Marketing Darwinism met up with Tom Taylor, Managing Director of Blueprint Technologies on his recent trip to NYC. Excerpts from the conversation:

MD: Tom, Blueprint has won award after award for phenomenal growth and customer satisfaction. What’s going on?

Tom: Thanks a ton; we are humbled by the recognition. We believe our success can be attributed to a combination of our unique perspective, drive for innovation, laser focus on the customer, and the quality of our team, our customers, and our partners. We’ve been very agile in addressing market and customer needs – we move quickly and have established a solid track record of delivering superior customer value.

MD: Great. You lead Client Development at Blueprint, tell us about your approach and where Marketing fits in.

Tom: Our approach is very execution-oriented. We hire entrepreneurial doers with amazing track records in industry and surround them with top-notch technologists and delivery professionals to amplify their effectiveness. That’s a core part of the collaborative approach we take at Blueprint – Client Development doesn’t end with the team I lead, it runs across the entire company. At Blueprint, “all hands on deck” really means that everyone aligns around customer value, and delivery excellence.

MD: Marketing?

Tom: We’re constantly refining the sophistication of the handshake between Marketing and Client Development, and investing strategically to really accelerate this. Tight integration between Marketing and Client Development is what will continue to drive momentum and support scale as we continue to grow.

MD: What do you see in the Marketplace?

Tom: We’re lucky to be in the Seattle area, which is at the forefront of a good number of key technology trends. Data Science, AI, Machine Learning, Business Process Automation, Cloud Solutions – all of these are top of mind for many of our customers right now. We often find that while the organizations we work with aspire to these higher order capabilities, they have foundational enablers that need to be addressed at the core infrastructure level around cloud migration, data engineering, modern workforce tool sets, etc. One of Blueprint’s key value propositions is our ability to traverse and up-level the entire organizational capabilities stack from core infrastructure up to customer experience optimization – this allows our customers to achieve wholistic digital transformation rather than just incremental single-point solutions.

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

Agile marketing increasingly is being recognized as a powerful key to content effectiveness. Buyer interest and trends can change in the blink of an eye, in particular as social and other media drive the news. Breaking news creates windows of opportunities, but only if marketers are quick and smart enough to take advantage of them.

On topic of agile marketing is what some have called newsjacking, which means responding quickly to news items of the day. More than just quickness for its own sake, the increased focus on what customers are interested in greatly improves content relevance.

And did I forget to say it can produce stupendous ROI results? It can produce stupendous ROI results!

I’m proud to say my latest efforts in this area on behalf of PwC have been recognized by ITSMA with its highest honor, the diamond award in its 2016 Marketing Excellence Awards global competition. Below, I’ll explain some of the elements of the winning program.

The quick or the dead

Keeping up to the minute with who’s buying what, matched with what you’re selling, and how you’re connecting and delivering for your customers is a dynamic and fluid challenge. As Financial Services and U.S. Brexit Marketing Leader at PwC here in New York I have a particular interest in rapid-response content creation, in particular how it can benefit our customers in their day-to-day decision making.

But professional service firms often impose inherent drags on marketing response. Internal reviews and multiple approvals have to be adhered to, and design and layout of messages, and distribution via Web, e-mail and social media, consume big chunks time.

That’s a shame, because firms like PwC are well-positioned to offer keen, insightful analysis of breaking financial news—analysis that’s effective only if it’s quick out the door. Think of it as a client calling a very knowledgeable friend to get “their take” on the news. Marketing best practices demand it, but more importantly so do current and prospective clients who have to make rapid decisions based on sometimes complex new regulations often rendered in government speak.

Knowing how the content game is played

We already distribute thoughtful briefs on new regulations, as well as deeper analysis. What we needed was a quick-response campaign platform tied to newsworthy events that we already knew were on the horizon, and that our customers also anticipated.

Consider the U.K.’s June 2016 referendum to eventually leave the European Union. It seemed that Brexit follow-up was always catching people flat-footed, with how-come and what-if analysis that was too uncertain and too late.

But the calendar revealed key dates that would produce news and content opportunities. We knew, for example, the Bank of England would hold a policy meeting on a certain day. We knew the particular date that the UK’s GDP numbers would be released, that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council was meeting in Brussels, and more. From these and other events, we were able to prepare preliminary analysis based on expected news, and get it out the door in two days or less—unheard of in most professional services firms.

The key is not responding to events, but rather anticipating them with compelling marketing content your customers want and need. I’ll give you a single example that turned out great for us, and impressed the ITSMA judges.

A combination of hard work and opportunity

• Market trigger: We knew that the U.S. Department of Labor planned to release details of a new trading law on April 6, 2016. It was a complex revision of previous regulations that changed how broker-dealers, investment advisers, insurance agents and consultants are compensated when dealing with investment and retirement accounts. A big yawn? Nope … it was and is of keen interest to an immense financial services community.

• Web presence: In advance, we developed a classic microsite, and built it out with content, news, video and keywords.

• SEM: We launched Google search ads two days prior to the DOL announcement, scheduled to run for two full months. We wanted to own this conversation.

• Scrum prep: We threw together a five-member client services team with the sole task of tearing apart the anticipated 1,000-page DOL ruling to fully understand what was in it.

• Thought leadership: Two PwC subject area experts were identified and prepped for press interviews.

• Media opportunities: In advance, and in anticipation of the announcement, 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. (Not bad for a day’s work!)

And the payoff? Our keyword buy results were among the strongest ever recorded for any PwC paid-search campaign, with the highest ever click-through rates and the lowest bounce rates. And we booked business in the first week of the campaign.

If all this seems daunting, don’t worry. Pick your spots, develop content in advance and think like the folks who are going to consume it. Agile marketing works; moreover, in many industries it can be the rule breaker that makes for outsized competitive success. So roll up your sleeves and make it happen!

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.

Here is a recent interview with my new friend, Gregg Thaler, is a self-professed data quality junkie and the Chief Revenue Officer of RingLead. We discussed some best practices in data. I hope you enjoy!

PD:     How often is poor data the downfall of a marketing campaign?

GT:     Well, if I said every time, that would be a bit of hyperbole, but only a bit. Typically what I find with lists – especially trade show lists – is that they are the Typhoid Mary of duplicate creation in your database. Very often if you think about trade shows, who attends your booth? Many times it’s your customers or existing prospects. And booth staff will scan them indiscriminately. If you import that list without taking preventative measures, then it creates a duplicates horror show.

So, there’s another category of bad lists and those are the lists that are purchased from vendors. And there’s a very fundamental reason why lists purchased from data vendors have data quality challenges. The challenge with contact data is that it ages like fish and not like fine wine. It gets worse as it gets older, not better. Data is foundational. CRM and marketing automation are merely vessels, it is the data they contain that is the true treasure. It’s the single most critical element when it comes to determining revenue success of failure. Everything else you do further down the order of operations, its’ outcome depends completely on the input. What do you get from an automated process when you put garbage in? Garbage out.

PD:     What would you say is one of the biggest mistakes you see B2B marketers making when it comes to data?

GT:     Well, the mistake that I’m going to describe isn’t really limited to marketers. If you want to really truly recognize the strategic benefits of having optimized data, you have to have a mindset to prevent errors at the source. There’s a simple reason for that. Generally speaking, whatever the cost is in the enterprise to get the data right at the point of creation it’s going to cost you ten times that later to fix it. But then, of course, if you do nothing, the damage caused by inferior data could be much worse, 100x worse is possible.

So often marketers come to us, and their hair is on fire they’ve got to dedupe their database right now. Yes, they’re right. You do have to remediate the situation since almost every single contact database is riddled with duplicate and non-standard data. Often, however, I hear brilliant marketers say something incredibly dumb, they’ll say “…we’ll worry about the prevention later.” Are you kidding me?

PD:     Who ultimately owns the data? It is really sales who owns it, or is it really marketing?

GT:     That’s a terrific question. Where should data governance reside? Who is the data steward? Traditionally it has been IT. Increasingly we are seeing the data steward role reside in marketing and sales which is where I rightly believe it should belong. Now, what we see in the market, most often the actual people who perform these data janitor-like tasks, are usually in marketing operations, followed very closely by their colleagues in sales ops. Really the best practice is, I believe that organizations should have a data quality center of excellence typically reporting into sales and marketing operations. Even if the COE is one person.

PD:     Let’s talk about the best way to boost productivity in marketing.

GT:     This has, of late, become a favorite topic of mine. I think it’s something that’s very under-focused on as it relates to peak performance not just for marketers, but throughout the organization. What I’m talking about is first the batch normalization of an org’s data and then the automated enforcement of data standards with technology.

I spoke to two very well-known technology companies. I asked them “how many technologies do you have in your marketing stack?” One responded 35 and another said 22. When you think about the performance efficiencies of all of those applications operating on, what for most people, is a completely non-standard set of data. That contributes to very poor application performance which would then translate into poor performance across the entire marketing stack. It’s a silent killer of revenue and application performance. People probably aren’t aware of how well those applications could perform on a standardized data set. They’ve never seen one. In the benchmarking we’ve done, we’ve seen eye-popping performance gains of up to 600% in duplicate detection in a standardized vs. non-standardized data set. Compound that kind of application performance improvement across the 35 apps that modify that data set and the gains in application performance can be off the charts.

I am completely convinced that data standardization is the single most impactful action, a unique foundation-level enabler that marketers and sales professionals can take to optimize their data for revenue performance and their applications for speed, accuracy and efficient operation.

Here is a great piece on the maturity of a company’s Thought Leadership program by ITSMA.

Last year I was asked by ITSMA to collaborate on this piece with them. They also tapped into companies like Deloitte, E&Y, IBM, Coginzant, SAP and more.

What came out is quite interesting for any company looking to take their thought leadership program to the next level. Here are a few points I pulled out to highlight for you that can help you make the case internally:

• 79% of would-be buyers say thought leadership is important to critical to determining which providers they want to learn more about
• 75% of would-be buyers say thought leadership helps them determine which buyers to put on their short list
• Traditional format for thought leadership has been the white paper but in this era of digital and social that isn’t enough
• To reap the benefits of a thought leadership program you must have SME’s that are recognized outside of your company
• Interaction with SME’s in social media improves the ability to communicate key thought leadership ideas

Click here for a full copy of the report on the 4 Stages of a Thought Leadership Maturity Model

Enjoy!

This week I had the pleasure of reading a new report from Smart Insights on the State of Digital Marketing 2015 and decided to dig in a bit further with an interview. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dave or Smart Insights – Dave Chaffey is CEO of Smart Insights, a publisher of planning templates and articles focusing on Digital Strategy with channels on B2B Marketing and Marketing automation. The following is an excerpt from our discussion, I hope you enjoy it.

1) What do you think the biggest change to Digital Marketing for B2B firms will be in the next year?

I think content personalization is the biggest opportunity into 2016 for B2B Marketers. Most B2B service marketers know the value of tailored landing pages to drive traffic and capture leads for niche B2B buyer personas. Let’s face it, these options have been around for fifteen years – your question takes me back to a workshop I did for Siebel systems around then, before they became part of Oracle. We were looking at optimizing targeted landing pages through Siebel for different search behaviors even then before some of today’s well-known marketing automation services like HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce were even established. These types of services and many others have made scalable lead generation affordable for businesses, but I often feel the potential for lead scoring and lead nurture through personalization isn’t being exploited as much as it could.

At SmartInsights.com, for example, our home page and member benefits pages are tailored by role based on their registration – so a marketing manager gets a different message and different content than say an agency manager. We setup our personalization rules in WordPress, but for marketers who don’t role their own there are many plugins and services to support greater B2B personalization, for example BrightInfo, Evergage and Marketizator to name three players. Again this approach isn’t new technically innovative, but it is underexploited. It is getting more sophisticated with automated content recommendations based on profile and content consumption – for example Idio can be used by larger businesses for this.

2) What do you see as the biggest mistakes being made in Digital Marketing by B2B firms?

The most common mistake I see is getting the balance of Content Marketing activities wrong. We all know content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing, yet often content marketing strategies don’t invest sufficient in the right range of content across the buying cycle and by content I am referring to our Content Marketing Matrix which helps businesses review the best types. The CMM also helps you think about the right balance of what Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner called nuclear and primary fuel. You need to invest in that emotion-inducing or shareable content that cuts through otherwise others who have made that investment will win across the channels whether that is SEO, Social media or Email marketing.

Then there’s content distribution… putting the investment into marketing the content you have invested in. Here there must be the right balance between paid, owned and earned media. Paid media, remarketing or retargeting through AdWords, LinkedIn or Facebook helps remind prospects about your services so it’s a mistake to miss this – it gives probably the best paid digital media ROI available. With Earned media it’s about putting the time into influencer outreach – it’s a popular buzz word, but few do this as well in my experience.

3) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer adopt in the next year?

Simple – Retargeting using paid media as mentioned in my previous answer – if you’re not doing already it’s a great opportunity. If you are, there are new options available all the time, like the recent launch of the LinkedIn ‘Lead Accelerator’. You can review the options on our Content Distribution matrix.

4) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer stop in the next year?

That’s tricky Paul, because we believe that any tactic can be optimized and most techniques can be made to work. If you’re not getting ROI from digital media that has to stop! But I’ll give you a simple marketing automation technique that any B2B marketer can apply – stop sending out welcome sequences that aren’t targeted, i.e. one-size fits all welcome emails. Since you collect the profile information of a prospect when they subscribe it’s a ‘no-brainer’ to target by role or vertical or need – whatever will give you the biggest uplift and different points in the lead nurturing.

Talking of Marketing Automation, we have a new survey on the opinions on Marketing Automation of B2B marketers in 2015 just launched. We’d love it if your readers can share their experiences and of course they’ll get the research report when it’s completed.

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.

With mid-year coming up and summertime upon us, many marketers are taking stock of the first half of the year and re-checking their Digital Marketing plans to finish out 2015 strong.

So I’d like to offer you some statistics I found eye-opening from a recent report published by Smart Insights:

• One half (50%) of businesses surveyed do not have a defined digital plan or strategy, although they are active in digital marketing.
• Nearly 60% of peoples’ time is now devoted to digital marketing activities, showing the importance of skills development in this area.

The point-counterpoint is just so stark I couldn’t help but write about this.

For any CMO, developing the skills of their team should always be a top issue. You can’t have a high performing team with spotty skills especially in the area of digital marketing. Whether that’s as simple as; how to write an effective tweet, to how to write for the web, or how to write a pay-per-click advertising the common denominator is content and writing.

Summertime is a great time to do a bunch of Lunch and Learns across your team why not consider a series of weekly lunch and learns to get the skill level across your entire team up! Here’s an infographic with more great stats – hope you enjoy!

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Transforming Events into Meaningful Experiences: Lessons in Real-Time Marketing. We had an esteemed panel consisting of Amber Quist, the Vice President of Brand Marketing and Communications at Spredfast; Greg Weiss, the Vice President / Business Leader of Social Media at MasterCard; and Adam Buchanan, the Social Media Manager for Cabela’s. This webinar was sponsored by Spredfast.

Amber set the stage with a discussion of Real-Time Marketing (RTM) and some examples of companies doing it right. When you hear RTM, you often think about the Super Bowl Oreo moment or this year’s Arby’s tweet at the Grammy’s, and we all agreed that is a form real-time marketing, but we want to widen the aperture a little on that definition and also talk about how brands are not only engaging in real-time moments, but also how they are using content in real-time in their owned media to engage their audiences and drive their brand forward. This set the stage nicely for Greg and Adam to discuss their companies success in RTM.

Adam then discussed the intersection of RTM with User Generated Content (UGC) and how that help drive the Cabela’s experience both online ad in-store. Cabela’s is leveraging UGC by “passing their customer the microphone,” because as Adam put it: “There’s a good chance your customer’s content is better than yours.” They leverage tweets and photos online to express the joy that fishing and hunting enthusiasts have when using their products. They also created a “digital brag board” in store to showcase some of the create UGC.

Greg took over and give us an inside view of how social experiences can be “priceless.” MasterCard’s theory was built on the idea that a brand that replies to a tweet can be worth more than years of advertising. They are currently running a campaign as the latest incarnation of their landmark “priceless” campaign, which started back in 1997 (17 years ago!), and it’s called “priceless surprises.” In this campaign they have surprises like Justin Timberlake showing up at your front door or surprise tickets to go see your favorite sports team playing a game. So far they have surprised over 60,000 loyal MasterCard customers!

Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very “participant-driven” and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: How to handle the legal issues of using photos from customers? How best to organize for Real-Time Marketing? How does Real-Time Marketing work in a B2B environment?

If that piqued your interest, you may want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides: please click on this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is onAllocating Resources Across The Marketing Mix: Where to Spend Socially. Sign up for it, or view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.