Last month, Corey blogged about a surprising result from MLC’s  social media opportunity survey—that relying on social media vendors to craft your social media strategy actively harms your ability to drive business results with social media.

Here’s another interesting finding from the social media survey—there is zero correlation between social media resourcing and business results.

That may or may not surprise you when it comes to financial resources.  But the result held true for people resources, as well.  That came as a surprise to us, since social media efforts are often so labor intensive.

How could this be? Read More »

For the last few months, the B2B side of our team has been working on the topic of marketing automation – the idea that, using customer data and a little computer wizardry, we can create scalable marketing campaigns tailored to a customer’s motivations, position in the purchase funnel, or any other variable. The verdict? Marketing automation is in its early days, beware of vendor hype, and be smart about the limitations of this kind of technology.

Now that I’ve tempered expectations a bit, I will say that one thing in particular is making me tremendously excited about this suite of technology: the idea that long-tail purchase motivations and special cases can be targeted with much greater ease than is capable with traditional marketing staffs and technologies. In the real world, that means a gradual replacement of general-purpose marcomms with increasingly-tailored communications.

That’s a process that’s well underway at Citrix, a networking and connectivity software company. Marketing noticed that the firm’s quarterly newsletter – a content catch-all that included multiple calls to action and spoke to many different kinds of current and potential customers – was underperforming expectations.

In order to extract the most value out of their marketing communications, the company turned to the best of automation and human judgment to create a lead nurturing program – one that starts with pre-programmed, automated content, but transitions to more tailored, targeted e-mails to convert prospects into sales-ready, qualified leads.

MLC members, want to learn more about how Citrix used automation and judgment to get more from their marcomms? Be sure to check out the full case, as well as the rest of our work on marketing automation.

For the last few months, we’ve been working on our major research project of 2012. As you’ve probably read, it’s all about data and marketing analytics – how companies should use the Big Data consumers generate to create more compelling products, experiences, and messages.

But bridging the gap from data to action almost always requires an intermediate step – testing. And with big, real-time data, the B2C marketing space just might be entering a golden age of testing and learning, as the test-to-results cycle speeds up and decisions can be made faster.

It’s important, though, to keep the possibilities here realistic – tweaking products, experiences, or messages will almost certainly produce marginal results, ones that might be eaten up by the macro factors at play in any business success – technological trends, the economy, that sort of thing. Case in point is Sears/KMart - a company that’s come on some hard times in the last few years, and one that recently announced that it would close between 100 and 120 stores in the coming year. Read More »

If there’s one thing the past few years have been notable for, for marketers, it’s instability and uncertainty. Core assumptions of the craft are being called into question by technological shifts, a growing impetus on globalization is running into geography-specific challenges, and it’s unclear whether consumers and business buyers will re-learn pre-recession habits.

A lot of these are longer-term issues, ones that we might not get clarity on for a few years. But some might be decided in 2012. Here are some things to look out for:

B2B social/digital media.In the B2B space, we think this might be the year that marketers gain a bit more visibility into how to employ social media marketing in the business buying environment. A number of variables are falling into place: for instance, marketing automation technologies are helping marketers use social data and platforms more effectively and a greater percentage of buyers are becoming more comfortable with social media.

I’m not suggesting that we’ll learn “the answer” to all B2B social media related questions, but I think we’ll get quite a bit closer. Read More »

Ah, New Year’s – the time when we step back, reassess, and resolve to do better in the coming 365 days. Most New Year’s resolutions are pretty predictable – stop smoking, lose 20 pounds, finally set up that household budget – but what should marketers, specifically, be thinking about their marketing startegy for the coming year? Based on our conversations, we came up with a few resolutions we’re hearing: Read More »