The same concept also holds true for marketers. There are so many competing priorities that it can be difficult to determine what to do when, and to determine how to get the best return on the marketing investment. Marketers ask themselves what type of data to invest in, how to leverage social media channels, when to invest in new database technologies and infrastructures, how to use response attribution and analytics to be more customer centric, etc. CMOs are also challenging their teams to get it all done immediately. With all of that on your plate, how can any marketer be successful?

The answer is simple. Prioritize. Identify the low-hanging fruit so that you can start seeing benefits fast. Understand what to focus on now, what to focus on in the mid-term, what your long-term strategy is, and how to focus your efforts to get there. A well-planned roadmap provides alignment and focus in a challenging landscape and addresses the urgent and the important items for immediate action. This helps marketers align to their strategic objectives, maximize marketing spend and prove value to their CMO – and even better, to their customers. And sometimes it is hard to make the right short term choices and ensure they align with the long term vision.  This is where expert guidance can help.  So, just like on a vacation, you have to determine where you want to start. What activity do you want to do first? What are those activities that you absolutely have to do, and what activities can you put on the back burner until time or money permit? Finally, what are those filler activities that you could do if something takes less time than planned?

A road mapping exercise is a great way to identify the needs , priorities and wish lists of multiple stakeholders.

A road mapping exercise is a great way to identify the needs , priorities and wish lists of multiple stakeholders. When a reputable 3^rd party is brought in to help identify the components of the roadmap, marketers can be even more in tune with what other retailers are doing in the industry. Just think… why do many travelers turn to travel agencies for vacation planning? Because travel agencies know how to plan a vacation for all customer types… they have feedback from former travelers on what is fun and what isn’t, and can help you decide if you want an adventure vacation or to just relax on a beach.

If you are a marketer struggling to put the right roadmap in place, seek an industry “travel agent” who can help understand your goals and objectives, provide the response attribution and analytics, and develop a roadmap customized for your marketing “vacation.”

If you are interested, read how our customer intelligence platform can help provide the analytics you need to build the right roadmap.

These lessons have taken some time to be adopted in the expanding world of digital marketing. From broadcast emails to placing banner ads to capture  eyeballs, the metrics have gravitated towards something new, including actions, conversion, click-throughs and even amount of purchase. Different companies, and even internal groups within companies, use different metrics to determine success. The metrics can be proactive based on strategy, or reactive based on other internal or external factors. Sometimes the approach is forced by competitive pressure, in other cases by the need  to track performance against broader objectives such as budgets or margins. As businesses become more used to the digital arena, segmentation and profiling play an increasingly important role in targeted campaigns.

Enter the new frontier of social marketing. Many questions arise for marketers, generating much discussion in industry groups and conferences: Which platform should I use? Which metrics should be tracked? What is the ROI? What does it drive? Also growing in complexity is the issue of revenue attribution in a multi-channel marketing world, and the role social media campaigns play in overall results. All valid questions, but a big challenge is that many seem to be forgetting a very fundamental question in marketing, regardless of channel, and that is: exactly who we are targeting? What is the difference between the 10 or 10,000 people who ”Like” your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter?

What is the difference between the 10 or 10,000 people who ”Like” your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter?

This is an important question because it raises the issue of relevancy. Look at the marketing efforts in other channels. Do we show the same ad on all channels? What about print ads in magazines? Is every customer or prospect sent the same piece of direct mail? The same offer? How about email? Even web pages are providing different experiences to different visitors based on what we know about them, including something as simple as a winter clothing offer that’s based on the IP address of the customer. It’s clear that marketing efforts are becoming more finely tuned and targeted.

One key strength of social media marketing is the ability to engage an audience, though this can be marginalized due to the one size fits all approach for social engagement efforts. The troubling question is: At what point does this approach become irrelevant noise or social spam? If I have one page for customers to like, in an attempt to speak to all of them I may not be speaking to any of them. The only case in which all messages are relevant to all the fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter is if they are essentially alike because I have a very narrow product offering. Let me describe the issue with social spam using a simple example. A national clothing retailer has customers who differ by age, gender and geographical regions. At the most basic level, the factors that segment the customers would be:

1. Gender: 2 groups – male and female
2. Region: 4 groups – West, East, Central and South
3. Age: 3 groups -18-25, 26-34, 35-44

Potentially there are 24 different segments of audience (2x4x3 = 24). It is late Fall and if the retailer is sharing updates once daily on its Facebook page, how often will it post something that is relevant to a 19 year old male living on the West Coast? Say the posting on Monday is for light Fall jackets targeted for teenage girls on the West Coast. Tuesday it is for heavier jackets targeted for 30-something males in the colder East Coast, Wednesday the message is for 35-44 age women in South for accessories, and so on.

At what point should that message targeted to a 19 year old male living in the West Coast show up? Until that message is delivered, the other messages might be seen as irrelevant noise or even be considered social spam. By attempting to engage fans and customers the retailer could be sending the wrong signals ¾ i.e., you are just a number. How long until this customer/target/fan stops paying attention due to irrelevant messaging day after day? It takes one simple click to stop seeing all or most of the retailer’s updates thereby losing the attention of someone who at one time was interested enough to like the retailer’s Facebook page.

So what is the answer? We have to go back to the basic principles of marketing. A social strategy has to be targeted and customized. We must be able to answer basic questions like: Who is our ideal customer? How much do we know about this person, and what is or is not of interest to them? This will help fine tune all aspects of our social channel efforts, segmentation and, eventually, drive strong results.

Profiling and segmentation are critical. We don’t send the same direct mailer or email, or offer the same landing page to all customers, so why force them to the same feed on a social media channel? The answer is to have more specific feeds, whether it’s pages, accounts or albums. The good news is that the right information is available to be able to segment. This includes all kinds of syndicated consumer information, as well as information available specifically in the social channel itself. There are many views and approaches to calculating the value of a “Like” on Facebook or a follower on Twitter, but regardless of how the value is calculated, the more specific your messaging is to the customer the higher the value will be. Remember the channel or tool may provide additional capabilities but the fundamentals have to be followed to make the best use of any channel.

The other day, however, was one of those times that I forgot my phone. I still wanted some tunes so I switched over to the FM dial. What I immediately noticed wasn’t the music, but the static that inevitably occurs as I drove in and out of signal contact. In the past, that static wouldn’t have bothered me so much. It seemed normal. But after listening to pristine audio for so long from my i-devices, it really stuck out. And it bothered me.

Retail marketers will load up the mailboxes with catalogs. And the savvy marketers with a mobile strategy are messaging right to the digital device. But how do you know these channels are working? I mean, how do you really know?

Then, because of my day job in B2B marketing, I got to thinking that all that static – all that loss of signal – is analogous to how many marketers approach campaign measurement. They are losing the signal from the time a customer receives an offer to the time they convert and take action.  Email marketers will send numerous email campaign deployments to their customers. Retail marketers will load up the mailboxes with catalogs. And the savvy marketers with a mobile strategy are messaging right to the digital device. But how do you know these channels are working? I mean, how do you really know? Sure, a customer who clicks through an email and immediately makes a purchase can be tracked. A direct mail responder might provide the keycode from the back of the catalog if you’re lucky. But what percent of customers actually provide you with all of that valuable insight regarding how they were promoted to prior to making a purchase? You guessed it. None.

The path to purchase is non-linear. You have probably heard assertions that the marketing funnel is dead. At the very least, it’s infinitely complex. Customers are crossing channels and making purchases in places they weren’t originally promoted to. And the limited ways in which they identify themselves is a real challenge to marketers. To solve for this you need a strategy for measurement that maintains the traceability of a customer from one channel to the next. You need this in order to maintain a clear signal and reduce the static in your measurement efforts. There are three questions you should ask yourself about your attribution methodology:

1. Does it allow me to truly recognize customers across channels, regardless of how they were promoted to, or how they responded?
2. Does it take into account actual promotional campaign data, as well as all response transaction data, regardless of channel, so that you can accurately measure at the customer level?
3. Does it allow you to quantify the contributions that each channel has on one another and on actual purchases made and identify areas of highest ROI?

If you answered no to any of these questions, you may be living with static and not even realizing it. And that’s just noisy.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to reduce the static, visit our website for more on response attribution.

The most important ingredients of a party are the guests: no guests, not much of a party. Over a long and fulfilling lifetime you make a lot of friends, so the key to planning this party was contacting our parent’s friends who now live in multiple cities.

We started by designing the invitation and, since most guests were born before Facebook’s inventors, we stuck with more conventional sharing and gave them the option of letting us know by email (on my domain) or phone (my brother’s house). This was the start of our “RSVP integration” nightmare.

Cards went out and, not surprisingly, we had a few deliverability issues including an invitation to Frank, one of my dad’s best work friends from years ago. Yes, he worked in an era when the Company was a place you worked for life, and relationships with co-workers and friends were like adjoining backyards without a fence.  Frank’s invitation came back to my brother’s house undelivered, so my dad called Frank to invite him directly. Frank later confirmed by email.

Meanwhile we received more phone calls and emails, which my brother and I traded back and forth. This is where things got really hard to track. Was the lady nicknamed “Mona,” who left a voicemail, the same household as the email from a “Mr. Bose?” The conflicting names and channels meant that when my mom called I didn’t have a simple answer to her question, “So how many people are confirmed so I can let the caterer know the count?” Well, our aggregations are probably wrong because our data quality is poor due to our inability to integrate across phone and email, “170, I think.”

A party is like a product that you market to your guests. As the marketer, you must contact your customers, engage them and end with a call to action (an RSVP in our case). Since you will hear back on multiple channels, you’d better be prepared to capture, integrate and aggregate the response from your customers across multiple channels. A marketer’s challenge is to do this for millions of customers. All marketers get anxious about a call from the “CMO,” but in my case, that means the Chief Mommy Officer.

Learn more about multi-channel marketing strategies for data quality, audience creation and response attribution tips and trends in Experian Marketing Services’ recently released 2012 Digital Marketer Report.

Response attribution

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers in today’s complex multi-channel world is determining which marketing programs are generating the biggest returns and which initiatives are not performing. Being successful requires a holistic and integrated approach to response attribution ¾ one that is based on a sound strategy and effective execution based on the company’s level of marketing sophistication.

Developing a strategy

Marketers need to think of three key things when contemplating response attribution and marketing cross-channel analysis:

1. Measure the ecosystem, not the event. Today’s complex marketing environment means that by nature, a customer or a prospect receives multiple marketing touches during the purchase cycle. Attributing 100% of a response, or a purchase, to a single event does not tell the whole story. Measure the entire series of events that drove that customer to purchase, not just the last touch.
2. Execute holdout tests. In order to truly understand the impact of withholding a marketing channel, marketers need to measure the lift that the channel provides to the marketing ecosystem. Do hold-outs and control groups consistently to make a properly informed decision.
3. Don’t listen to the pundits. Every company’s data is unique. There are tons of technorati, digerati and social media elite that depict a particular marketing channel as dead or dying and being replaced by another. That statement is only true if the data says it is true. Listen to the customer and how he or she interacts with your brand, and then make an informed decision.

Pre-order The 2012 Digital Marketer report and be one of the first to receive it this April. In it we’ll continue the response attribution conversation including how to effectively execute the strategy.

“But last in is how my company and others like it have been counting conversions for centuries (or maybe a decade)” you object. True, but does your company still have every Friday off and hand out thousands of stock options to every employee like they did back in early 2000? Probably not. Look, there is nothing wrong with counting conversions based on last in or first in. In order to assign a value to some channel, you need to have a method that is quickly implemented in your web tracking tools and usually, by default, it is last in or first in. It is the first step in the evolution to truly understanding how all of your marketing efforts, across all of your channels, are really impacting conversion. But, that is all it is, a first step.

So intuitively you ask, “OK, I’m listening, what’s the next step?” Excellent question. We consider truly understanding how all of your marketing spend is impacting conversion in a 3-step process. We’ve already covered the first step of assigning value to different channels by some method to get the process started. The second step is capturing all of the data for each channel that drove the conversion. The first type of data that needs to be captured is direct data or data that is directly traceable to a conversion, such as email data, website data and click-through data from affiliates, display ads and social media. The second type of data is indirect data or data that has to be inferred to have driven a conversion. This data can be derived from TV ads, billboards and the infamous display ad view-through. Some of these two types of data can be captured using web analytics tools, but most inferred data is stored in separate databases and needs to integrated with the rest.

“Wow! That’s a lot of data to look at,” you say, “so what am I supposed to do then?” Simply put, understand how your channels are influencing different customers. You need to understand how your potential and current customers will interact with you and how effective it is to send them an email, show them a display ad or do nothing and let them come to the site. This is Response Attribution – , taking all of the data mentioned above and building strong, robust highly executable models that will allow you to truly understand what channels you should continue to spend money on and which ones you should increase or decrease your spending on. The decision on spend will not be the same for all people. For instance, you may have a group of people that see display ads but never click them, receive emails but never open them and get catalogs but never order by phone. However, that same group of people contains some of your top customers. Does this mean that all of the other channels are ineffective? Maybe, maybe not. Response Attribution will give you the insight you need to understand which of those channels you should spend more or less on. For instance, view-throughs usually aren’t that effective, so perhaps you can pull back on that, or maybe emails are annoying to this particular group; so why annoy them if they will continue to spend anyway. These are the kinds of answers you can only get from building sophisticated models and looking at all of your data across all of your channels.

keep your mind on the customer and the customer will keep their mind on you

To summarize, last in wins, isn’t necessarily a bad philosophy, just not the right one. Truly understanding how each channel a consumer touches impacts conversion will help you increase your ROI across all channels and lead to a better marketing experience for the consumer. As always, keep your mind on the customer and the customer will keep their mind on you.

Questions / Comments contact me
Linkedin: David Kimery
Twitter:  @dkimrey
Email:  david.kimrey@experian.com