The flavor of the year is web intelligence.
While web analytics companies had fallen out of favor with their burdensome plethora of datasets and a marketer's inability to spare the time to digest it all, the latest trend is to provide integrated dashboards that marries most of the online and offline transactions together so that marketers can make meaningful purchase decisions with respect to advertising and campaign spends. This is a snake eating its tail. But, what purveyors of web analytics do not tell you is that there isn't a single solution available that is an actual standalone single solution.
By standalone, I mean to say that there isn't a single dashboard entity that has all the necessary tools under its own dashboard. It may show up in the UI as a single utility, but it is the merger of several tools from different providers each of whom you have to purchase to use.
The secret sauce that has everyone whispering about at conferences and marketing webinars this year is how to combine online data transactions with offline data transactions so that marketers can better understand online marketing, retention efforts, create more targeted advertising, and ultimately generate higher conversions.
Customers interact with your company and its brands everywhere:
- Twitter, Facebook
- Via mobile phone, Skype, or call centers
- In-store kiosks (Starbucks, bank branches, photo duplication, etc.)
- Brick and mortar stores
- Print publications (magazines, newspapers, flyers, postcards, POS)
- On the web
Probably the greatest benefit that marketing and advertising gives to the world is the ability to invoke desires from potential consumers. While this is just a concept video from TATmobile, if touch screens could do this today and have a low cost of ownership, I would be one of those pushing demand for these products.
Watch the video.
[Edit: 3/5/2011, we may never get the chance to see this as TATmobileUI has been acquired by Research In Motion, Ltd., and is now tasked with developing UI for the Blackberry ecosystem.]
At the first marketing consulting firm I worked for the agency's lead consultant believed that the database was the lifeblood of the company. This still rings true today. The cleaner data that has gone into it over its lifetime, the better able you will be to evaluate a customer's lifetime value (CLTV) and identify potential customers that meet the same specifications. Likewise if your data migrated from one CRM system to another but only retained the past year of customer data, there will most certainly be knowledge gaps about those customers.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) databases have long been used by salesforce-driven companies to store datasets such as customer/vendor/partner contact info, purchase history, product interest, product registration, and occassionally market research data on individual customers. It has only been last five years that all this data has been coming together for small-to-medium sized businesses with emerging web platforms that enable sales professionals and marketers to better target their optimal 20% (The Pareto Principle suggests 20% of customers produce 80% of revenues).
Relationship marketing is primarily focused on customer retention and satisfaction rather than the achievement of sales quotas using sales-related promotional methods.
A themed viral marketing campaign, for example, would target existing customers and also:
- be supported by a microsite, YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitter
- encourage customers to "Like" the page, ad, or video or Tweet it to their friends
- aimed at a specific demographic segment appropriate for the offering
- could include a loyalty program to help customers save time and/or money on future purchases, e.g., season pass holders for the local symphony could be automatically subscribed to receive alerts
A campaign's success depends on how customers perceive these types of interactions with a company, its products, or its brands.
