Blog Posts By: Ram Krishnamurthy

Salesforce.com's acquisition of Radian6 yesterday was quite the news yesterday. This was especially interesting following their recent investments in Hubspot and Seesmic and the acquisition of Jigsaw last year. This reflects a general trend where the B2B lead management (demand generation) and social media world are fast coming together and are no longer separate silos. 

Social media is becoming a key building block for a successful brand management and customer engagement strategies. With social media companies can join conversations about their brands and stay connected to their customers and prospects.

In a previous blog on agile marketing I discussed how marketing could learn from software development and become more agile. With online and digital channels becoming more prolific, there are numerous opportunities for marketers to put this into practice. A successful marketing program uses extensive experimental design and testing. Using the agile methodology, marketers can constantly test, learn and improve. This is becoming increasingly important as marketers strive to remain relevant and embrace Agile Marketing - an approach encouraging rapid response to align customer and prospect needs and maximize return on marketing dollars spent.

Recently I have been working with a couple of different clients to determine metrics for their e-Commerce efforts. In each case, the immediate challenge was to provide a more holistic understanding of e-Commerce performance rather than focus on the basic measures. Most organizations make the mistake of using basic web analytics reports as e-Commerce metrics. Instead, they should use a new generation of measurement framework, which augments web analytics reports that would provide more accuracy and predictability in their e-Commerce efforts.

I recently attended the Neolane Evolution 2010 in wonderful Paris and I was impressed by the number of attendees. I had the opportunity to talk to a number of them about the challenges that they are facing in marketing today. It was also a great opportunity to hear from marketers about the interesting things and areas that they are exploring, as well as how they are leveraging Neolane.

Here are some of the broad themes that I heard at the conference:

A big component of lead management strategy in B2B marketing is the process of building relationships with your prospects and engaging a prospect with meaningful dialogue that moves them through the sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer.

In my previous blog I wrote about the growth in mobile channels and content challenges that organizations are facing. In this blog I will focus on the two other major challenges for mobile marketers ---- Preference Management and Measurement.

In my previous blog I wrote about the growth in mobile channels and how it is interlinked with growth of social media. This growth presents a fantastic marketing opportunity. In this blog I will outline some of the challenges with mobile marketing.

Mobile is one of the fastest growing channels for marketing and advertising in the last few years. And in the next few years marketing spend towards mobile channel is expected to grow at an even faster rate. Social networking is one of the fastest-growing activities and with a large set of demographics, social media users use mobile phones to access social media sites. This is fueling the growth of Internet usage in mobile phones and social media site usage by mobile channels.

The tough economic climate has significantly impaired marketing budgets.  Although the economy and budgets may be bouncing back, Marketing professionals are still being asked to do much more with less and prove that marketing is working. In this tough environment, it would behoove marketers to think of agile marketing rather than the traditional approaches they have employed in the past.

In a recent blog, my colleague Roman Lenzen discussed concepts on how to optimize offers in both inbound and outbound channels. It was a great blog and I wanted to expand on the critical components that one should consider while building the offer optimization framework:

As more and more organizations want to extend their reach using Digital marketing, the biggest challenge they face is "how to handle anonymous users". Most organizations rely on cookie mechanism for identifying visitors and as users are increasingly deleting their cookies, typically 75% of the visitor traffic is anonymous visitors or first time visitors. This implies that organizations must develop a data collection, segmentation and targeting strategy for anonymous online visitors.

In this tough economic climate, all companies are trying to improve their overall bottom lines. How can online and digital marketing help with this? In a recent study from summer 2009, most companies stated that the No. 1 conversion relevant to them was sales, with sign-ups and registrations a close second. What are the key tactics to improve overall conversion on site?

In a previous blog, I had discussed how financial services companies should use web analytics tools. In the past few weeks, I've had discussions with a couple of our financial services clients and found that while many are trying to use Web analytics to address business challenges, they are struggling with some challenging technical implementation issues.  This blog will focus more on the technical side of web analytics implementation and offer up some key best practices.

I was reading the recent research from Center for Media Research and it was interesting to note that 8% of Internet Users account for 85% of all Clicks. The results indicate that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.

I recently read a published survey on marketers' frustrations with Web analytics solutions. In this tough economic environment, marketers are being held accountable to show increased performance with a reduced budget. This has led many to shift their budgets from more traditional media to digital. I have addressed this phenomenon in my previous blogs - why we are seeing increased spend in digital media - and this trend is likely to continue.

By all accounts, marketers are realizing that moving to digital media has tremendous upside. With the right strategy and execution in place, digital media has proven to be lot more cost effective, and scales and caters to a larger volume with faster go-to market capabilities. However, the biggest challenge for marketers has been their limited ability to measure and accurately quantify the impact and use that information to make relevant business decisions. That's where Web analytics comes in; they provide a means to measure the performance of digital media marketing.

A  July 2009 study of Fortune 100 companies found that more companies had a presence on Twitter (54%) than on Facebook (29%). According to the study, which looked at corporate blogs in addition to Twitter and Facebook, about one-fifth of Fortune 100 firms only used one of the three channels. Those companies were overwhelmingly likely to choose Twitter (76%) over Facebook (14%) or blogging (10%).

Research shows that people spend more time reading their emails than they do surfing the web. Email is one of the most powerful mediums that you can use to talk to customers and prospects and is an extremely cost effective channel and once the initial investment in infrastructure set up is complete.

In order to maximize the use of email marketing here are some best practices for marketers.

In the past few years, we've seen marketing technologies market grow and shift to comprise these four major application areas:

• Web content management
• Online Analytics/Digital Marketing
• Enterprise Marketing Management
• Customer Relationship Management

The recent acquisition of Omniture by Adobe looks to be the first step toward industry consolidation of Web content management and online analytics.

Forrester recently released the five year forecast for the interactive marketing spend. The interesting trends from the report reflect the changing investment in interactive marketing.

Financial services firms are shifting to a more sales-centric mode. With this shift, companies should invest in tools to help them understand how Website visitors engage with and use content. Web analytics tools can be used to measure site effectiveness, determine site priorities, and develop the optimum sales purchase path. Unlike e-tailers, where conversion equates to a purchase, financial services firms traditionally struggle to co-relate web activity; true success events or "conversion" are often less clearly defined.

Process is often a forgotten component of marketing. When it comes to marketing a lot of effort and time is spent on key issues of deliverability, targeting and relevance, but a key ingredient to success of marketing program is process. In most cases the lack of process is highlighted when a mistake occurs and in this era of digital marketing it is usually visible to all of your customers and prospects.

In my previous blog, I had written about how digital marketing spend will increase in 2009 and beyond. So how does this affect marketing organizations? This blog is part one of a two-part  series on the divide between Digital and direct marketing and what are tactics to bridge the gap.

Digital Marketing or Interactive marketing spending will hit $25.6 billion this year -- up 11% from $23.1 billion in 2008, despite being flat, as marketers shift money from traditional media to digital channels based on latest Forrester study.  See Forrester Anayst Shar VanBosKirk's blog.

So what does interactive or digital marketing encompass?

Email marketing is fast becoming one of most favored marketing channels due to its cost effectiveness and efficiency to reach customers at a much quicker timelines. Email marketing has become increasingly sophisticated and strong marketing organizations understand the power of email marketing and the commitment that is needed to adhere to the privacy guidelines ensuring relevance and promoting the brand equity. A big portion of the email marketing in today's environment is transactional emails, which relates directly to something the recipient did either in the form of request for content or purchase or confirmation of a transaction.  The CAN-SPAM definition of a "transactional or relationship message" is any email "facilitating, completing or confirming a previously agreed upon transaction" between the customer and the organization.

Some facts from eMarketer study:

• In Feb 2009, users averaged over 3 billion minutes on Facebook site.
• They updated their status 15 million times and became "fans" of a particular company, brand, product or person 3.5 million times daily
• US residents spent more time on Facebook than any other Website

These are staggering numbers and facts. Marketers and advertisers understand the opportunity and potential of social networking. However, the fundamental principles are a bit different in social networking marketing and advertising. The behavior and habits of social network users seems to be very different than traditional online users.

The more successful advertisers and marketers are using Social networking for brand awareness and building customer loyalty and increasing customer insights. The eMarketer study is a worthwhile read. Please use the link below.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006996