Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 34 of 74)

Speaker Spotlight: Jake DiMare – Web Content Management Hub, Multiple Channels, and Marketing Technologists

October 11, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed three of our frequently asked questions to speaker Jake DiMare, Senior Project Manager at ISITE Design. We’ve included his answers to those questions here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Jake DiMare - Gilbane Conference

Speaker Spotlight: Jake DiMare

Senior Project Manager

ISITE Design

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations?

My personal perspective is the customer is at the center and everything else orbits around them. Thus, if I must use a label, customer experience management makes the most sense to me. That said, and to extend the metaphor, I do think content management is the hub of technology in the ‘low customer orbit’. I believe customers make decisions about where to focus their attention in the digital world based on the content available and so it stands to reason the technology that delivers your content must be rock solid.

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels?

To borrow an acronym from NPR (National Public Radio), in my humble opinion, the best strategy is COPE or “Create Once Publish Everywhere”.

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

Frankly, ‘Marketing Technologist’ has been an imperative, existing role within digital agencies and on the client side for over a decade. Whether the need is recognized and respected is the real question… And so the title and associated job description are laggards. Predictably, the result is many people within an organization will wear the marketing technologist hat.

In the most practical sense, if your organization engages with customers through any digital channels, whether you want it or not, somebody at some point will play the role of marketing technologist. The size of your organization will certainly dictate when this becomes a full time job or jobs, but the following responsibilities will always need attention:

Coordinating internal and external digital strategists, designers and engineers for the purpose of designing, building and maintaining digital properties.
Working with content strategists to ensure a seamless transition of content across channels.
Coordinating with traditional marketing to ensure digital channels are aligned with overall initiatives.
Measurement and optimization of customer engagement through existing digital channels using analytics and reporting.
Looking forward to determine how to engage audiences with emerging technology.
Understand and grow customer engagement management.
Work with brand strategists to ensure the overall digital customer experience is aligned with brand values.
Accountable for digital projects.

Catch Up With Jake at Gilbane

Track E- E5. Incorporating Content Strategy into Your Project: Why and How?
Wednesday, December, 4: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.

Hear more from Jake when you subscribe to his blog, The CMS Myth.

Gilbane Conference Speaker Acceptance Notices

August 15, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

We have just sent out a batch of acceptance notices to those who submitted a proposal to speak at our conference in Boston this year. As we mentioned in a recent post, we had a record number of proposals this year and are only going to be able to include about 20% of them.

It will be another week or two before all acceptance notices are sent.

We will be emailing everyone who wanted to speak whether we can fit you in or not, but will be holding off until we are pretty sure about everyone’s status.

Thanks for your patience!

Thanks all for the Gilbane Conference speaker proposals

July 23, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 1 Comment

Thank you all for the Gilbane Conference speaker proposals. We received a record number this year even with a condensed timeframe for submissions. We also have a larger percentage of high quality proposals, fewer blatant sales pitches, and a greater percentage of proposals from women (Hmmm… correlation or causation?). We are now busy evaluating, organizing, and mapping proposals to the topic areas our audience needs to hear the most about.

If you have submitted a proposal it will be a couple of more weeks before most of you are notified.

Miss the deadline?

For all of you who missed the deadline for speaking proposals for this year’s conference, our policy is that we always accept proposals – in fact we accept them all year long if you use our submission form – however, proposals received after the deadline for each conference miss the first review by the program committee and some of the early decisions. If we have two good proposals on the same topic the on-time proposal gets preference. Also, decisions are largely made on a rolling basis once the deadline passes, so if you have missed the deadline it is still a good idea to submit as soon as possible.

If there is a particular topic we need more proposals for we will post about it on this blog, so stay tuned.

The Marketing Technology Landscape

May 13, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that marketing continues to increase spending on technology, which raises the question of which technologies they are spending on. The answer is “lots” – the marketing technology landscape has become much larger, more varied, and more complex. One sign is the evolution of some web content management systems to solutions for web experience management, web engagement management, digital experience management, etc., which involves integrating with marketing automation, predictive analytics, social and many other marketing tools and back end systems.

Not all this is new. In 1999 more advanced businesses were already integrating e-commerce, web analytics, personalization, and marketing automation, but it was much harder then and there were far fewer options. I hesitate to say it is easier now, but it is in many ways – the technology is much better and we have much more experience with it. What is certainly not easier is navigating the technology landscape which is extremely dynamic, and contains categories with too many vendors. Both CMOs and CIOs need a marketing technologist function in some form, and would certainly benefit from input from analysts, and a <plug> vendor and analyst neutral conference </plug>. The illustration below may be scary, but should be very useful. Thanks to Scott Brinker for first pointing this landscape out. Scott also has his own similar graphic.

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY LUMAscape from Terence Kawaja

Customer experiences, communications, and analytics

January 30, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

I recently discovered Scott Brinker’s Chief Marketing Technologist blog and recommend it as a useful resource for marketers. The Venn diagram above is from a recent post, 3 epicenters of innovation in modern marketing. It was the Venn diagram that first grabbed my attention because I love Venn diagrams as a communication tool, it reminded me of another Venn diagram well-received at the recent Gilbane Conference, and most of the conference discussions map to someplace in the illustration.

As good as the graphic is on its own, you should read Scott’s post and see what he has to say about the customer experience “revolution”.

Lest you think Scott is a little too blithe in his acceptance of the role of big data, see his The big data bubble in marketing — but a bigger future, where the first half of the (fairly long) post talks about all the hype around big data. But you should read the full post because he is right on target in describing the role of big data in marketing innovation, and in his conclusion that data-driven organizations will need to make use of big data though these data-driven and data-savvy organizations will take some time to build.

So don’t let current real or perceived hype about the role of big data in marketing lead you to discount its importance – it’s a matter of when, not if. “When” is not easy to predict, but will certainly be different depending on an organizations’ resources and ability to deal with complexity, and organizational and infrastructure changes.

Integrating External Data & Enhancing Your Prospects

December 13, 2012 / hhenry / 0 Comments

Most companies with IT account teams and account selling strategies have a database in a CRM system and the company records in that database generally have a wide range of data elements and varying degrees of completeness. Beyond the basic demographic information, some records are more complete than others with regard to providing information that can tell the account team more about the drivers of sales potential. In some cases, this additional data may have been collected by internal staff, in other cases, it may be the result of purchased data from organizations like Harte-Hanks, RainKing, HG Data or any number of custom resources/projects.

There are some other data elements that can be added to your database from freely available resources. These data elements can enhance the company records by showing which companies will provide better opportunities. One simple example we use in The Global 5000 database is the number of employees that have a LinkedIn profile. This may be an indicator that companies with a high percentage of social media users are more likely to purchase or use certain online services. That data is free to use. Obviously, that indicator does not work for every organization and each company needs to test the data correlation between customers and the attributes, environment or product usage.

Other free and interesting data can be found in government filings. For example, any firm with benefit and 401k plans must file federal funds and that filing data is available from the US government. A quick scan of the web site data.gov shows a number of options and data sets available for download and integration into your prospect database. The National Weather Center, for example, provides a number of specific long term contracts which can be helpful for anyone selling to the agriculture market.

There are a number things that need to be considered when importing and appending or modeling external data. Some of the key aspects include:

A match code or record identifier whereby external records can be matched to your internal company records. Many systems use the DUNS number from D&B rather than trying to match on company names which can have too many variations to be useful.
The CRM record level needs to be established so that the organization is focused on companies at a local entity level or at the corporate HQ level. For example, if your are selling multi-national network services, having lots of site recrods is probably not helpful when you most likely have to sell at the corporate level.
De-dupe your existing customers. When acquiring and integrating an external file — those external sources won’t know your customer set and you will likely be importing data about your existing customers. If you are going to turn around and send this new, enhanced data to your team, it makes sense to identify or remove existing clients from that effort so that your organization is not marketing to them all over again.
Identifying the key drivers that turn the vast sea of companies into prospects and then into clients will provide a solid list of key data attributes that can be used to append to existing records. For example, these drivers may include elements such as revenue growth, productivity measures such as revenue per employee, credit ratings, multiple locations or selected industries.

In this era of marketing sophistication with increasing ‘tons’ of Big Data being available and sophisticated analytical tools coming to market every company has the opportunity to enhance their internal data by integrating external data and going to market armed with more insight than ever before.

Learn more about more the Global 5000 database

Technology and IT Spending Metric Options

November 25, 2012 / hhenry / 0 Comments

When planning for global market growth and sizing up the opportunities in various countries, there is often a lack of data available from various industry sources. One could look at GDP figures or population data by country – both of those have some limitations. A better gauge might be to look at those business entities that generate the most revenue in each country as they will help contribute to other businesses in the geography and in general, raise the level of B2B activity overall.

Diving into the data of the Global 5000 companies – the 5000 largest companies in the world based on revenue – we find a couple of different ways to help guide your estimates of market size and rank order.

The first list is the top 10 countries by number of firms in our Global 5000 database with HQ in the country.

USA – 2148
Japan – 334
China – 221
UK – 183
Canada – 124
Germany – 98
France – 84
Australia – 77
India – 76
Italy – 65

For each company in the database, there is an estimate for the amount spent on IT – both internal and external costs. When we take those amounts for each country and look at the average IT spending for these leading firms, we see a different order of countries which would also prove to be attractive targets.

France – $902 million per company
Germany
Netherlands
Spain
Venezuela
Italy
China
Switzerland
South Korea
New Zealand – $545 million per company

Of course, all these companies are the biggest of the big and not all companies in that country will spend at that level — but it is indicative of the relative IT spending on a country basis and again shows some of the potential for attractive markets as you eye global opportunities.

Learn more about more the Global 5000 database

Social Media: Creating a Voice and Personality for Your Brand

October 26, 2012 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

Gilbane Conference Workshop: Social Media: Creating a Voice and Personality for Your Brand

Instructor: AJ Gerritson, Founding Partner & Social Media Strategist, 451 Marketing
November 27th, 2012 at the InterContinental Boston Waterfront

For consumers, brand interaction on social media platforms is no longer the exception, it’s the expectation. In order to stay relevant, companies must develop digital tactics that boost the brand’s overall communications strategies and marketing campaigns. When utilized effectively, social media marketing enhances your brand’s voice and personality, making you more approachable and transparent to your target audience. But, how can your company devise a social media strategy that entices audiences and encourages interaction? Which platforms make sense for your brand? How can you monitor the effectiveness of a social media campaign?

In this interactive session, 451 Marketing founding Partner and Social Media Strategist, AJ Gerritson, will outline the major social media platforms, strategic approaches, best practices, time commitment, and measurement tools and techniques necessary as part of an effective social media strategy. Using industry statistics and case studies, AJ will teach attendees how to structure a successful social media strategy that can be easily integrated into your brand’s existing communications campaigns.