MarketingSherpa Blog

If you’ve been a reader of the MarketingSherpa Blog for a while, you know I think passion is an important part of a marketing job. After all, how can you really sell a product to potential customers unless you are passionate about it, too.

That said, a marketing job is still, well, a job. If we were all independently wealthy, we might not be as motivated to take the morning train to a marketing department every day and leave our families.

So, today’s blog post is about filthy lucre. Or, to be more specific, marketing salaries.

Wendy Weber, President, Crandall Associates, Inc., has allowed us to post the 2013 Digital Marketing National Salary Guide  for free download for readers of the MarketingSherpa blog. Just click that link and the PDF will instantly download. There is no squeeze page or form fill of any kind required.

I asked Wendy about what she learned while conducting research to put together the company’s 2013 salary guides. Here is what she had to say …

MarketingSherpa: Why the new addition of social media positions?

Wendy Weber: Many companies initially held back on hiring social media marketers. They questioned whether social media was a passing fad, and since it can be difficult to quantify and monetize, they chose not to devote resources towards it.

However, social media has only grown as a marketing tool, and at this point we can conclude that it is most certainly here to stay. Big corporations, as well as your local pizza parlor, want “likes” on Facebook, and most companies of any size now have the capability to respond to customer service issues through Twitter.

The actual resources being devoted to social media vary tremendously from one organization to another. Some companies are allowing interns to maintain the corporate social media presence, and others are paying six-figure salaries to social media teams.

Just as companies who didn’t establish a website back in the 1990s eventually accepted the online channel as a new order of conducting business, companies who didn’t accept social media as a marketing channel that is “here to stay” are now realizing that they need one or more dedicated social media professionals on staff.

A truly experienced social media professional is hard to find; many fancy themselves social media pros, but few can deliver.

Job descriptions vary widely; in some organizations social media is more focused on blogging. In others, it may be more focused on Facebook contests or Pinterest … and pay varies significantly, also. Read more…

“Mobile is a behavior, not a technology. It’s about accessing content wherever you are. It’s really the use that is mobile, not the device,” Anna Bager, VP and GM, Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, said in an interview with ClickZ.

This leads to part of the challenge facing marketers. How do you optimize for this emerging behavior? After all, technology is easier to optimize for than fickle people. If you were just optimizing for technology, you could simply, or not so simply, make sure something reads well on mobile.

So to remix an ancient Greek aphorism …

With all thy knowing, know thy customer

In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll give you an abbreviated look at some data and resources compiled by the MECLABS Business Intelligence team to help you understand this new and still-evolving customer behavior.

“According to a recent Adobe survey, mobile optimization has been identified as the most exciting digital opportunity of this year,” said Gaby Paez, Associated Director of Research, MECLABS. “As marketers, we need to learn as much as possible how consumers of all ages are using their smartphones; how and when they are visiting our websites, checking their emails, etc. More and more people are using their phones instead of laptop or PC to buy online.”

“We put together this summary to help our team get a quick snapshot of key takeaways they can incorporate now in their optimization projects. We hope this summary helps many of our readers, too,” Gaby offered.

Key Data Point #1: Users are spending a growing amount of time with their devices

What struck me about visiting New York City a few months ago is the sea-change in behavior of office workers. You used to walk through Midtown Manhattan and see people on the street in front of office buildings taking a smoking break. Now, everyone is milling around checking their smartphones.

Website traffic coming from mobile devices increased 84% from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012, according to a report from Walker Sands.

Nielsen also shows mobile growth but breaks it down slightly differently and looks at a slightly different timeframe – July 2011 to July 2012. Its study shows a significant difference in time spent in mobile Web versus apps. Time spent in mobile Web grew 22% while mobile apps grew by 120%.

How you can use this data: First off, this data is a great proof point to secure the budget necessary to reach mobile customers.

Second, you can use these mobile growing habits to help grow other, more traditional channels as well. For one way to do this, read the MarketingSherpa how-to article, “Mobile Drives Email List Growth: How to use SMS and relevant content to add opt-ins.”

Of course, that growth isn’t occurring in broad brush strokes …

Read more…

For the recently released MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their understanding of customer mobile device adoption …

Q: How well does your organization know the level of mobile device adoption of its customers?

Damir Saracevic, Director of Digital Marketing, Catalyst, shared his thoughts on the data …

Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Website Optimization Benchmark Report, we shared how marketers view their website strategy …

Q: Which of the following statements are representative of your organization’s website strategy?

Click to enlarge

Why do you have a website?

“I usually start by asking new customers: ‘Why do you have a website?’” said Søren Sprogø, owner, Afdeling 18.

“Any answer but ‘To make more money!’ is wrong.”

“Next question of course then is, ‘How can your website help you earn more money?’ Now that’s the big one, and it can be discussed for hours. But by building your website around this question, you ensure that it supports your business and that it is measurable,” Søren concluded.

  Read more…

Data collection and analysis is a topic near and dear to most digital marketers’ hearts. Social media interaction is another topic that fits the same bill. What happens when you combine data mining with links shared on a social platform? Measurable and actionable insight that can inform your marketing planning and tactics.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Topsy Labs, took the time to explain to MarketingSherpa how marketers can mine Twitter for links, hashtags and topics to learn more about influencers, trending subjects and how your brand is perceived.

Data collection and mining is Topsy’s core business, and Rishab shares the types of data that marketers should be tracking on Twitter and what marketers can, and should, be doing with this social media information.

Eddie Smith, Chief Revenue Officer, Topsy Labs, will speak on this topic at the upcoming MarketingSherpa B2B Summit, August 27-30 in Orlando.

  Read more…

You network with the most interesting people at a MarketingSherpa Summit, and Optimization Summit 2012 was no exception for me. I caught up with one of the top optimizers from Denmark and a nonprofit marketer heavily engaged in A/B testing, and I also met two professors in the increasingly popular Web analytics field.

With our next event, B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, just around the corner, I wanted to take a moment to look back at our last event in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post and share an interview with those professors, who can provide a unique viewpoint on Internet marketing.

With their experience teaching others in the classroom and having to convey overall marketing principles, they are a step removed from the average in-the-trenches, brand-side marketers, overly focused on the “putting out today’s fire” crises that sap so many marketers’ attention.

And, since they’re not vendors of platform providers, well, they’re not trying to sell you on their unique marketing buzzword approach that just happens to map very nicely to the products and services they are trying to sell.

Ray Lam and Victoria Harben are adjunct faculty and teach Web Analytics, a graduate-level course in University College at the University of Denver. During Optimization Summit 2012, they live-tweeted the event to their students from @COMM4324.

MarketingSherpa: What were the top lessons you learned at Optimization Summit that you think could be helpful to brand-side marketers?

Victoria: The main point that was reiterated throughout Optimization Summit was to always test; don’t rely on assumptions, intuition, guesstimations, or theory — rather, get out there and test it. It’s always best to back up a hunch with data, and that’s exactly what the Summit instilled in me: test, test, test! We’re teaching a Web Analytics class at DU through the New Media and Internet Marketing program, and this is the first thing we tell our students.

Ray:  The top lesson I learned was Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s conversion formula: C=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a. Where m=motivation, v=clarity of value proposition (why), i=incentive to take action, f=friction elements of the process, and a=anxiety about entering the process. This simple formula helps marketers think about the different elements that need to be considered when constructing a landing page.

Read more…

“This never would have been attempted with a film camera,” posted Tom, one of my Facebook friends, in response to a recent status update. He was referring to a posted image of photographer John Baldessari’s “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts).”

I guess 36 attempts sounded like a lot. However, what Tom didn’t know was the photo was taken in 1973 – before either of us was born, and before people were bombarded with information in the form of images, advertisements and email.

The point is that digital media continues to rapidly change people’s expectations. We (speaking as both marketers and consumers) know how little effort it takes to shoot 36 or even 3,600 digital images, or send the same amount of automated email messages. But that doesn’t mean marketers can (or should) give up on such forms of mass communication.

I’m talking about that oh-so-familiar marketing tactic that precariously sits somewhere between your outbound and inbound campaigns – EMAIL. We need every possible approach to draw customers to our company sites and storefronts. So why ditch email? Why not instead create emails that customers crave?

According to “How to Improve the Value of Your Email List,” a recent webinar led by MECLABS Senior Research Analyst W. Jeffrey Rice, marketers can work to develop this desire in customers – not by coercion, but rather by engaging customers in a two-way communication.

During the webinar, Jeff explained how we can transcend the broadcast, scattershot model of advertising from the Mad Men days, and treat email like the nuanced, targeted digital platform it is:

Read more…

Yuchun Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM, understands analytics and metrics are, as he puts it, “a huge part of marketers’ lives.”

He says the question then becomes, “How much time and energy should marketers spend checking out metrics and worrying about the analytics of their efforts?”

Yuchun adds, “I think the market trend has been moving towards incorporating more and more data and analysis of customers.”

This includes learning what messaging is relevant to your customers.

“Being able to analyze the data to understand a customer becomes paramount for every business,” explains Yuchun.

This data analysis allows you to determine consumer sentiment, which in turn provides a framework for relevant communications. 

Read more…

I think all marketers would agree that digital technology has brought about a sea change in the world of marketing. The basic model has gone from almost exclusively “push” messages to more of a “pull” approach that combines traditional channels, such as advertising and direct mail, with strategies like search engine optimization, social media marketing, mobile and email marketing.

At one point in time, marketers could dictate the message their prospects and customers received, and then hope that message resonated enough to drive sales. In the complex sale, this meant Sales was handed scads of leads from a variety of sources with almost no additional information about that prospect on where they were in the buying cycle, or even where they were in the buying process at their company.

Power shifting to the customer

In marketing today, prospects and customers are educating themselves about your industry, business space and product or service area. This holds true in both B2B and consumer marketing.

These people are not interested in receiving marketing messages pushed to them from the mountaintop. They want useful information to begin the decision-making process long before they actually interact with your company or brand.

This new way of looking at marketing has been described a number of ways, and one new book fresh off the presses calls it, “precision marketing.”

I had the chance to speak with Sandra Zoratti, Vice President Marketing, Executive Briefing and Education, Ricoh. Along with Lee Gallagher, former Director Precision Marketing Solutions, Ricoh, she co-authored, Precision Marketing: Maximizing revenue through relevance, which is this week’s MarketingSherpa Book Giveaway.

Sandra defines the term, “Precision marketing is about using data to drive customer insights so that you send the right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel.”

The precision marketing framework is about following a logical, sequential and continually improving process:

1. Determine objective
2. Gather data
3. Analyze and model
4. Strategize
5. Deploy
6. Measure

We covered a variety of what Sandra considers precision marketing topics, including how it can even help improve your marketing career.

Before I get into Sandra’s ideas, here are a few interesting data points from the book:

• 64% of consumers say promotional offers dominate email and traditional mail received. Only 41% consider these offers “must-read” communications.

• Out of the 91% of consumers opting out or unsubscribing from email programs, 46% do so because the messages are not relevant.

• 41% of consumers would consider ending a brand relationship because of irrelevant messaging, and an additional 22% would definitely end the relationship because of irrelevance.

• A survey of IT buyers by the International Data Group found 58% of vendor content was not relevant to potential buyers, and that this lack of relevance reduced the chance of closing a sale by 45%.

Are you seeing a theme here? Relevance is extremely important in marketing today.

“I say customers are powerful, in control, and they know it,” Sandra says. “They vote with their dollars. They vote with their attention, and what I would call their brand-altering online voices. So, customers are really in the driver’s seat, and marketers need to recognize that.”

  Read more…

Recently, I had the privilege to sit on, and moderate, a panel discussion on the basics of digital marketing for the technology startups being incubated at Tech Wildcatters in Dallas this spring and early summer.

We covered a variety of digital marketing topics, but we focused on three areas: email marketing, social media marketing and online privacy. And, I wanted to share some of the panel’s wisdom with MarketingSherpa readers. Luckily for me, I was joined on the panel by two excellent marketers – Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy and Security Officer, Eloqua, and Shama Kabani, CEO, the Marketing Zen Group.

It was called “fireside marketing,” but, thankfully, the fireplace was virtual given the summer temperatures in Dallas.

Read more…