I'm not tethered to my laptop, but I certainly couldn't say that of my iPhone and iPad.  Our new mobile app makes this more true than ever.  Here's my story...

If you're a marketer like me, you are always "on."  I mean you think a lot about marketing even when you're not at work.  Like you, as a consumer and business professional, I am  (as is my immediate family) bombarded constantly by off- and on-line messages, which never fail to get me thinking about the strategy and tactics behind a commercial message that is highly relevant.  I am particularly curious about the communications that completely miss the mark!    I'll also admit that I am a weekend peeker -- on my own marketing initiatives.  I like to know how marketing campaigns are progressing as well as the status of creative reviews, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I do have a life.   And, it just got better with our mobile app!

When I purchased my iPad, I said goodbye and closed my work laptop on Friday evening and used my iPad for everything digital, including managing my work and personal email boxes.  I couldn't, however, fulfill my desire to know the progress or status of some marketing activities or check the numbers on a campaign report, etc.   Sooooo... on occasion I'd boot up my laptop to access our integrated marketing software solution. (More than you think!)  

As of this Monday when we released our mobile app, I can stay with almost 100% confidence that I can power down my laptop on Friday for the whole weekend and still remain informed about my projects.  I am particularly excited about the ability to use my iPad and/or iPhone on workdays that take me away from my desk.   For starters, I plan to take my iPad instead of my laptop to certain industry events for note taking.  It's much more portable and easier to carry, and importantly, I have as much access to any of the marketing information I need -- email marketing reports, post campaign analyses, digital assets, etc.  And when the opportunity arises -- as it often does -- I can pull up a solution brochure and send it to an interested prospect on the spot.  Isn't being mobile with marketing automation awesome?

Check it out --

I had the pleasure of meeting with a former boss today to talk about the ins-and-outs of B2B data management, including off- and on-line information.  I've never met another person quite like Mike (I'll call him Mike here) who gets really giddy about addresses, or more specifically, the processes used to improve their accuracy and quality:

• convert and parse
• standardize components
• correct
• enhance
• update

The improvements in the address data, in turn, lead to improvements in merge-purge - that dedupe process that consolidates all the sources of information about an individual to produce a 360-degree customer (or prospect view) for marketing.  

Maybe you're thinking... but most B2B marketing is online, why do I need address processing anymore?Yes, the majority of B2B communications are digital, but without address information you will struggle to:

• append firmographic information from industry files
• match to industry master lists to tie parent and child records together
• link individuals at the same company site
• match to industry data assets to standardize company name
• assign Sales reps by geography (unless you require Zip Code at the time of registration) 
• link revenue to marketing efforts

Most importantly, however, is the importance of quality address data to create the single customer and/or customer view, which remains a huge challenge for many B2B marketers.  And the challenge is only getting bigger with the continued expansion of data available for use.  Everything B2B marketers do is better when the data are accurate -- campaign segmentations, interactive email dialogs, lead management and results analysis.

It's been a while since I've been in the B2C and B2B data management trenches like Mike, and they've made some real strides in helping B2B organizations improve the quality of their marketing data.  

Here's another little advancement:  Linking home address to work address.  It's not out of reach!  With home address, the data available to you about the individual grows exponentially.  Isn't it an exciting time to be in B2B marketing!? 

Let me know what your biggest data management challenges are.  I guess I get a little giddy about address data, too.  I learned from the best.  (Thanks, Mike.)

cg

Don’t count on it. ROI in advertising and marketing was even a concept back in the 1960’s – the period that AMC’s hit series Mad Men takes place.

It’s a popular show because Mad Men strikes a chord with viewers for being factually correct with bad manners prevalent for the period: womanizing, especially by Sterling Cooper’s Don Draper; desk side chain smoking; lunch cocktails and office parties; and, the agency’s struggle with how to harness the power of the newest marketing channel: color television.

Let’s face it -- we’ve all gone to website pages that take forever to load.  Sometimes, the load times are so long, I just close the window or hit return and hope a competitor’s webpage loads faster.  So, what’s the culprit here?  Typically it’s a large Flash file or just a page with one or more images that have not been optimized for the web.  Non-optimized images and long page load times adversly affect conversion rates and marketing campaign results.  Whether you’re building a simple webpage, a marketing oriented microsite or an email, images must be optimized for the web. 

Optimizing images for email and microsite pages is the act of finding the sweet spot between a great looking image that takes too long to download and a grainy image that downloads in a second at dial-up speeds of 56kps.  The idea is to modify the image to retain a nice rendering while decreasing the overall file size.  Optimization becomes more and more critical as we add more and more images to any microsite page.

There are a number of software packages out there that allow you to resize images – Photoshop, Fireworks and Paint Shop are a few of the most popular.  By resizing, I mean changing the absolute size in pixels, as well as the file size itself.  Changing file size refers to changing the amount of data compression used for an image.  The most common image files used for the web are JPEG, GIF and PNG.  The difference in JPEG, GIF and PNG is the way they compress data.  GIF and PNG compression work almost exactly the same, but PNG often produces slightly smaller files.  JPEG compression is designed to optimize images with fine gradiations of color, while GIF and PNG are better at compressing images with large areas of color, such as illustrations.  The more you compress JPEG files, the more artifacts you see.  This is because you are actually removing “data” from the file.  Here are a few JPEG examples I created using Fireworks.



Look at the captions below each of the images.  The original uncompressed image on the left is 96K and would take 15 seconds to download if you were using a dial-up connection.  The image on the right manitains almost the same overall quality but has been compressed to less than 25% of the original file size, resulting in only a three second download.  Now imagine that there are four images on this page that are these sizes.  A webpage using non-optimized images would take 60 seconds to fully render, while a webpage using optimized images will only take 12 seconds.  This is the difference between losing and gaining customers that visit your web and microsites.  As you can see, "size" really does matter!

While GIF and PNG compressions do not actually lose “data” like JPEG compression, they do lose color fidelity.  GIF and PNG files are limited to 256 colors or less.  When compressing these files, we typically move to 32, 24 or 8 colors.  Here are a couple of examples of compression using PNG files.



The above images are virtually identical in appearance.  However, by looking at the captions, you can see that the 16 color, 8-bit image on the right is only about a third of the size of the original.  

Many companies today are adopting marketing management technology that allows marketers to easily create their own marketing campaigns, emails and microsites.  This is great, but companies need to also put safeguards in place to protect their brand.  This is where marketing asset management comes into play. That is, the notion of creating assets like logos and other images that have been optimized and approved for use in marketing campaigns.  Please feel free to visit our blogs on Brand Asset Management to learn more.

I can honestly say I had never even considered the term Marketing Operations prior to starting at Aprimo nearly four years ago. Now I’m not only entrenched in promoting this technology for marketing to help automate and manage marketing, I’m also knee-deep in managing Marketing Operations at Aprimo. I guess this is what I get for having a strong math and process background. It goes back to my days as financial manager for the Concert Committee and my fraternity in college. My engineering degree gave me a healthy appreciation for process. However, my creative side drove me into marketing so…well…here I am. 

I’m fortunate to play a role that feeds my creative side and my process/logical side. What I find interesting is how marketing operations seems to be the step child of marketing automation. I understand that the “execution” aspect of marketing is where the rubber meets the road and demand is created, however; I am amazed that marketers don’t fight the amount of detail and project management they have to deal with to get to the creative work. A good marketing operations application can simplify a lot of this. It takes some work, but the pay off can be great. From financial tracking, to managing creative workflow and our digital asset library, we’ve benefitted many times over. A couple of years ago, we became our own case study when we let our discipline relax and lost track of some big invoices. I got the assignment to get our financials back in control and put some process in place supported by our own product.   Now, I'm tracking ROI in marketing activities.

Stay tuned and I’ll give you some more details on working with marketing financial software. If you are having similar issues or are on your own marketing operations journey, I would love to hear from you.

It’s been just a little more than three months since I decided to shut down my marketing services company, jump back into my pumps and back into the proverbial hot seat of a high-tech CMO.  It’s been just a little over a month since joining my new company, Aprimo.

What is going on in the Marketing Automation space, let alone here at Aprimo, is just too exciting not to jump in.  Name it. Budgets are slashed so B2B and B2C marketers are flocking to improve pay per click management, organic search, social media and blogging to reach new prospects and consumers at a fraction of the cost.

Guess what happens when marketers flock?  Innovation occurs. And as B2B marketers try to scale and B2C marketers try to entice...CMOs like myself are looking to automate not populate to get more personal and more relevant with their marketing strategies and tactics.

Enter Aprimo. Our flagship product, Aprimo 8.5, automates the hard work of marketing -- budgets and financial planning, mass amounts of digital assets as well as integrated, multi-campaign management.  Our new product line, Aprimo Marketing Studio, offers a suite of software as a service applications for interactive marketing -- including the blog I'm writing...as well as microsite tools, pay per click management and social media optimization.

So as Aprimo's CMO -- my team and I get to innovate our own marketing efforts -- and those of some of the most savvy marketers on the planet.

Can you blame me for jumping back in? Come join me -- let's talk about how we can innovate together.