Online Marketing

Like many other terms, Marketing Optimization (MO) can hold different meanings for different marketers.  For online marketers, it means developing marketing campaigns that do A/B testing on emails and microsite pages to see which one’s generate the most opens, click-thrus, conversions, etc.  Those emails and web pages that underperform are eliminated in favor of the best performers.  For other marketers, MO means optimizing your communication strategy across campaigns and marketing channels to improve response, customer loyalty and profit.  It is the later meaning that this article will focus on.

Initially, optimization was used as a way to mathematically determine the optimal allocation of scarce resources. The concept has been borrowed by business analysts to aid decision-making.  Optimization has been used in the areas of the manufacturing supply chain, airline revenue yields, and financial investment risk assessment. More recently, the concept is being adopted by marketing.

Every day, marketers face realities like competing business goals, campaigns, channels, budget constraints, and product managers with myopic views, to name a few.   Large companies are often faced with campaign calendars that may not represent an ideal communication plan with its customers.  The below diagram illustrates this phenomenon for an electronics retailer.



As you can see, campaigns and customers associated with these campaigns can easily overlap.  If you are a prospect in each of these campaigns, will you feel overwhelmed by the number of contacts?  If you are a marketer with limited budget, how should your prioritize your spend across campaigns to generate desired response rates or ROI?  With multi-LOB companies with many products and services, it makes great sense to employ some degree of intelligence into the marketing equation to ensure a win-win outcome for companies, LOB’s, and last of all but not least, customers.

MO across campaigns and channels typically relies on the development of business rules, the utilization of sophisticated mathematical algorithms, or both.  Most software applications that use mathematical algorithms typically use linear or non-linear algorithms that attempt to maximize an objective function (e.g., response rates, profit), while imposing constraints.  Constraints may include: budgets, minimum/maximum number of offers per customer and/or campaign, channel capacities, etc.  While very powerful, optimization algorithms are problematic to use.  They require statisticians that build customer response and valuation models, as well as profitability models.  This takes time and money.  Then there is the issue of ensuring the algorithms actually find the global minimum (cost) or maximum (response rate) as desired.  The image below helps to visualize this issue.



It’s possible for algorithms to find “local” minimum/maximums that lead to sub-optimal marketing outcomes.  That being said, in the hands of the right practitioners, mathematical optimization can create significant marketing ROI.  So, short of the required expertise and/or budget, what are marketers to do?

More recently, software vendors have tackled this issue via the development of business rules that marketers can build.  Business rules can work within and across campaigns to optimize your communication plan.  Examples of business rules include:

• No more than 2 weekly communications via any channel to a customer, to minimize fatigue
   
• Make the best of multiple potential offers based on profit, revenue, or likelihood to purchase, as examples.
   
• If a customer may be touched by multiple campaigns in the next month, only communicate with them about the two campaigns with the highest priority.

These types of rules can easily be developed using a point-and-click interface like that found in Aprimo’s Contact Optimization module. 

So, business rules are easy to create and use -- there must be a downside, right?  Yes, there are tradeoffs associated with simplicity and ease-of-use.  Some of those include:

• We are really not optimizing an outcome from a mathematical point of view.
   
• Business rules support “subtraction”, i.e., supporting the imposition of a maximum number of touches, offers, etc.  Linear and non-linear algorithms can do that, but they can also impose minimums like, the number of offers or contacts per campaign.

Keep a look out for my next article that will continue this discussion and provide some real-life case studies.

 

The key to achieving your desired conversion rate is relevancy -- pure and simple.  It's more than using your microsite software to support specific campaigns.  It's about testing and delivering personalized emails with relevant content that drives customers to a personalized and relevant experience on your microsite. 

A few words stand out in the above paragraph that merit additional attention.

Personalize - This means many things to many people.  It can be as simple as embedding the customer's name in the email message.  A recent study by Aberdeen found that personalizing an email with a name increased conversion rates by 200-300% over non-personalized emails.

Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer.  Relevancy can be driven by events,  prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.

• Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call.  A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options.  A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest.  Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.
   
• Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases.  For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters.  Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services.  Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond).  We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.
   
• Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations.  One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time.  For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product."  Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering.  Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.).  While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other.  Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name.  The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant.  If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have.  Let's look at an example.
  
  A large print newspaper in the northeast was experiencing declining subscribers like many of it's counterparts nationally.  The newspaper appended Census data (number of residents, race, ethnicity, age, income, home value, average commute time and many other variables) at the zip+4 level to all of it's subscribers. It then used clustering to create five different clusters of customers based on the Census data.  Their idea was to profile each group and develop editorial zones based on these segments.  Each editorial zone would receive it's own unique newspaper content based on assumed interests as derived from the cluster profiles.  One cluster was comprised of the highest proportion of customers with high home values, 4-year degrees and the lowest proportion of people with blue-collar jobs.  This cluster also  enjoyed the highest penetration in terms of current subscribers.  You can see how the content this group would be interested in would differ from the cluster with lower education and income.  By personalizing the newspaper content, the newspaper reduced the rate of subscriber loss from all segments/zones. 
  
  This information was also used to promote customizable online versions of the newspaper as well.  Subscribers now opt-in/out to various content.  As such, they are directly professing their interests in a topic or issue.  This information is even more powerful from a marketing perspective than what we "deduce" via analytics, and can drive a circular process where we get to know the customer better and better over time.  This increases customer loyalty and ROMI.
  
  Many organizations have even taken this idea farther from a Social Marketing perspective.  Customers can form their own clusters by opting in/out of particular forums or discussions.  Creating customer segments based on the forums or discussion groups to which they belong is valuable low hanging fruit.  Some leading edge companies are also applying Text Mining to customer posts to take proactive steps for customer loyalty/retention, cross-sell and acquisition efforts.  More to come on Social Marketing and Text Mining in future posts.

Test - Testing is a best practice that cannot be ignored by Online Marketers.  It's often referred to as A/B or Champion/Challenger testing.  The notion is to create two or more versions of your message.  Perhaps version A uses a dark blue call to action that is italicized, and version B uses rich green that is bolded instead of italicized.  The simplified notion here is to split your targets into two groups or segments.  Segment A gets version A, and segment B gets version B.  We'd then look at open rates and click-thru's to see if one version outperformed another.  We can then use the format of the winning version in future email campaigns.  We can also utilize A/B testing on microsite pages as well.  Testing can cover various combinations of: font size, font color, subject line text, images, etc.  Testing is truly where the art of marketing meets the science of marketing square on to dramatically improve your campaign performance.  I will develop a post dedicated solely to the subject of Testing in the near future.  Keep an eye out!

There is soooo much that can be written on the many marketing topics I've covered at various levels in this post.  Please write to share some of your valuable insights today and help others become marketing heros!

Well, change is in the air.  I've just moved to a new role at Aprimo and I am extremely energized.  I started my life in Product Marketing and now find myself getting the opportunity to head back there.  After a three year stint learning the ropes in traditional corporate marketing and marketing operations, I now get the opportunity to run Product Marketing for an exciting new on-demand version of our product that is optimized for online marketing - Aprimo Marketing Studio.  I'm like a kid in a candy store!!

It's really almost too good.  I've been driving our move to online marketing internally (with the help of some really great and experienced people, of course).  Honestly, three years ago I didn't know about Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click or Campaign Workflow to any level of detail.  Now I've been through it and it has really opened my eyes.  With this recent economic challenge, the move to Online Marketing has accelerated and it's clear there is no looking back. So, the tune of my blogs will change moving forward.  I'll be sharing our thoughts about product direction and the challenges I'm hearing from our customers and prospects.  I would love to hear from you.  What are your challenges with online marketing?  Are you using social media and getting value from it?  Is your email marketing generating the response and return you expect?  Are you able to build a profile of your prospects, customers and partners so you can communicate the way you want?

Keeping up with one area of online marketing can be a tall order. Trying to stay abreast with every facet of interactive marketing can seem like an impossible task for humans.

But it is being done by people just like us.

B2B marketers, like myself, seem to be slow to utilize some social media tactics like YouTube, but for a handful of B2B marketers the results of using social media advertising are well worth the effort.

One of my favorite B2B social media advertising videos on YouTube would have to be Mr. W, the story of windpower.

It would seem getting wide-spread appeal and putting a personality to an abstract concept like windpower would be nearly impossible, but German-based Epuron nailed it with this video.

Epuron gained international interest for this YouTube clip.  The video has has been watched nearly two million times. So, before you think YouTube is not a viable social media outlet for your B2B product, you might learn something from Mr. W.   



 

Once upon a time, we had marketing and we had marketing-related specialties like search engine marketing and online marketing. Not so much today. The division between offline and online marketing is becoming more and more blurred. After all, marketing needs to create demand and interest for a company's products and services, no matter what form it takes.

For a traditional marketer, online marketing can seem a little overwhelming, but it doesn't need to be. Marketers can find a Webinar or podcast for nearly any facet of the marketing world.

One of the marketing tactics nearest to me is search engine marketing. Network Solutions had become a great resource for everything Web related, from securing a domain name to browsing and watching its comprehensive listing of pre-recorded Webinars.  It's a great place to brush up on some lesser used skills or learn new ones.

Right now, the Network Solutions is offering free pre-recorded Search Engine Marketing Webinars on these topics:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
3. Link Building Techniques
4. Effective Keyword Strategies
5. Search Marketing for Local Businesses
6. Constructing Optimized Web Pages
7. Blogging/Web 2.0 Strategies
8. SEO for Ecommerce Sites
9. Getting your Business Online 101

Even the most seasoned interactive marketer can learn something from this extensive list.

That question popped into my head today, as I read over online media stats about the number of individuals with access to the web, Facebook users, Linkedin accounts, YouTube visitors, and other data points on social and community networks.  I've worked in advertising so I started to think about the similarities (as well as differences) between the seemingly ubiquitous online media channel and one of its venerable well-known mass media counterparts like TV.  I wondered what the online "reach" equivalent would be to TV's Gross Rating Points and Total Rating Points (GRPs and TRPs, respectively), and in particular, how the online metric could be calculated with an increasingly fragmented audience with dimensional behaviors that include commerical email message forwarding, member site comments and/or content creation, viewing, sharing, etc.  

To succeed today, marketers must master the new "mass media" channel.  Why and how?

To the first question of why:  It is a question worth answering -- or trying to answer because companies are increasingly focused on it and ramping up their online spend.  That means 1:1 Marketers, like me, need new ways to break through the online clutter to get noticed and engaged with individuals to attain our goals.  

As to how: We need marketing automation solutions that support a more holistic multi-channel campaign management approach that includes additional online communication vehicles and tactics, some of which support 1:1 interactions and some that do not [directly, that is].   Here's my wish list for a multi-channel campaign management solution that gives me more end-to-end functionality, with the ability to better harness the power and value of the online channel.  This is just a start and not all-inclusive: (Of note, it will never be all inclusive, because the market continues to evolve, and so must my tools!)

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

With applications that enable and empower marketers to use a mix of 1:1 communications and online tactics marketers can execute and measure campaigns improve customer loyalty, increase your brand awareness, and accelerate time to inquiry or brand preference (e.g., visits to your web site, content downloads, agree to live chat, etc).  So...no, the internet is not truly a "mass media" channel, but it is the channel-of-choice so marketers need to expand their toolbox to include more than the traditional 1:1 tools.  Probably should think about an expandable toolbox...

I often hear things like, I need help with my (pick one) marketing budget, project managment/workflow, creative reviews, job requests, campaign planning, asset management, etc.  As we get into discussions around other processes like online marketing, people are surprised that Aprimo offers one solution that manages all of their marketing processes and it is easy to use.

Aprimo Marketing Studio is new to the marketplace but the demand is not new at all.  I'm hearing people talk about their company having lots of different vendors and technologies trying to do what Aprimo Marketing Studio already does.  They're still looking for a better solution because....all the different things they have in place right now aren't working for them.  They say they don't know how effective their email campaigns are because they have no way to measure them.  They have no idea how much they're spending on each campaign, they need visibility into their proejcts, etc.  Their stories go on and on. 

If you are looking for ONE solution to handle your marketing needs, call me at 317.860.2424.  I would love to speak with you about your specific needs and share how Aprimo Marketing Studio can help.  You can also reach me via Live Chat at our Web site, aprimo.com.

It's football season!  I love football and have my favorite teams from high school, and college, up to pro.  We've had many great years and some not so great.  The teams work hard to achieve their winning seasons.

I spoke with a gentleman recently who asked where we are headquartered and when he learned we're in Indianapolis he asked if I was a Colts fan.  Of course I am!  He spoke about the team effort it takes to win a Super Bowl and likened it to marketing efforts.  I wondered where he was headed with the comparison.  He said the team must communicate well, they must be physically fit, have great play books, great offense, great defense, great special teams, not to mention the coaches, etc.  

His marketing team needs to first be physically fit and get rid of the baggage that is weighing them down.  He wants to switch from spreadsheets and sticky notes to marketing automation software.  His team needs visibility into their marketing efforts to communicate well - be it their financial management, project management/workflow, online marketing, reviews and approvals, etc.  They need a great play book and have everyone on the same page...a marketing events calendar.  It takes campaigns to drive prospects to them... offense.  It takes lead management to handle the leads and convert them to sales... defense back to offense.  It takes great special teams...creative marketing, database marketers, etc. and posting numbers on the scoreboard all comes down to ROI in marketing.

I had not thought of marketing as a football team, but they do need to be a well-oiled machine to get the job done and win the sales that their company is looking to capture.  If you need some coaching on how your team can increase your top line revenue, let us know.  Aprimo software manages all aspects of marketing.  Let us know how we can help.  We would love to huddle! Oh!....and go Colts!

In high school, I wore Guess jeans to fit in. In college, I tried smoking to fit in. Fitting in here at Aprimo - different ball game - don't need to buy any clothes...already addressed THAT issue...smoking is certainly not necessary. Sure, I could paper my cube walls with Pac Man pictures or Super Mario Bros...or, I could learn to play Foosball. This seems to be the before work, lunchtime and after work past time in our breakroom. I am AWFUL at it! I blow off steam by turning the TV off to silence the advertsing and marketing attempts...I guess techies play games away from computer screens? Maybe. We're all similar - we shut off the clutter and complex in exchange for simplicity.

Can't the same hold true for your interactive marketing needs? My marketing buddies across the country seem to rely on a variety of point solutions to serve their online marketing needs. They are cluttering their marketing campaigns by relying on a whole host of services from different vendors - streamlining all of those needs into one dashboard option could get them back to the land of simplicity and reduce their choas.

There are options out there. There are dashboards that pull together social media advertising, banner ads, microsites, PPC marketing, blogging (I'm using it now) and more. Do some research and clear away your clutter...

It's lunchtime here...off to get schooled in Foosball!

It's probably happened to almost all of us.  Broken links on the Web site.  They are a nuisance and can cost you leads or conversions.  However, I'm not talking about just any link, I'm talking about a research note you licensed and are offering on your website.  We use this a lot.  Prospects are very interested in the research and opinion pieces provided by the popular research firms.  In addition, it usually provides an unbiased opinion that supports the value propositions of our products.  Consequently, we often offer these pieces for download on our website or in our marketing campaigns in exchange for some information about a prospect.  They are a popular tool for online marketing.

The challenge is knowing when these digital assets expire.  That's where the digital asset libray in our marketing automation software takes over.  We can store the research note in the library and mark an expiration date.  That way we get notified when our license for the research note is about to expire and can pull it off our website or out of our marketing campaigns before it is unavailable.  This keeps us from looking like we don't know what we're doing with our own interactive marketing actions.

Extend this concept to other areas such as licensed photography or artwork.  Sometimes there are stiff penalties associated with incorrect use of these materials.  Having access to this simple piece of information can save companies a significant amount of money and hassle.  Have you ever had issues with this?

OK, it's getting close to Q4, all the wonderful campaigns and resources of the annual budget are winding down, yet Sales is still asking you to prime the pump!
How do we work effectively at year-end, with few resources?
As research is showing, more and more marketers are moving to the Web.  Website marketing is growing in leaps and bounds, and there's good reason: 
- Web Analytics are instantaneous
- Web Advertising is relatively inexpensive
- Search Engine Management is becoming easier
- New options for marketers are appearing every day
So, how do you figure out how to tackle this medium?
Do what your customers are doing:  Go search on the web.
Blogs are popping up every second, covering everything under the sun.
If you can think of a word to search, I can almost guarantee you will find a blog....
OK, back to your budget.  Look into some tools that can help you manage your online marketing activities, and your budget.  Look for Marketing Automation.

I spoke with a gentleman this week challenged with finding different approaches to beef up his company's interactive marketing efforts.  He was searching for solutions - notice that is plural, "solutions" - to manage their different needs.  I shared with him that Aprimo has an integrated, interactive marketing solution that could manage all of their online marketing activities from search engine management to a dynamic web analytics system .  He said we had already begun to save him time!  He was even more excited when he discovered our software, Aprimo Marketing Studio, comes in an easy to deploy and attractively priced solution.  Are you looking to beef up your interactive marketing efforts or even just your social media marketing?  Visit us at Aprimo.com.  We would love to help.

As I had mentioned in my previous blog entitled: Interactive Marketing can Lead to Interpersonal Experiences; using on-line marketing tools like microsites, paid search and Live Chat can and will  make my offline marketing activities more effective. 

As my employer, Aprimo, a marketing automation software company, gets better at integrating our marketing; both online and offline, we are beginning to see a trend with those that are truly in the market for our products and those that are not ready to consider them.  This is a great thing for us because now our sales team knows with whom to spend time and with whom they need to nurture along. 

Perfect example - I had a guy from a really large company come out to our site and download a paper.  I called, we talked and he said, 'I'm just looking'.  Then 3 days later, while reviewing my Website Analytics Software I spied not just His company ISP but his location as well, telling me it was him.  So, I called him.  He tells me, no just looking but wanted to know how I knew.  I shared with him Aprimo's fully integrated marketing powerhouse software and he was truly amazed.  He asked me to not reach out to him and that he would reach out to me.  So, I put him in a lead nurturing campaign based on his activities and interests.  Intermittently we have been sending him information on certain aspects of marketing automation and every time he opens one, it flags our system to then send him something on the same line a few weeks later.   Well, I decided to call him at the end of last year and he said, "Perfect Timing" and to me...that just makes my day. 

This sort of thing, online marketing supporting offline efforts, is really paying off.  How have you driven success integrating these two seemingly different marketing initiatives?

I am a proud new parent of not just one, but two teenage girls.  Sixteen is their age and incredibly demanding is their rage.  Talk about changing your mind as often as you change your socks.  The worst is when I can't ever seem to find them - especially in this day and age of technology and multiple software applications - you think it would be a snap. 

What kills me, is the fact that they can't answer their phone, but they can text on the go, read blogs and post on facebook and twitter almost simultaneously.  They are truly the social media experts. Just think about what the savvy marketer is going to have to pull out of their interactive marketing bag to attract this group! Do you think the approach will be specifically online marketing?  I'm not sure about that. But what does scare me is the statistic I saw, 'online' that stated that in just nine months Facebook had one million new users, but it took the Television, 15 years to achieve the same thing.  Yikes!

Back to my daughters.  No, they can't remember to leave me a note on the counter telling me where they will be or leave me a voicemail so perhaps I need to go online and get a 'wall' that they can comment on, that way, I too, will become a social media socialite. 

How do you keep in touch with your kids?? Post it to my wall - ha!

This week I had an interesting conversation with a lady I first met on Live Chat.  She told me she was looking to learn more about how our marketing software can help her company with their online marketing efforts.  She liked our Live Chat feature yet early in the chat she was a bit hesitant.  I asked if she would prefer I call her and immediately received her telephone number on the screen.  I called and we discussed her needs. 

In the discussion, she said that while she is the Project Manager leading the effort to find a marketing automation solution, she was not comfortable typing through a conversation.  She also mentioned she was not one to "text" either.  :)  After some discussion around her needs with offers, microsites and landing pages, I was able to direct her to the District Manager in her area to assist her further. 

If you are not comfortable typing through a conversation on Live Chat, you can always ask us to call you.  You may also call our company at 317 803-4300, email us at info@aprimo.com, or fill out a form online at aprimo.com.  Just let us know how to reach you so we can assist you with your marketing management needs. 

The concept was so simple, that it took a while for me to understand it.  Now, I had worked in a relatively big company (HP through the late 90s) but hadn't been in a big marketing organization since that time.  In reality, HP still operated as a series of small companies when I left them.  So, the concept that a Marketing Calendar could provide an ROI in Marketing was somewhat hard to grasp initially.  However, as my learning increased here and our own marketing got more sophisticated from lead development through marketing planning and I got exposure to larger marketing operations operating in this increasingly complex world of online marketing and offline marketing, it all came clear.

Marketing Operations were spending extensive person months just managing and communicating their calendar of planned activities.  Literally, there are multiple companies that have individuals that spend all of their time gathering new and changed information that drive the calendar of marketing activities and formatting the information to communicate it (everything from elaborate graphics to spreadsheets) to people inside and outside the company that need to know.  So, what if there was a tool within marketing automation that allows the people that are managing their marketing projects to easily update their calendar dates that could drive a series of calendars tailored to the audience and available online?  A simple concept extended to scale and married with the current process of marketing project management can really work.   I would love to hear from those of you that relate to this, those doing this or those that have tried and failed.

...yes it's true. 'Cover Girl' not as in a model, but as one who is constantly running for cover! I work for Aprimo, an online marketing powerhouse, as the Manager of Lead Generation.  I can tell you that more times then not, we have been bombarded through our Live Chat.  Someone comes on our Web site, probably through the assistance of our Search Engine Marketing tools and by using my web analytics tools, I can see them.  I can then initiate a conversation or wait for them to reach out to me. 

One day, this person initiates a live chat acting as the CEO of one of our competitors, (like we wouldn't know his name) and then proceeds to ask for a cheeseburger.  This technology is great, but it does release some crazies!  I wish our Marketing Software could detect the fool hearty as they hit our site so we can dispense them quickly. Now, wouldn't that be cool?  

The ability to have something instantaneous, like an answer, is something our Interactive Marketing is trying to foster.  I think we need to create a whole new lead nurturing cycle for these 'Chats'.  Yes, that is what I will work on today.  Developing my leads through multi-directional campaigns using Multichannel Marketing. Since my Interactive Marketing software tells me where my chat is coming from, all I would need from that point is their name because email configurations are usually quite easy to find.  Then, I could actually create a campaign workflow around these inbound marketing opportunities and really focus on lead nurturing and account development. 

Believe you me, it sounds a lot more complicated then it is.  Marketing Automation, you gotta love it.   How do you handle those people who hit your site to chat?  Or do you even chat?

Knowing how to best complete a chore is often the hardest part of the task. For example, take the monumental task of bringing new life to old wood floors on the cheap. For me, a purist, I find the newest ways of doing things aren't always the best. 

Take for example, rehabbing old houses, which could a be a torture tactic. One of the staples of rehabbing is refinishing hardwood floors. You could sand, sand, sand, sand and then sand some more. Get some really toxic chemicals, wear a respirator, carefully yet quickly spread the polyurethane and not walk on the floors for a couple of days.  Or, you could just get some good old-fashioned floor wax, play some old tunes from Frank Sinatra and have a good day. Less mess, no fuss.

How does polishing up old wood floors have anything to do with web analytics solutions or post campaign analysis, you ask?  You are in the right place!
 
Technology for marketing, like polishing old wood floors, can take on any number of different guises. Take for example measuring online marketing efforts with the time tested CID command. It is a simple and quick way to measure any URL, and the beauty of it all is that anyone, from event managers to marketing communicators, can use this simple but nifty tool anytime with no assistance from interactive marketers, like us.

So, next time you are asked to track a campaign or Web page, give the requester the power to utilize their own marketing management technology tools. Tell them to add ?CID=(tracking name) to any URL. Your web analytics solutions like Omniture or Google Analytics, will be able to report the data needed. 

So, nice move Kanye.  Take the only moment a young kid, Taylor Swift, has to be truly thankful, make a huge assumption that Beyonce' was overlooked for an award at the MTV Awards and make yourself a PR nightmare.  My dad has always said, "Go Big or Go Home."  Well, Kanye, you went big, and you went Splat!

I have got to tell you though, this is how I think marketers treat us, as consumers on the Internet. They think they have this whole 'Internet Marketing thing' figured out. They can make wide sweeping, huge behavior assumptions about us based on some random response history we have provided and TADA, we get hit with tons of online marketing and social media marketing.  

The good news is, there are companies that are great at predictive behavior modeling through multichannel marketing.  I love that software companies can help marketers quickly identify the keywords their market is using and then apply Pay Per Click (PPC) Management and lead scoring to determine those in market. 

No need to make assumptions any more, huh?  Geez, Kanye...just think...if you had to do things over again, would you do them differently?  

Aprimo is looking forward to participating in the Interactive Marketing Summit, Thursday, October 8th, at the Hyatt Crown Center in Kansas City, MO.  If you are in the Kansas City area, I hope you are planning to attend as it will be a great opportunity to network with other marketers and learn more about emerging trends in online marketing.

Our very own Lisa Arthur, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo, will be speaking at the Summit.  Her topic is The Educated Consumer/Prospect.

We will also be showcasing our Aprimo Marketing Studio solution, which is focused on streamlining your current online marketing efforts.  Stop by and see us.  We would love to learn about your specific online marketing needs and answer any questions you might have about how Aprimo Marketing Studio might help your company.