Go ahead, test your marketing knowledge to see how well you know the answers to the most critical marketing questions:

You have the data – now go use it to your advantage and harness the information to make your marketing metrics meaningful.

What marketing questions does your executive team ask your marketing team? Tell us what questions are discussed within your organization in the comment section.

Make your data-driven marketing your go to survival tool. Get Started.

The post Are You Data-Driven Marketing Minded? appeared first on GoodData.

It is more important than ever to know every aspect of customer behavior–and that power comes from marketing technology. Today’s marketing departments own—and, increasingly, buy—the tools that measure customer behavior. If an organization wants to know how to drive conversions from their websites, which activities are building the sales pipeline and how social media is impacting revenue, to name a few, they are turning to marketers. The marketing role is evolving and expanding, and it is becoming a key strategic driver.

The CMO is ready to evolve into a more technology-enabled role. A CMTO, according to some. Several stats show us how marketers are influencing technology more than ever before:

• CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs in 2017
• Also by 2017, spending on high-tech marketing is expected to increase 11%
• The marketing department, not the CIO, buys 30 percent of marketing technology
• This year, nearly 70 percent of companies plan to increase spend on data-related marketing initiatives.

The role of marketing has become a more strategic one. Marketers are now influencing not only customer interactions, but the direction of the business at large, driven by a bird’s-eye view of how customers operate. As marketing becomes not just a functional role, but a driver of new business, companies will need to re-think how they procure and adapt technology. It’s a brave new world, and technology marketers are at the helm.

Like this blog? You might also enjoy:

• The Art and Science of Data-Driven Marketing
• Marketing Metrics Overload: What Really Matters
• 7 Strategies For a Stellar Executive Marketing Dashboard

Find out how data can empower your marketing team.

The post The Era of Marketing Technology Has Arrived appeared first on GoodData.

To avoid getting caught in the madness of the data sphere, take a look below to find out which marketing metrics deserve attention and which are safe to let go.

When you are feeling bogged down by the metrics and data, take a step back and try to determine which marketing metrics directly relate to your company’s bottom line. You want social media and marketing analytics that are tied to sales or revenue. If the marketing metric does not tell you much about sales and instead, provides a meaningless number that makes you feel good about the brand, it is safe to focus your attention elsewhere.

Don’t get caught up in the madness – preview more marketing metrics in action.

The post Marketing Metrics Overload: What Really Matters appeared first on GoodData.

Read our new eBook, The Art and Science of Data-driven Marketing and get the scoop on how yesterday’s marketing artists can become today’s marketing scientists.

Show Me the Big Data
In order for big marketing data to be truly valuable, marketers must become marketing ‘scientists’—not actual experts in science, but rather probers and testers, who not only capture and trace information, but who also organize it and pinpoint what data-based strategies truly work, when they work and with which audiences they work best. To prove their worth and keep their seats at the revenue table, CMOs need to be armed with data that’s both measurable and actionable.

It’s All in The Analysis Silly
Generally speaking, most marketers are in agreement that a lack of data isn’t the problem. Marketing information is relatively inexpensive to collect and store, and you’re probably already amassing huge quantities of it. But knowing how to best access, organize and then act on that data confounds and frightens some marketing leaders, because a poorly planned approach could mean the difference between success and failure. Data-driven marketing is the science of harnessing big marketing data and turning it into decision-making metrics.

Selling It Upstairs
You’ve got to show executives how data-driven marketing will help you contribute directly to the bottom line. You can align your argument with each stage of the classic marketing funnel. Show how you will drive traffic to the top of the funnel by using metrics to know more precisely which marketing programs perform best, thus enabling you to better allocate your finite budget. And of course monitoring metrics for website conversions, lead nurture, customer marketing and e-commerce conversions are readily available and can be mined for significant efficiency gains. Adding all the gains together along a realistic timeline is likely all the structure you’ll need for executive buy-in.

Time to make your marketing data-driven? Contact us to find out how.

The post The Art and Science of Data-Driven Marketing appeared first on GoodData.

Your primary marketing dashboard is typically presented weekly to executives, and viewed daily by your marketing team. Done right, it has the amazing ability to keep executives calm and your marketing team focused. Done wrong and you’re slogging through the weeds every week with your CEO, and every executive in the room is suddenly donning a bright orange “today I’m a marketer” cap. Nightmare.

Here are 7 strategies to help you craft an elegant, effective marketing dashboard:

#1 Map To Your Marketing Strategy
Every executive in the room should immediately recognize that the metrics on your marketing dashboard map directly back to your marketing strategy. If your marketing team has committed to support a specific share of sales, then focus on that, or a metric that’s a good near-term proxy for a sale, such as SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).

#2 Save the Strategic Reports for Later
Make it clear that longer-term metrics will be covered on a quarterly basis. For example, total marketing spend per sale is a critical metric, but is best discussed on a quarterly basis.

#3 Tell Your Story, Backwards
CEOs and VPs of Sales have notoriously short attention spans, so cut to the chase. Tell them the conclusion of your story first, and then back it out and paint the broader “why” picture. This may mean presenting your marketing-supported sales (or SQL) chart first, then registrations, and then website visitors. Basically, just flip the classic marketing funnel upside down.

#4 Keep It Simple
Suppress the marketer’s urge to show everything. By keeping your marketing dashboard simple you’ll not only focus the conversation, but executives will quickly become familiar with the metrics, so you’ll spend less time explaining the charts and more time discussing trends, tactics and strategies.

#5 Forecasting Calms Mental Calculators
Rather than force everyone in the room to do the mental math to project numbers out to the end of the month, do it for them! Use a simple straight-line projection for the month and explain away any aberrations caused by holidays or blizzards. You can also use a more sophisticated forecast if, for example, you know inside sales won’t be done calling all leads generated in May until one week into June.

#6 Keep Tactical Metrics in the Back
You’ll definitely want to build a series of robust tactical marketing dashboards, but make sure these only make an occasional appearance. If you’re wheeling these out then something especially good or bad is happening.

#7 Have Your Story Ready
We’re all marketers so we think in stories. The same should be true for your marketing dashboard. Before you head into your executive briefing map out the path you’re going to lead them down, particularly if it’s clear you’ll have to jump off the weekly dashboard and into your tactical metrics. If you lead the way everyone will better enjoy the ride.

Ready to Create Your Own Marketing Dashboard? Contact Us To Get Started.

The post 7 Strategies For a Stellar Executive Marketing Dashboard appeared first on GoodData.

Even if you attended the Marketo User Summit this year, though, you probably didn’t learn it all. You had to pick and choose which events to attend. So in this blog, we’d like to provide you with five tricks that you may have missed. All of them take an hour or less, and will immediately benefit you as a marketer.

1. Create Approved Smart Lists

You can use smart lists time and again without having to worry if you have all the right filters. They save you time and elbow grease.

To create smart lists, go to your leads database. Create new folder called “Approved Smart Lists”. Within that folder, create your individual smart lists. Some ideas for approved smart lists are: Product Categories, Do Not Market, Active vs Inactive.

2. Deleted Records Data Management Campaign

Leads and/or contacts get deleted in our CRM system whether we like it or not. There are always going to bogus emails in your CRM — the Donald Ducks (donaldduck@goofy.com) and the ASDF’s (asdf@asdf.com) of the world. If sales deletes these addresses from your CRM, don’t you want them gone from Marketo, too?

There is a simple fix. Create a triggered smart campaign that will delete the record in Marketo if it’s deleted from your CRM. I’ve included instructions below.

3. Long Live the Job Title

Job titles are not the most important thing to consider when segmenting. During one of my sessions, Veronica Holmes from Nuix gave an example of how her title is Marketing Operations Manager but she manages three directors! This was an “a-ha” moment for me. Why didn’t I know that a manager could be the boss of three directors?

Like many others, I assumed that everyone does everything in the same order. The VP of marketing in is charge of the  director of marketing, who leads the marketing manager. Obviously, this isn’t always the case.

To fix this hierarchical blind spot, you should start to look at a person’s job role and/or department. You can either start asking about these things on your forms, or you can assume a lot of them. For example, if my title is online marketing manager, I can assume that my department is marketing. Now you can use this information to segment your audience and provide them with more relevant content.

We do this as a batch campaign, meaning we run it in batches every week. If you have a large number of new leads you may want to think about doing it daily. Here’s how you do it:

4. Interesting Moment – Bounced Email

If your sales team is utilizing Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) to send sales emails, they probably want to know whether or not an email has bounced or is invalid. I’ve created a super simple interesting moment that will let sales know if this happens.

5. Exclude Non-Commercial Email Addresses

If you’re anything like me, you know that non-commercial domains, such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, etc., don’t convert in specific channels. Make sure to exclude those domains from forms. Eric Hollebone from Algonquin College has already done all the heavy lifting and has full directions and javascript on the Marketo Community, you can find it here (You’ll have to login to access it). Don’t be intimidated, it’s really easy!

By taking the steps above, you’ll find that your marketing life is that much easier—and braver.
Did you learn anything at the Marketo User Summit that you’ll be implementing soon? Share it with our readers!

Like this post? Subscribe to our blog.
Ask for  a demo of our GoodMarketing Bash to see how GoodData enables CMOs to run more effective marketing campaigns.

Additional Resources:

Using Marketing Analytics To Gain a Holistic View Into Your Marketing Data
Marketing Revenue Attribution: Sourced vs. Influenced Revenue

The post 5 Ways to a Brave New You – Takeaways from Marketo Summit 2013 appeared first on GoodData.

Nearly 70 percent of companies plan to spend more money on data projects for marketing this year, according to Forbes. By 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs, Gartner projects. Marketers demand big data analysis and fast, mobile applications that will reach audiences all over the planet. As their need for data processing grows, marketers are putting more pressure on IT to deliver the tools they need.

The CIO’s Altered Kingdom

IT is in an identity crisis. For several years, workers have adopted cloud-based technology outside of the CIO’s kingdom on devices outside of IT’s control, a phenomenon known as BYOD (bring your own device). CMOs, for one, are already accessing and crunching data on Google Analytics, automating their marketing campaigns on Marketo and managing the health of their customer base on Zendesk. None of these are legacy tools. All are managed by entities outside of IT.

In a world where third-party providers prevail, the CIO is left with a new role, one involving a partnership with the CMO [and other functional heads]. Here are four ways to make that partnership work without pain.

1. Give the Cloud and SaaS a Chance

A number of CIOs still don’t understand that the cloud has adapted to fit enterprise needs, including security, privacy and access controls. It’s no longer a ‘toy’ for consumers. Cloud providers like Google and Amazon may have started out targeting consumers, but they’ve grown up and have more than proved themselves to be safe for business use.

Now is the time to adopt the cloud. In a couple of years, the notion of on-premise data will be seriously under threat. It just won’t be secure enough. If a hurricane wipes out your single point of failure, you’re finished. Go to the cloud now so that you won’t regret it later.

2. Leverage Big Data

With storage and collaboration taken care of by the cloud, it’s time to focus on your big data infrastructure. The old way of investing in heavy infrastructure is over. Old-school business intelligence (BI) involved high overhead cost, months-long implementations, ongoing infrastructure management and an expensive specialist to make sense of all the data being generated.

Today’s new cloud-based platforms turn big data into a true partner for the entire business. They operate on the cloud, so IT’s role is to make sure that BI and other SaaS-based networks run quickly and continually, are accessible on the right devices to the right people, and don’t break the bank.

3. Democratize Information

It used to be that IT, because they were the only ones who knew how to run systems without breaking them,  hoarded information  and provided siloed views to different constituents. The new era of IT, however, is one of democracy. IT must stop hoarding information and provide permissions for marketing and others to access that data. Information is king now, and decision-making must be a group process. It’s the CIO’s job to make sure that everyone has the information they need on a real-time basis.

4. Stay Agile

Maybe it used to take six months to roll out and provision an on-premise solution that was rigid and couldn’t easily accommodate the changing needs of your customers. Today, with the cloud, there’s no excuse to do that. Cloud-based solutions are up and running in days, enabling IT to stay agile and deliver more quickly. One of the CIO’s new main priorities is to figure out how to launch, manage and operate systems quickly, so that the systems themselves are consistently available and scale seamlessly. Waiting has become too expensive.

Time to Be a Team Player

While the CIO used to operate IT in a relatively isolated, perhaps elite domain, that model has changed. Today’s CIO must be a team player, because technology has changed the way the team operates. With key constituents choosing cloud-based solutions (SalesForce, Marketo…) for faster time to value and greater agility and devices brought from home, the CIO has been forced into a position of collaboration with the rest of the company. Hoard information and nothing will ever get done.

And really, is that such a bad thing?

Like this post?  Subscribe to our blog to keep up to date on all things Big Data!
Ask for  a demo of our GoodMarketing Bash to see how GoodData enables CMOs to run more effective marketing campaigns.

The post Relent, CIOs. Your Kingdom Has Been Infiltrated. appeared first on GoodData.

But even when you combine the best reporting that both systems have to offer, you’re left with gaps. You might know the size of your sales funnel, but you probably don’t know whether your webinar or email campaign is generating more revenue. You’ll know how many users unsubscribed, but you won’t understand what stage of the funnel they’re in.

In order to find granular information beyond the basics, you have to pull four or five reports from your systems, plug them into Excel and manually drill down to find the data you want. Such cross-object reporting can take days when done by hand. It’s also where marketing analytics shine.

Analytics Simplify, Speed Up Cross-Object Reporting

Analytics hook into either your CRM or marketing automation system, or both, and mine data for insights. Beyond the simple vanity metrics, marketing analytics lets you see where your biggest opportunities lie, and which campaigns or projects influence those opportunities most.

Leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities are removed from their siloes and mashed together to provide new insights. You can see exactly how many clicks it took, and on which campaign, to turn someone into a lead, a contact and then an opportunity. Conversely, you can see when and how leads fell out of your marketing funnel.

Over time, marketing analytics will give you a good idea which kinds of programs—webinars, emails, dated contacts, etc.—work best, when and for whom. By gaining a big-picture view of what you’re doing right and wrong in your strategy, you can make your campaigns better over time. You can also get a clear view of how cost-effective each email is.

Analytics for Better Marketing ROI

Perhaps you have a standard equation for your marketing ROI. If you focus solely on emails, that might involve how much it costs someone to compose and send an email based on their hourly rate and time commitment. If you calculate how many emails you’re sending at the given cost, you can compare that information to your sales results to see what your ROI is. Across campaigns and programs, you can find out how much revenue each type generated. Maybe your webinar was a gold mine, and your PPC ad and email campaign contributed the rest. Determining which sources provide the most revenue is crucial determining your marketing mix going forwards. (I’ve written more on marketing revenue attribution here.)

The only way to find that ROI is through marketing analytics. Marketing automation and CRM just won’t provide the level of reporting you need in order to find your ROI. The ability to pinpoint ROI makes marketing analytics pay for itself. If you add in even more features, like the ability to use pre-defined best practice metrics, you’ll find that marketing analytics is a resource you can’t live without.

Here at GoodData, we’ve partnered with Marketo on the Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation to share with our customers. It explains more about how to really make your marketing automation shine.

If you don’t use marketing analytics yet, what’s stopping you?

Like this post? Subscribe to our blog.
If you want to see how GoodData, can help you run a more effective marketing organization, request a GoodMarketing Bash demo today.

The post Using Marketing Analytics To Gain a Holistic View Into Your Marketing Data appeared first on GoodData.

Put differently one might ask: How much revenue should be attributed to any given campaign? This is the thorny question of revenue attribution, labored over by many a marketing manager looking to recreate and multiply past successes.

No one has advanced a simple solution. Those sensible marketers who employ a calculated approach for investing in campaigns that drive the most sales typically advocate some combination of four methodologies to attribute revenue. Below, we’ll consider a hypothetical situation as a means of examining each of those methodologies in turn. Which one best informs where future investments should be made?

Imagine you ran a lemonade stand. Would you market your upcoming lemonade sale by posting handwritten flyers for $1, by investing $20 in newspaper ads, or by hiring friends to market door-to-door for $50?

Well that depends, you might say. How much revenue can be generated by each of those channels?

Reviewing revenue growth across past lemonade sales could inspire additional questions.

Which marketing campaigns should I invest more in, or less in, to maximize revenue?

Should I boost investments in the least expensive campaigns to get the most bang for my buck, or are the pricier campaigns worth the high cost?

The good news is you don’t need to answer these questions blindly because as a shrewd business-owner, you had the foresight to collect some data to inform future investments. You started by asking customers how they heard about your last sale. You recorded which customers experienced which campaigns, and whether customers were touched by the same campaign more than once (e.g. a customer may have seen multiple flyers). You also took note of the first and last campaigns to influence customers who had experienced multiple campaigns.

Your data log might look something like this:

The data above indicates that your marketing campaigns may well have played a role in influencing revenue earned. Still, you remain ill equipped to quantify the influence of each. Did investing in the newspaper ads earn any more revenue from Mr. Bartur than would have been earned otherwise? How much of the $10 spent was due to the flyers, or to the door-to-door marketing?

The complexity of the issue can easily overwhelm. To keep things simple you decide to attribute all the credit for the $10 in revenue from Mr. Bartur to the first campaign that touched him. According to Mr. Bartur, the source of his interest in your product stemmed from a newspaper ad he saw. Later, he saw a second ad and a flyer at the coffee shop. He was even visited by your door-to-door marketing team. As far as your records go, 100% of the revenue earned from Mr. Bartur is due to the very first ad he saw. You begin to invest heavily in ads, and less in your other campaigns, as a result.

When your next lemonade sale rolls around, revenues plummet. What happened?! You tripled investment in the campaign that sourced your single largest deal on a previous sale. Revenues were supposed to skyrocket, but something clearly went wrong.

Suddenly it dawns upon you. What if Mr. Bartur’s purchase was motivated less by the way he learned about your lemonade and more by the campaign that was freshest in his mind? According to your data that last touch was a visit by your door-to-door marketing team. Eureka! You shift gears and hurl money into your door-to-door marketing efforts.

But something still isn’t quite right. Why should all the credit go to a single touch? Doing so rules out the likely possibility that some combination of campaigns worked together to influence Mr. Bartur’s purchase. A far more sensible approach would be to spread attribution across multiple campaigns.

Spreading credit across multiple campaigns is surely the soundest strategy to-date. Nonetheless, you’re haunted by the fact that your current approach doesn’t acknowledge the fact that some campaigns may have influenced Mr. Bartur more than others—a likely possibility. You decide to continue attributing revenue to multiple campaigns, but instead of doing so equally, you weight the revenue attributed to a campaign in proportion to how frequently that campaign touched customers. This is surely the most nuanced approach yet, but also the most complicated.

So which is the ideal methodology for attributing revenue? The answer may depend on the particularities of your business. Fortunately, there’s no need to permanently commit to any of the four approaches above when investing in new campaigns. In fact, you might even settle on a unique approach that weights campaigns according to more complex criteria than appears in this example. Through experimentation, you can let the data validate whatever approach most accurately predicts campaign ROI. The key is having the flexibility to assess multiple methodologies and the tools to substantiate your ultimate investment decisions.

How do you calculate influenced revenue at your company?

Do you think there is a single optimal approach to revenue attribution? If so, what is it?

This blog was a collaboration between Dilip Ramachandran, Winston Christie-Blick, and Stefani Horton

The post Marketing Revenue Attribution: Sourced vs. Influenced Revenue appeared first on GoodData.

How To Avoid Being Tone Deaf To Customers

Let’s say that you exceeded your sales quota last quarter. You’re rewarded with the company car. That car happens to be a Ferrari 458 Spider.

Chances are, you’d want to take your new Ferrari out for a spin to see what it can do. You probably wouldn’t leave it sitting in the garage and ignore it. But that’s exactly what many B2B salespeople do with the technology they’re given.

Wasting Time on Tone-Deaf Tools

Social media, email campaign and marketing automation tools, to name a few, can give salespeople incredible horsepower in terms of building a quality sales funnel. Yet many companies choose to ignore the potential of their tools. Instead, they stick with tone-deaf techniques like cold calls, or one-way, impersonal email and social conversations — in other words, shooting in the dark for leads.

Email marketing and social tools are also meaningless if they don’t bring intelligence to the conversation between the sales force and leads. What good is blasting out content if your leads still don’t know who you are?

Intelligent Information Generates Better Leads

The key is to bring intelligence to the conversation by configuring each of your messages in a way that’s attractive and relevant to your individual prospects. Here are three ways to use information intelligently — and avoid being tone deaf:

1)   Have the right tools to listen.

Listening involves much more than seeing who opened an email you sent. You want to monitor how people are both finding and engaging with your website.

Which SEO and SEM techniques are working, and in which search engines? What are the main ways that people are finding your products or services? What are people saying about your brand and competitors? How are they finding you in the social sphere? Know the details of how people operate in your company’s online channels, so that you can take intelligent action on the information that you uncover.

2)   Take action on the information you find.

It’s one thing to know that someone is interested in your product. Taking action on that interest is another issue entirely.

One of the most positive things you can do is to send out your product information in a personalized way, then score each lead on their interest and responses. If a lead’s activity is compelling enough, for example they visit your service’s pricing page, forward their information to a salesperson.

Genius automates such personalized communications and the scoring of leads. When I first learned about Genius, I thought to myself “I wish I’d known about this years ago! I would have been rich.”

Coming from a traditional sales background, I’m no stranger to the pain of cold calling. Genius supplants that pain by automating personalized responses and follow-ups, so that leads are engaged on a human level. When you attach Genius to your sales database, you can send personalized messages to each lead ensuring an impactful, engaging and automated qualifying conversation.

The automated version of the salesperson will intelligently engage and respond with a lead for months, keeping them warm until they’re ready to buy, at which point the salesperson would take over communications. In other words, when the sales team does get engaged, there’s already a relationship in place, but no blood and tears have been lost in the process.

3)   Understand trends at the aggregate level, so that you can optimize the first two processes.

The more you understand the channels feeding your pipeline, the better you’ll be able to communicate with your leads. GoodData is very helpful for Genius customers in this step. GoodData can tell you any number of things, including which pieces of content people find most attractive on your website, which channels drive the highest number of clicks, longest visits to your website, and revenue contribution. You can find out what you’re doing well and where you’re lacking, and optimize the weak spots to drive greater traffic,visibility to your brand, pipeline and revenue.

Now Go Out and Drive That Ferrari

At the end of the day, people do business with people. It’s time to use the technology at your disposal to bring the human touch back into your sales funnel. With social media and marketing automation, and tools like Genius and GoodData, you have a Ferrari sitting in your sales garage. It is time to start it up and drive revenue.

Even serves as the Vice President of Revenue and Business Development for Genius.com, prior to which he served as Director of Corporate Sales. During his tenure as Vice President, the Company has grown ASP, reduced churn while expanding Genius’ footprint into five international markets.

Prior to joining Genius, Even was Vice President of Sales at Practice Fusion, Inc. Prior to Practice Fusion, he was with an Associate Managing Director with Oppenheimer & Co., where he managed over $325MM in corporate investments. Even graduated with a Bachelors in Economics from San Francisco State University, and is trained in financial, econometric and BI statistical data analysis.

The post How To Avoid Being Tone Deaf To Customers appeared first on GoodData.