selling hundreds of products directly or through e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com and you want to optimize profitability using customer feedback and reviews. In the past this was a labor intensive process to summarize comments and ratings to get the insights you needed to make decisions.

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Lead Generation: Are you using B2B marketing analytics?

Certainly, lead generation has value and should be an element of every sales and marketing organization. However, “leads” come in all shapes and sizes. They come from traffic generated at a trade show, from a web visitor downloading content from your website, from a direct marketing campaign or from a web seminar, among other efforts. Yet, some of those “leads” are simply your competitors trying to find out what you are up to. Other “leads” are companies that you cannot afford to sell to due to their limited budgets. And still others are just interested in the topic with no project in mind, or authority to act.

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The Death of the Customer Database?

For many years, firms have let their own intuition about “business value” guide their investment in, and development of, database systems that record their knowledge of their customers’ experiences. Concerns about the accuracy and data quality within these systems have largely been calmed by layers of data governance and good MDM (Master Data Management) practices – especially when a concerted push toward CRM is in play.

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5 keys to get the most out of your database marketing investments

In today’s rapidly changing world of consumer fragmentation, product proliferation, and evolving marketing channels and technologies, marketers need to carefully assess and take stock of their marketing capabilities before committing to investments in technologies that could hold them back in the years to come. Now more than ever before, consumer-focused companies need to make sure they have a clear plan for capturing valuable customer insights and applying that information with integrated marketing technology.

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Sales Force Automation is great but…

Most SFA tools are designed to record what activities a salesperson has accomplished … assuming of course, that they consistently input the data. The tools themselves add very little value to the salesperson. In fact, most salespeople view data entry as an arduous task and a waste of valuable selling time.

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The Sales Optimization Portal: A Critical Tool for Technology Marketers

For years there has been a huge chasm between marketing and sales when it comes to applied analytics. Marketing typically hired analysts to build predictive models to make direct mail and email programs more effective. But the findings of these models were rarely ever shared with Sales – and they were even more rarely turned into actionable programs for the sales teams.

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As a campaign metric, ROI beats response rate every time

A simple ROI calculation does it all: Test cell revenue/test cell cost. Run the numbers on your next campaign and you may find some fascinating new insights about the results of your programs.

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