Marketing Darwinism caught up with Kathy Visser-May, CMO of Acumatica, the world’s fastest growing Cloud ERP company. Kathy is a celebrated Marketer with experience traversing technology giants like Microsoft and PeopleSoft/Oracle and hyper-growth companies like Acumatica. Recently, she was named a CRN 2018 Woman in the Channel.

MD: Kathy, tell us a bit about Acumatica. We hear about the torrid growth. Any color you can add?

Kathy: Thanks Paul. Acumatica is focused on helping mid-size companies transform their business with a modern system that grows as they grow. The most forward-thinking companies are disrupting themselves to ensure they continue to be the architects of their future. This trend is affecting all industries, it doesn’t matter if you build buildings, manufacture auto parts, sell shoes online; disruption is happening, requiring companies to change how they operate and provide value to customers. As a result, the requirements of a mid market business to be competitive today are as complex as large enterprises were 10 years ago.

We have built a flexible, powerful, and secure platform that offers them speed and scale and connects their business in an end-to-end way. The growth is testament to the quality of the product and our unique licensing and deployment models that enable customers to scale as their business grows.

MD: You emphasize the Channel a great deal at Acumatica. Is it true that you are a 100%- Through-Channel company?

Kathy: For us, the Channel is our lifeblood. These amazing companies sell to and service customers with a deep understanding of their business needs across many industries and geographies. I like to say we don’t compete with our channel, we feed it. My team spends 50%+ of our resources and marketing dollars on creating high quality sales leads for our partners. Partners tell me all the time one of the reasons, in addition to our modern, cloud solution, they love selling Acumatica is because of our commitment to this model. We provide the Channel not only with technical knowledge but sales and implementation support as well. Such harmony is unheard of typically. So, yes, we are 100% Channel.

MD: You mentioned Digital Transformation. What does this mean specifically in the Acumatica context?

Kathy: We love the phrase Digital Transformation but are also aware of its shortcomings. For many businesses, the phrase implies something arcane and something “other” than what they are doing. But when you inspect the issue, ask the right questions, and find out that these very organizations are migrating to the cloud, digitizing process, and unifying Business and IT, you realize that they are in fact doing Digital Transformation. In our conception, it’s about two things: Operations and Customer Experience. We help Medium-sized companies operate in a manner that allows them to spend their energies engaging with customers and conferring that constantly-improving experience that their rightfully demanding customers ask for. The core concept of the DX journey is that the system at the center of the business must be one that is capable of housing the data needed across the business operations and the ability to provide real-time data and connection across all systems. Systems that house islands of data that have to be synchronized and reconciled are no longer effective in the modern world.

MD: ERP can at times seem “old hat.” What about emerging technologies?

Kathy: There are a few things embedded in this question. For some, the idea of ERP might seem to be yesterday’s news but for growing companies seeking to improve their engagement and experience, ERP can very well be a fresh and new way to approach their business. We are adaptable, flexible, and natively Cloud-based not cumbersome and laborious to implement. Interestingly, emerging technologies, especially AI, are a core pillar of our business. 75% of our resources are technical and we never have and never will stop engineering new products that transform how businesses operate and deliver value to customers.

Two of my very good friends, Romi Mahajan of the KKM Group and Aseem Badshah of Socedo shot a video discussing our most recent blog post on the Return of the Marketing Mix. Ultimately, marketing is a mix of channels, tactics, and bets, of which some are measurable and some are not. It’s time for marketers to reclaim their role as engagers, risk-takers, and experimenters!!

Fashions change. 

This cliché doesn’t apply just to hemlines and jeans, but to business as well.  Anyone who claims that business is all about logic and data needs to get a reality-check; Marketers are perhaps the worst offenders here, much to their detriment.  Of late, Marketers have suffered from a deep alienation from the real essences of their profession and we hope that 2018 will usher in a return to sanity.

This alienation – or departure from sanity in Marketing- stems from the over-indexing on Data and Measurement.  While this sounds strange, even counterintuitive and heretical, it stands the test of logic and does not require a deep knowledge of Marketing to understand.  Data and Measurement are no doubt valuable but they can also be the refuge of scoundrels.

The key in the above paragraph is the term “over-indexing.”  In other areas of life, the tendency to over-index is called zealotry.  In Marketing, the zealotry of measurement has created an untenable situation in which Marketing is asked to be as resilient as Physics or Mathematics; So too are Marketers, who feel forced to conform to the fashions of the day.  For the past decade or so, the fashion has been “Performance Marketing” or, in a wild conflation of strategy and channel, “Digital Marketing.” 

The genesis story here is a good one.  Marketing for a long time appeared to be a cocktail of guesses mixed with a dose of manipulation.  Organizations started to get frustrated with the lack of predictability and rising costs associated with Marketing and the ecosystem of agencies and media companies that had to be invoked when even considering bringing a product, service, or brand to market.  Theories of consumer reception abounded, but the overall logic of Marketing appeared to be something akin to “do it and it will work.”  Since no company could afford to shut off all Marketing, they continued in an inertial frame for decades.

Then came the Internet.  Almost overnight- or so it seemed- behavior patterns changed.  In addition, the almost infinite real estate and low cost of replication on the Internet, allowed for a completely different cost structure for Marketing. Completing the hat-trick was the fact that digitized Marketing can be “revved” quickly and tests of efficacy can be run in record time.  A heady mix indeed!

And for a while it seemed great.  Marketers could “go to market” quickly and bypass the usual middle-men.

Soon, however, the false “quants” took over and started writing how Marketing was both a “Science” and “Predictive.”  Tomes could be written about the false attribution that plagued the marketing scene with the eminent measurability of Digital Marketing.  We neglected Pater Semper Incertus Est. 

Marketers new to the profession became one-channel ponies. They only knew Digital Marketing. They also grew up under the totalitarianism of measurement.  They believed in the falsity of attribution and hewed only to the channels that provided an easy story for attribution.

Lo and behold, pundits declared the demise of “traditional” marketing.  Some said TV was dead. Others eulogized radio.  Still others print and outdoor.  Digital Marketing was ROI Marketing and ROI Marketing was King (forgive the pun!)

The zealotry created real problems for real Marketers.  First, they were subjected to Wall Street-type time-frames. What would in a sane world take a year, had to be measured in weeks or months.  Second, the need to show ROI created a channel bias in which they were forced to market in only those channels which were eminently measurable.  Third, they lost the Art which defined Marketing and chose, instead, to genuflect at the altar of a false science.  CMOs lost their jobs in 18 months because they could not prove the ROI they agreed to.  Marketing lost its way.

Fast forward to now. 

Are Marketers ready to reclaim their profession?  Are they ready to bring back that Evergreen-yet-needs-to-be-green-again concept that defined their art?  Yes, you know what we mean- The Marketing Mix. 

We predict that 2018 will be the year in which Marketers re-embrace the notion of managing a portfolio of bets, of which some are measurable and others are not.  The rush to measurement restricts the channels Marketers pick to engage with, not unlike a Chef with an infinitude of ingredients but only one ladle and one pan with which to create a gourmet meal.  

The portfolio will no doubt contain elements of Digital Marketing but will also likely concentrate on what the current and future audience really needs and could, thus, index on physical marketing, TV, Radio, Outdoor, even Print.  Who knows.  Why discount ideas and channels a priori? 

Ironically, the zealotry around measurability and ROI lands Marketers in an ironic soup- they restrict themselves from generating real ROI by thinking of it as an input and not as an outcome.

All fashions have their arc.  It’s high time we reclaim Marketing from the ROI zealots and re-engage with the world as it is and as it could be.

Guest post by:
Romi Mahajan, Blueprint Consulting
Steven Salta, Agilysys

On April 6, 2016, the Department of Labor released a 1000-page document known as the Fiduciary Duty rule (DOL fiduciary) requiring financial advisors to always act in the best interest of the client, expanding the meaning of “investment advice fiduciary” originally defined under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to also include retirement investment advice. Asset managers have since faced a new set of intricate regulations to comply with, tight timelines to meet, and structural/operational changes to enact within their own firms.

From the very beginning, the fiduciary rule had the weight of inevitability and the social pressure of protecting investors’ morality behind it. Assets under management in America alone nears $40 trillion, most of which is managed by the US’s largest 50 banks.

While the industry foresaw change with the DOL fiduciary rule, my marketing team saw opportunity. What if we could prepare our subject matter experts to react quickly, time our content with the news cycle, and launch an advertising campaign that could help demystify the rule for our clients and potential prospects? Better yet, what if we could be the leading consulting firm on the rule and how to implement it? We immediately got to work.

Program execution

• Web presence: Ahead of the game In advance of the April 6th announcement, we developed a classic microsite, and built it out with thought leadership, media placements, and videos, all of which were keyword-optimized. Front-and-center, we placed a jargon-free description of what the DOL Fiduciary Duty Rule really meant and how we understood its possible effects. Also quickly available to visitors was a highlighted drop-down list describing various services related to DOL Fiduciary rule and how we could help. Throughout the first added our DOL-focused publications, webcasts and videos, as well as other related content.
• Thought leadership: A deep-dive and first-to-surface We are never surprised by a regulation. At the time of the announcement, marketing was prepared (at 6 a.m.!) to work alongside a five-member client services team to tear apart the 1,000 page ruling; we published a paper within 48 hours. We also scheduled interviews beginning at 11 a.m. that day with two thought leaders who were media-trained.
• Media coverage: And then some In advance, and in anticipation of the announcement, two subject area experts had been previously identified and were prepped for press interviews. We arranged for interviews on the day of the DOL announcement with The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Reuters, Reuters TV, Bloomberg, CNBC and CNBC Closing Bell.
• Webcast(s): Ramping up and following up In February 2016, we held a webcast to present industry perspectives and impacts, discussing four major impact areas: business models, operating models, technology and data, and compliance programs. By polling our webcast participants, we also confirmed concerns that we assumed were top-of-mind for our clients. Once the rule was announced, we held a follow-up webcast within two weeks. The April webcast reviewed the regulation, compared the proposed rule to the final, discussed industry impacts and reactions, next steps and FAQs.

Over the course of 14 months, we helped PwC grow a dedicated DOL team of nearly 200 employees serving 25 clients, 120 projects, and of course we booked business. Best of all we got the call every marketer dreams of from the project team to “please turn your marketing off we have too much demand!”

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of The ROI of Influencer Marketing. This webinar featured Eric T. Tung (@EricTTung) Brand Ambassador for companies like Ford, Microsoft, Verizon and MasterCard, Kathleen Hessert (@KathleenHessert) CEO of Sports Media Challenge and Eric Berkowitz (@tracx) SVP of Global Services at Tracx. This webinar was sponsored by Tracx. We discussed ideas and tips from finding influencers for your brand to calculating ROI on your program.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Not all influencers are created equal – Brands should look beyond social metrics into psychographics and contextual intelligence to determine the ideal candidates
2. Bigger doesn’t mean better – A large following or readership does not inherently make a person influential
3. The ROI of Influence – True influence drives action, not just awareness

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Omni-Channel Marketing: Creating the Right Mix for Your Brand be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of From Community to Commerce: Making the ROI Connection. This webinar featured Meagan Fish (@iRobot) Global Social Media Manager, iRobot, Andrew Ashton (@@AndrewLAshton) Digital Marketing Specialist, Pizza Hut and Jordan Slabaugh (@jordanv) Vice President of Marketing, Wayin. We discussed a ton of ideas on how to capture ROI in social media!

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Social Media has gone mainstream ow so you should be measuring social media in the same way that you measure any other marketing investment
2. Match your CRM data with social data to start building out a clearer picture of your audience and be more relevant to them
3. There is no ROI in social without the “I” – so that means you have to make in investment to get in ROI

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Making the Case for Employee Advocacy At Your Firm; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Way Beyond Listening: Integrating Listening Into Your Platform for ROI. This webinar was sponsored by Synthesio and featured Brian Melinat (@brianmelinat) Director of Marketing Analytics within Dell, Kristine Vick (@kristinevick) Principal in the Digital and Content team at SAS, and Ben Lapidus (@benlapidus) Senior Sales Engineer at Synthesio. We discussed nine ways companies have found to connect social media to revenue and ROI.

Here are nine ways to connect Social Media to Revenue and ultimately ROI

1. Map your social activities to all 4 stages of a customer journey: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation and Retention
2. Connect social media to all marketing campaigns to gauge response
3. Connect social media to SEO activities to increase SEO
4. Plot your social media sentiment against your NPS scores
5. Provide delightful customer support
6. Listen for Lead Gen opportunities
7. Use social for new product ideas
8. Use social media to vet pricing of new products
9. Use social media for M&A ideas in your product lines

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled To LinkIn or Not to LinkIn: Getting Ahead of Your Competitors with Innovative Strategies; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

It’s apparent that there’s a missing vital component in the quest to modernize marketing. Today’s marketing organizations are aggressively modernizing, automating and adding more digitally centered marketing tactics as they focus on their mandate to discover prospects and create new customers. To meet the challenge, CMOs have turbocharged Marketing Ops teams and are building their “Marketing Clouds,” leveraging marketing automation to nurture prospects, adding CRM to manage pipeline and customer relationships, while spending millions on branded websites and social pages, coupled with billions on media to promote their offerings.  We are not connecting that media investment, the prospects generated, nor their data, with our marketing systems and processes. Integration between the two is a critical missing link.

The prospect marketing effort, which is predominantly driven by third-party media investments in content syndication, search and advertising, is still very fragmented and, worse, seldom measured or optimized. Disconnected and unable to adequately track and optimize media spend, marketing organizations struggle with lead velocity, mixed data quality and a lack of ability to attribute results back to the source or measure ROI. This is a tough hit for marketing executives as they realize how much money they’re actually spending on media to create prospects—$40 billion+ on digital advertising alone in 2013, according to the IAB.

Here are 3 areas of focus for CMOs and marketing pros who are out to modernize their approach in order to drive a higher return on media and technology investment should consider:

• Integrate third-party media investment and data with marketing systems and processes.  Today, engaging with the media community (publishers, affiliates and other sources) combined with the internal marketing processes necessary to get data into systems, requires numerous manual processes—hours of data scrubbing and lots of spreadsheets passed between media providers and marketing teams.  A more efficient approach is to automate by integrating the prospect and lead data garnered from media campaigns and partners directly with your marketing automation system and/or your CRM. Ensuring the data is delivered directly into your current systems eliminates numerous manual, resource-intensive tasks.
• Validate prospect information in order to inject quality, actionable data, and thereby increase lead velocity and lower media costs.  Once you decide to directly inject prospect data from your third party media sources, it becomes essential that the media-driven data you’ve paid for is validated, cleansed and formatted for your marketing systems (Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, etc.). This not only ensures that you get what you paid for from your media investment, it also allows you to more rapidly get down to the business of nurturing and developing customers.
• “Close the Loop” to garner actionable insights that can be applied to optimize media campaigns and marketing programs. Today, we have the ability to gather data from every campaign we run but most of it we can’t and don’t act on.  Whether you leverage banners, email, content syndication, telemarketing, search or a combination and whether you utilize cost per acquisition, lead, sale, click or incoming call, you need to analyze marketing performance data by media channel, media source, creative, content, offers and campaigns all in one place.  Then you can more easily acquire insights that can be applied to optimize campaigns by focusing on higher performing tactics, redistributing media spend across the most successful media sources, and applying the resulting audience data to fine tune targeting parameters.

Taking action on the missing link is a necessity. If you are investing in media to generate prospects and acquire customers, be certain to connect those media programs with the rest of your marketing systems and process.

This post was written in collaboration with Integrate – learn more about Integrate at http://www.integrate.com

This is the era of Social Media.  With over a billion consumers offering opinions, sentiments, and insights online, Social Media has in a few short years eclipsed many traditional forms of expression in terms of volume and importance.  As a result, the professional world is abuzz with discussion of this new form of communication and interaction, concentrating on its positive, even revolutionary aspects.  However, there is still a lot of discussion by an alarmingly large group of pundits that Social Media lacks clear ROI.  In my view since Social Media generates ROI more directly and with higher velocity than other forms of marketing.  It’s the era of Social Media for a reason!

Media planning and buying is an area in which we see this Social Media-led advantage in bold-relief.  In the traditional model, advertisers and media buyers make and execute buying decisions and then wait for the results to come in.  It’s often hit or miss and mid-course correction is impossible.  Nuanced feedback is virtually non-existent and when insights are generated they are delivered after-the-fact.  Billions of dollars and thousands of people-hours are expended with little result to show.  Of course, there are effective media buys but they are rarely driven purely by empirical or predictive data.  While hits occur, the ratio of hits to misses is sub-optimal, a bitter pill to swallow in turbulent economic times.

Not so when media planning and buying is informed by Social Media.  When it is, you benefit from immediate ROI and take the guess-work out of your decision-making.  This is true for three core reasons:

• Social Media provides real-time and contextual data
• This real-time data, when deciphered and interpreted, allows you to make data-driven decisions
• Social Media is underpinned by technology which allows for speed; meaning you can measure and react with no delay

When these are combined with a team that is ready to hone and adapt quickly, media planning and buying can be taken to the next level.

A few examples are in order here.

Leveraging the social nature of TV

In the traditional model, a media buyer contracts to purchase spots based on imperfect knowledge of audience attitudes.  The spots run and the buyer gets feedback three months later, well outside the window of possible action.  With social media, you get feedback instantaneously whether on content, messaging or the theme of your ad; you learn what is resonating with the audience of a given TV program minutes after it airs!  With that insight you can make changes on the fly and either avert disaster or further enhance an already-popular campaign. An engaged TV audience with spot on messaging gets more happy consumers, and is a profitable win-win that pays for itself quickly.

Optimizing media choices

In the traditional model, smaller companies with new and disruptive products and services are often locked-out of media buys because they lack the incumbents’ financial muscle.  With information and insights derived from Social Media, these companies can find alternate and more effective channels to disseminate their messages in real-time and with high-fidelity to audience attitudes and behavior.  Social media democratizes the playing field for small and medium companies for whom attention and exposure is priceless, and again generating an immediate ROI.

Perfecting product placement

In the traditional model, a media buyer spends valuable dollars to place an advertiser’s product in a media outlet.  The decision about which outlet is made often with a gut decision based on limited information and the resulting uptake, or lack thereof, cannot be measured with precision.  It’s a shot in the dark, which not only costs dearly but forecloses on other opportunities.  With socially-informed buying, a buyer can test the potential reception of products in real-time and make data-driven decisions accordingly.  This process leads to finding the most relevant audience and most relevant outlet, driving immediate ROI and allowing an advertiser to avail the best opportunity available.

In today’s world of media and marketing in general, ROI is not a luxury it’s a must.  By informing your decision process and actions with the data from Social Media, you can guarantee the most you’re your marketing spend and in do so immediately generate what we call an IROI.