Technology For Marketing

Technically, my name is Kati Dafoe, and technically, I'm an Associate Events Specialist at Aprimo. I figured before I let too much time go by, I should officially introduce myself, my background and why you should care about what I have to say!

I'm part of a two-man (well, two-woman) team that manages North American events for Aprimo. So, on a typical day, you can bet I'm working on a webinar, our annual user conference (a premier event that highlights our industry-leading technology for marketing), a smaller regional lunch meeting or thinking about our booth strategy for our next tradeshow sponsorship. And, on a typical day, I am using our industry-leading technology for marketing to make my life a little easier. And it doesn't just make my life easier, but my co-workers' lives as well.

I consider myself lucky to have gotten my start in corporate America long after computers became mainstream. My mind boggles when I hear stories of faxes and paper mounds and endless file cabinets (oh my!). Just last week, I cringed when a vendor thanked me for emailing a document but asked me to fax it instead.

What old school processes make you cringe? What present-day technology for marketing puts pep in your step?

Technology for marketing takes on many forms. In this post, I will focus on some great web analytics tools marketers can use for marketing information technologies, search engine marketing and overall Website health. 

Google Search Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. Google Search Tool will list back links, pages indexed, cached page and related links. 

Yahoo Site Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Mike's Marketing Tools
Search Engine Rankings offers free, instant, on-line reports of web site rankings in eight top search engines and web directories, including Google, Yahoo! Search, Bing (MSN), AOL, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! Directory, and Open Directory (Dmoz).

These are just a few of the many free tools available. Do a Google search and you will find many, many others.

Let us know about your favorite search tool. Post a reply and tell us about it.

I’m sitting in Row 6C (ah, an aisle!) headed from Aprimo’s global headquarters to New York City where I will be joining dozens of CMOs for one of Argyle Group’s executive level summits. I didn’t start out the flight writing my blog. I started out the flight reading Tribes, written by one of my favorite marketers and storytellers, Seth Godin. 

Godin has a way driving home his “position” with intense simplicity coupled with repetitive examples of his thesis at work.  Maybe that is one of the reasons I respect him. Yes…he can air on the side of arrogance. Regardless, his way of telling story illustrates the essence of good marketing – a simple, clear, and compelling message and lots of proof points to back up his claim.

OK.  I’m not here to sell more books for Seth Godin – he is doing a fine job of that without my campaign management. What made me put down the book and boot up my laptop? It was the concept behind the book – the concept of how Tribes relate to marketing -- B2B marketing in particular.

In short – Godin examines us humans and our need and desire to be connected to a tribe or many tribes –around a leader or an idea. He also discusses how the web – no surprise here - -has reduced the geographical, cost and time associated with finding and joining tribes. The missing link – the cruxt of the book – is that Tribes need a leader and the internet can’t provide leadership.

What are we doing as B2B marketers to foster our own Tribe? I believe we need one –  I’ve been in B2B working in technology for marketing for more than 20 years -- and I don’t see a Tribe for us. Am I missing one? Have I been too buried with spreadsheets and powerpoint decks to see them right in front of my face? I see analyst firms and paid for marketing destination sites offering advice and workshops. Hey, we subscribe to Forrester Research – and read Laura Ramos’ blog. We work with Sirius Decisions and read their benchmarks. But as a third time B2B CMO, I’m not seeing the conversations and the leadership within our line of business.

Is this one of the reasons many of us are still fighting for relevance in our technology or product focused businesses. We just don’t have a sense of belonging – anywhere?
 
We, at Aprimo, are on a quest to help make the world we marketers live in, better. Is there a Tribe out there I should join? Should we think about starting our own tribe? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Should we be working together to make our professional lives (which I know consume for most of us more than 50 hours a week) better, easier, and more rewarding?

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. 

Well I have to admit, the notion of putting my thoughts into the open world did seem a little daunting to me. I am the technical marketing manager for Aprimo, a marketing automation software company. Seems like the word marketing is used a lot in my title and role :). A few years ago, the words technical and marketing together would have seemed strange, but its amazing just how much marketing is reliant on technology these days, especially in my world. Now, technical marketing is not a role unique to Aprimo, but it just so happens that we are a marketing software automation company.

Interactive Marketing, Direct Marketing, Digital Assets, Lead Management, Social Media - to name a few, are arenas we play in every day and all are completely online. Every day we are solving problems for marketers, andthrough the use of our software. 

I dare to think where we would be without the Internet, email or social media (I wouldn't be writing this post for one). The direct mail trend is dropping while interactive and email channels are growing exponentially. Every email sent, opened and clicked can be tracked. This is all valuable information, which is then used to further engage and target each prospect or customer. This information is gold to a marketer and its all using technology, our technology in this case. As you may have guessed I am a technology junkie and I am lucky to be involved in one of the hottest growing industries in the world. 

I believe we have only scratched the surface of what we can do with technology and marketing, and I am so excited to be part of this exciting industry. 

Being my first blog, I seemed to have waffled a bit. As you can see my passion is technology and how we can use it to solve marketers problems. If this is something that interests you then watch this space, well this blog anyway.

Before I go, I leave you with with this story that really tickled me. Sometimes I think we are not as advanced as we think.

More to come next time....

If you're like me, you are constantly wanting improve your ROI in marketing. Paid search is one of the many tools interactive marketers use to stay a few steps ahead of the search engine management circus.

But, what does one do when conversion rates start to slip? No matter how well you have your paid search ads crafted, regardless of how well you use all of the technology for marketing tools offered by Google, sooner or later, your ROI will start to lose some of its luster.

Search marketing is a larger-than life project, one that requires major planning and insight. But sometimes, it's the smallest of strategy shifts that produce big results. And, with everyone trying to do more with less, these small optimizing ideas can be golden.

As any PPC guru is well aware, Google Adwords offers a plethora of tools to manage your paid search efforts. Two that are often overlooked are ad scheduling and IP restriction.

Ad scheduling will help search marketers fine tune their paid search campaigns by limiting when their ads appear within Google searches. If, you know that your prospects are going to be searching for you during business hours, does it make sense to run paid search ads on the weekends?  You can dictate when your paid search ads appear from the campaign management tab. 

Another tip would be to restrict your ads based on IP address. This tool can make your paid search budget go even farther and increase your marketing ROI. This easy to use tool is also found in the Tools section. By excluding IP addresses that have low conversions rates, you can focus your precious search engine marketing budget on more lucrative site visitors.

A year ago, I didn't follow ANY blogs. I now follow four, plus the two I write....(kinda have to subscribe to those) so we're up to six! A year ago, I didn't author any blogs and as forementioned, I now write two. Two years ago - I hate to admit, but I don't remember even thinking that blog was a word! Could have been longer than that - I can barely remember last week, let alone two years ago. In any case - here I am...subscribing to blogs, researching blogs and certainly writing them.

As I become more savvy to the social media science going on behind the blogs - I take particular note of some of my favorites and all of the social media advertising that sandwiches both sides of the posts. I have to wonder as a marketer, what their intent was in starting their blogs?

For me, my personal blog catalogs the life of my 3-year old and the funny things she says and does - a scrapbook, if you will...since she was born to a ridiculously uncrafty mamma! My professional blog catalogs my life as a marketer - marketing technology for marketing departments across the globe. Both will capture rights of passage, I suppose.... and coming of age or stage.

Who knows...in time, perhaps you'll see my blogs with PPC advertising peppered down the sides - until then, keep reading, keep commenting.....I want to know you're out there! and I'll keep writing.

We are currently in the process of evaluating the features offered in our forthcoming mobile marketing application for our marketing software solution.  This process has plunged me into the middle of mobile marketing and the emerging use of SMS within the marketing function.  Clearly, SMS has become an important technology for marketing along with other outbound & inbound marketing initiatives.

It appears, as marketers, we are all coming up with clever ways of saying "text XYZ" to short code "1234" and get "ABCD" back.  It amazes me that this simple concept is starting to pop-up in so many interesting ways.  However, after watching my son deliver his 10th text message while watching a football game, I realized why this will become a major new force in marketing. 

It is no surprise to anyone with a teenager that text messaging has become the ubiquitous communication channel for the next generation of consumer.  In fact, they hardly know why a phone receives calls at all.  For them, they would not be surprised if several "phones" started dropping that silly talking feature soon. 

So, if you are a marketer looking to reach this growing population of text savvy consumers, what better way to reach them than to use their preferred channel communication, which has become text messaging. 

Clearly, Europe was well ahead of this trend.  However, the next generation of consumer in the United States is right with them.  The way things are progressing, at this point, I might need to improve upon my current 1 word per 10 minute text performance or I might not be able to make a reservation, get information on a new home, buy a ticket to an event, or ask where the bathroom is in my next restaurant visit. 

Not many days pass when I don't ask myself, "Well, how did I get here?" From a newspaper reporter to a media relations flak to an Internet marketing guru, my career path has been a great one. And, my past experiences have been a great prerequisite to my biggest challenge to date: interactive marketing.

Online marketing encompasses so many different marketing-related tactics, an extra large arsenal is required. Interactive marketers are a mixed lot: part engineer, part creative, part writer, part developer, part producer, and the list goes on. 

I guess you could say we're mutts of the marketing world. And that's a good thing.



Back in the day, before the 'World Wide Web' spawned a whole new vernacular of terms like search engine management, social media, marketing technology, online marketing and Website traffic, I was a cub newspaper reporter on the world-famous Las Vegas strip. I would brave the searing desert heat to find the stories my readers -- or potential customers -- wanted to read.  Flash forward nearly 20 years, and not much has changed.

While I now work in air conditioned comfort instead of broiler-like heat, I am reminded on a daily basis that the heat of my competitors can be more intense than any sun-drenched desert. And, to scoop my rivals, I must constantly reinvent how I tell and deliver my only asset, my story. 

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying that journalists and marketers are one in the same. But, journalists, like marketers, are storytellers, and therein lies the connection. How the story is told is the difference.  

So, that's how I got here. Whether working the news beat or touting the latest marketing software, interactive marketers -- like reporters -- are out to tell the best story and to tell it first. We have a few more tools to help us get the message across, but at the end of the day, we all just want the world to hear what we have to say.

So, when I ask myself how I got here, I realize, it's the same as it always was.

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.

I am new. New to Aprimo. New to the four padded walls I call a cell..oops…cubicle and new to working in technology for marketing. What I am not new to is marketing (& cubicles!)

Being newly induced to the IT industry has provided a fair share of challenges – a language I do not speak (tech talk), Marketing Information Technologies I have yet to fully learn, obstacles I cannot fully comprehend and most certainly a fashion (jean shorts, black socks, sandals) that I will not support.

With those challenges always comes great realization – realization that the IT industry is moving faster than the speed of light and that for being a 12-year seasoned marketer, I was pretty bland and well, dumb – I’ll say it, when it came to knowing about marketing software that would help me do my job. I spent so much of my career fighting uphill marketing battles on ROI, tracking, results – blah, blah, blah and then more recently on SEO and social media. How did it never occur to me that there may be tools out there to help?

Look at me. Harried, single mother, toddler on one hip, blackberry in one hand, iPhone in the other. As a marketer – I want the cutting edge technology to simplify my personal life – Why don’t I want the best technology to aid in my professional life too?

So, yes, I now work in the IT industry as a marketer and can use great, interactive technology in my professional life. Best of both worlds. I will learn the lingo – enough to translate break room conversations. I will grasp the software. I will overcome obstacles and do my fair share of hurdling…but NEVER in jean shorts, black socks and sandals!

How about you? What are your marketing hurdles?