Revenue-driven Marketing

Marketing Metrics - are we missing the fundamentals?

At a recent gathering of marketing execs, I informally polled the group on how they were measuring Online Marketing effectiveness.   It seems that metrics are not keeping pace with our new reality.

 
The majority are using web analytics tools, like Google Analytics and Omniture, to track page views and navigation paths.  About a quarter are working with a social media agency, or using a social media platform (like HubSpot) for tracking.  But hardly anyone is using CRM to track lead-to-sale metrics (like Google AdWords for Salesforce).  And some are using no tracking at all. 

It's true that many of us need to use a hodgepodge of tools to keep on top of our programs (I use Google Analytics, LeadLander and Salesforce, along wtih Google AdWords for Salesforce), and it's no fun to spend more time number crunching results than generating leads in the first place.  But if Marketing remains a nebulous science, we're not doing ourselves any favors by avoiding metrics altogether.

Lack of Lead Gen is a Symptom, Not a Disease

You're interviewing for a VP Marketing gig, and you're asked the question "Do You Do Lead Gen"?  And you begin to suspect that 1)this job is more low-level than it sounds and 2)yikes!this company does not value branding or marketing strategy. 
The suspicion may well be false.  Because in the overall scheme of marketing life, lack of lead gen is just a headache.  It's not a disease, it's a symptom of something much bigger.

 
The roundabout route that many Lead Gen discussions take is that there are little/no marketing programs in place, the sales team isn't armed and there's no way to measure the marketing to sales cycle.  Which can also mean: No clear, compelling value proposition, and no educational (vs. promotional) content. 

So there's no need to run when the lead gen question comes up.  It's part of a much bigger story and a much meatier assignment. 

And if Lead Gen is not part of your repertoire, you may miss the strategic conversation all together.

Small Company Marketing = Self-Reliance

Running Marketing for a large company couldn't be more different than marketing at a start-up (a.k.a a small company with big ambitions).  I've done both, but I must admit that start-up marketing is more energizing and rewarding. 

Why?  Is it the long hours, frantic page, lack of funds and fast-disappearing runway? 

 

I'd like to think that it's the feel for the road.  Marketing for a start-up forces you to act less like a general contractor and more like a can-do tradesperson.  By doing almost every job in marketing, you may not get to flex your muscles, but you get to build them.  

 
As a result, you've got more marketing tools in your bag, so you can choose whether to delegate well or Do-It-Yourself as the need arises.  With the average CMO tenure at less than 18 months, self-reliance is more valuable than ever.  More valuable than a windowed office with a scenic view. The only thing I miss is a huge whiteboard...

55% of Power Point Users Like Pie Charts (aka the power of the survey)

I recently ran a couple of webinars for a client on very short notice.  I ran out of time to write a white paper (since I was developing the content and the promotional copy at the same time), so I worked with the hosting company to include a few brief survey questions in the registration form and during the event.  

 
The result?  Enough data (10 questions, 150+ respondents) to publish a "survey" (not statistically significant) of what executives in the industry were thinking.  Created in Power Point, saved to a .PDF, the charts and graphs provided enough eye candy (and benchmarking data) to make the call-to-action even more compelling than the white paper we originally envisioned. 

Born to Build: The Joy of Learning Through Trial and Error

We are all born to build things, in one way or another.  For some of us, it’s being unable to pass a set of Legos without fiddling with the blocks, or being unable to resist the urge to throw just one more spice into the soup. 

For me, it’s making art, even if it’s a cruddy watercolor I painted on the beach while watching the kids or a surreptitious sketch of a stranger at Starbucks while waiting for a client to show up.  As a formally-trained fine artist, I have to chuckle that my most prolific medium these days is PowerPoint.  As much as I love to write stories in .ppt format, it’s not nearly enough to satisfy the craving.

Mark Frauenfelder’s book Made by Hand confirms my suspicion.  Building tangible things fulfills a primal need:  learning by making our own mistakes.   

Kids do it every day because they lack the fear of failure.  How freeing to be able to make missteps as an adult, learning (and hopefully laughing!) along the way..

Note:  in the midst of drafting this post, I was forced to put the principles of the book in action. My laptop OS died a miserable death and I had to reformat my primary drive and rebuild it from scratch.  

It wasn’t my definition of a good time, but it could have been a lot worse, and in the process, I rediscovered my inner geek, the one who used to rollback to DOS 2.1 when a DOS 3.0 install didn’t take, and lamented the day my command line went away.

It was a great feeling to switch from automatic to manual, and to feel as if I was fully capable of controlling my own computing destiny (after a litany of missteps, of course).  The only difference between these days and my DOS days is that it would have been impossible to do the installs & updates without using my backup laptop alongside to pull up online documentation, Microsoft tech notes and support threads...

Making Services Tangible: "Out-of-the-Box" Lessons from Non-Profits

 
Non-profit marketers are very inventive.  (Perhaps it’s because they have the most constrained budgets of all).  We can take a few pages from their playbook on making services more tangible, and more desirable by potential buyers.

Donating to charity makes us feel good.  But it’s an intangible "feel good".  Short of reading annual reports from cover to cover, we really don’t know where the money is going.   Unless the charity makes their services into products.

Shelterbox does a brilliant job of making the intangible tangible.  Instead of asking donors to fund "humanitarian relief services", they ask them to buy a box (or a portion of a box) which contains a weatherproof tent, blankets, cooking supplies, a water purifier, etc, to provide a temporary home for a displaced family.  And the "box" you donate can be tracked online, so you know it’s been received by those in need. 

  
WorldVision makes contributions tangible with a gift catalog of farm animals, to donate to families around the world.   My 12-yr old was motivated to donate rabbits and chicks for Easter this year, and we plan to make it an annual tradition.

88Bikes was founded by two brothers who visited Cambodia and offered to provide a few bicycles for a local orphanage.  Once they found out the school had eighty-eight children, they got organized.  Now 88bikes enables donors to give bicycles (which lead to schooling, better opportunities and a better quality of life) around the world. 

 

Every single animal, shelter, bicycle makes a difference.  For the recipient, and the donor.

Product management never has enough money or time to please all stakeholders.  As I’ve developed product strategy and launch plans over the years, I’ve often turned a product into a service to get it to market faster.  Or turned a service into a product to drive sales volume.   Thinking of  "out of the box" concepts like Shelterbox reminds me of how many options are really out there.

The Mashup of Consumerism in Developing Markets

Sketching the scenery of south India from a moving vehicle, I was forced to take it all in and put it down on paper as fast as I could.  Indians are absorbing consumer culture just as quickly, and adding the best of the "new world" while retaining the uniqueness of a 4000+ year old culture.

I passed by a Pizza Hut next to actual "huts", villages with intermittent electricity, bullock carts and bustling Internet cafes where farmers were trading commodities while students were doing their homework.  Fresh sugarcane juice was being squeezed with a sturdy device that looked like an improvised clothes wringer with a flywheel.  Next to the sugarcane stall were signs for Java programming, SAT and MCAST preperation classes.

A book that I picked up at Bengaluru airport, We Are Like That Only,(Winning in the Indian Market  is the U.S. edition) by Rama Bijapurkar  sheds light on the consumer mashup in modern India.  Generalizing a market of a billion people and their demand for consumer goods based on per capita income, past behavior and population growth would be short-sighted.  Indians don't want to emulate the west, they want to adopt western goods and services in their own way.

In Praise of The Short Form - Telegrams, AdWords, Twaiku and ATCs

Telegrams: My grandmothers lived half way around the world, without telephones, when I was a kid.  My mom (a former newspaper editor and headline-writer extraordinaire) would make composing telegrams (Happy Birthday, New Baby, Significant News) into a game -- how to convey an important message in 15 words or less?

Google AdWords: Today, my far flung cousins have cell phones (no landlines or email!).  But I find myself writing in the short form more than ever.  I've been tweaking Google AdWords campaigns for clients and I must admit that the restrictions of the medium only make it more fun.   It's hard to ramble on about your value prop or insert more marketing fluff when you're writing on a postage stamp.  Which is the beauty of it.

 
Twitter Haiku: Since I don't switch ads out daily, and still want to tone my extra "marketing flab"  I've started a new fitness program: writing Haiku via Twitter (or Twaiku). 

ATCs: Fine artists have long touted the advice "if you're in a painting rut and you paint small, paint huge for a change.  If you paint huge, go to miniature".  In January, I started painting ATCs (Artist Trading Cards) for that very reason. 
  
I doubt I'll become a true miniature artist (my brushes are way too big) but I'm up for the journey...

Surprise! Checklists are not the Antithesis of Creativity (or Progress)

As an "idea person", I'm somewhat averse to checklists (except maybe for the pre-flight packing checklists from TravelSmith). After reading Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, however, I'm starting to think that Checklists may be for both thinkers and doers.

A practiced surgeon, Gawande has proven that checklists in the operating room save lives. He has observed how other professions benefit from this approach, and has brought back field notes from multiple markets, including the aviation industry, the source of the safety checklist.

Putting a process in place to manage the details can facilitate teamwork with an "ensemble cast" of players. The "Miracle on the Hudson" story of US Airways Flight 1549 last January was more than covered by the media. Gawande, however, walks through little known details. The pilot and co-pilot had never worked together before, and the rudimentary pre-flight checklists enabled them to discuss their respective skill sets, meet with the crew and smoothly handle the baton pass when things went awry. I walked through this section of the book with a team of 6th graders prior to their Destination Imagination tournament on Saturday. They were tired after six hours of tournament day, but they found the story fresh and relevant.

I misplace ideas regularly, many of them lost forever on errant sticky notes. I'm planning to take more notes in "checklist form" to make sure they're put to better use.