Marketing Automation

How to use Big Data to start small

The big promise of big data for marketers is to be able to use all the data we have. By looking at all the information, big data allows us to explore minute details without the risk of blurriness.

in theory, sampling (which always lost detail because it is a proxy for the full data set) and guesswork go away, we can analyse all the data for every customer and prospect, and provide that customer experience nirvana of just the right offer at just the right time.

If that feels like a big change for you, then start small. Attribution, one of the most persistent of marketing challenges, can be a great area to apply big data for immediate results, and ROI.

Key findings from the Econsultancy/Accenture roundtable in Singapore

Econsultancy recently held a joint roundtable with Accenture in Singapore on April 4 covering Content, Marketing ROI/Attribution and social media.

The power of roundtable discussions lies both in the diversity of companies grouped around a single table, from B2B to B2C or from local minnow to global brand, as well as the transparency and range of the conversation.

The joint Accenture Interactive and Econsultancy roundtable was no exception, with over 25 companies represented from a mixture of multi-national, to local innovator and from B2C to government sector.

Big Data: key takeaways from Digital Cream London 2013

Whilst the discussion was ripe with technical tongue twisters, the overall message was clear. Big Data, and its implications on Big Marketing, remains a mystery for many.

There is an endless stream of Big Data platform providers clamouring to prove that only they provide the most verifiable and cleanest solutions.

What is vital here is to not become fixated by promises but instead challenge the vendors’ capabilities to provide specific, applicable data which allows you to achieve the true purpose of engaging with data.

This purpose is to make more informed, Big Marketing decisions.

Conversion optimisation in an internationalised online world: part one

When I moved to the UK in 2007, aside from acclimatising myself to a new city, culture and a host of new accents, I found myself having to adjust to being regularly mistaken for an American.

At first, it bothered me but as with most things though, you adapt. But it bothered me because, despite all our apparent similarities, Canadians and Americans are very different. 

These differences can be translated to today’s online world, where it’s important for businesses to recognise that countries or cultures interact with websites differently and should therefore be treated with a bespoke experience.

In the realm of conversion optimisation, there are a number of best practices that can be considered.

Five uncommon ways for ecommerce retailers to segment their email list

It’s “divide and conquer” when it comes to email lists. Your analytics team is charged with putting your customers into their respective buckets.

Then it’s the job of the marketing and creative teams to come up with relevant messaging targeted to each segment.

Marketers are familiar with the traditional types of segmentation, such as gender, age, location and engagement.

These types of segmentation pay (literally), however, it can be even more rewarding to dig a little deeper into your list and find the correct segmentation for the job.

Following are five less-common methods of segmenting your list.

It’s not the size of your data that counts…

It’s how you use it. Big Data is today’s marketing black, no doubt about it. But it’s not as one pundit suggested “Big Data is just ordinary data with good PR” neither is it just the amount in your stash.

No, if you want to realise the massive/staggering/blinding difference data about your visitors can make to your marketing, business and profits you have to learn to wield it effectively.

So, having been given the opportunity to blog about data-driven marketing, data-privacy, and all things targeted, I should start by talking about what we mean by, and can do with, the Big Data bonanza that the online channel provides us…

A plea to all data geeks: speak human

An innumerate marketer begs the new species of click-sniffer to make a bit of an effort and translate your undisputed brilliance into some language other than Klingon or Ithkuil.

If you believe the bloggers (and who doesn’t?), marketing departments all over the world are clearing out the desks of their PR, advertising and ‘corporate communications’ dinosaurs to make room for the new breed of data geek.

On the whole, that’s good, but data is only useful if the lessons it provides can be communicated in terms that people can understand. 

How to encourage all your employees to use your brand/marketing portal

According to Gartner, marketers are becoming increasingly responsible for buying marketing related technology and services. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.

Here at Brandworkz, we are seeing a growing trend for marketers to implement online brand management or digital asset management systems. 

In line with this trend, marketing and brand teams in global companies are becoming used to using their brand management portal or digital asset management system widely and frequently and probably take its working resources pretty much for granted.

But we believe your brand portal can be a much greater an asset to your business if everyone in the organization makes use of it.

It’s true that people working in other departments don’t always see themselves as directly responsible for the brand. And yet, if your HR team, sales people and IT department can also be converted to brand evangelism, the outcome can be hugely positive in terms of building your business.

Here are five ways in which you can help make that happen…

The three steps to ‘shareability,’ sharing customer information within the firm

Multichannel marketing means being able to deploy not only campaigns but content across channels in an integrated fashion.

It is recognized that to communicate effectively across channels, customer information must be also shared effectively within the organization.  

Data sharing was the a topic at Econsultancy.com’s recent Big Data Roundtable in London in February. What is less well-known and understood is how to get to a shared data repository as an organization.  

This blog post discusses my research results on data sharing. For more on the topic, Econsultancy has a great report on how to achieve shared data in a corporation.

Five ways to become a big marketer and drive big results

In a world of buzzwords, perhaps the most over-used and under-explained term that marketers will be coming up against this year is “Big Data”.

Big data, as we’ve learned from actually working with the stuff is realistically only the first part of the jigsaw when it comes to upping your game and marketing in a more agile manner that’s responsive to the market you’re serving.

We believe that it takes Big Marketers to unlock big data. People who are willing and able to look beyond the now bygone era of a “campaign” that has a start and end point and realise that digital marketing has become about responding to the fast pace of the internet itself, with equally fast and relevant decision-making.

In this piece, we discuss the kind of attributes a marketer needs to take themselves to the next level and employ a big marketing strategy that will not only set them apart from their peers, but help them to build knowledgeof how to take the rough diamond that is rawdata, and transform it to work best for your brand.

How to effectively segment your data

It’s a well-known fact that relevance is one of the points to focus on when sending promotional email messages to your customers. Data is relevance!

The data you gather from your customers and store into your central database provides you with tools to create relevant and timely messages.

By segmenting your marketing database into relevant target groups, you are on your way to get the most out of your customer data.