Blog: marketing

Showing blogs: 1–16 of 16

The Case for End to End Enterprise Analytics

Oct 27 2011

There has been a lot of chatter in the analytics circles about the need for a Chief Analytics Officer (CAO). Increased focus on data driving insights that drive corporate revenue has brought this to the surface. However, the case for CAO highlights the need for End to End Enterprise Analytics. Organizations that have not been focused on analytics in the past see analytics as a system that spans operations to finance to marketing.

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Does Marketing Measurement Really Matter?

Apr 1 2010

I attended a webinar presented by Professor Paul Farris of The Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  He was promoting his updated version of his book on Marketing Metrics which was recently released.

He had done a survey of the folks that were registered for the webinar and the results were interesting.   

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Customer Service and Marketing

Feb 22 2010

Recently, we had interesting conversation with the senior executive in charge of customer service at a major client of ours.  This client uses our Precision email product to communicate with their customers on service issues, such as outages, delivery, scheduling of service calls, etc.

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Is technology the gating factor for marketing?

Jan 14 2010

Last month, I was on a keynote panel at the National Center for Database Marketing (NCDM).  The topic of the panel was "Evolving from Database Marketing to Customer Intelligence" and the discussion largely centered around the evolution of marketing into a bi-directional communication mechanism with customers across multiple channels and the challenges that brings.  An audience member asked the question, "Is technology the gating factor that prevents or slows marketers from embracing these changes?"   The panel differed on their responses.   Some felt, yes, technology was indeed an impediment to doing this well.     I and at least one other panelist disagreed.   

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Missed Opportunity for Customer Engagement

Nov 9 2009

 

Like most people, I have signed up to receive newsletters from organizations that I think can provide me with information of interest.  Many of these organizations will also send me email with an invitation to attend an event, download whitepapers.   I must admit that many of these invitations are so irrelevant to me that I immediately delete them.  In today’s world, which is quickly becoming more and more about engaging your customers and prospects, it’s hard to understand why organizations who are clearly not getting the attention of customers like myself, don’t take the time to find out why.  Instead, I continue to get similar invitations and content that I don’t care about until I either immediately delete the email or unsubscribe completely.

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Measurement from the Customer's Point of View - Part II

Aug 24 2009

In my first post on the subject, I talked about how challenging it is for companies to link marketing activity to financial impact and identified the need for a customer-centric measurement system.  Now, let's see it in action.

We work with a financial services client that has three different lines of business-organized around product and channel-all talking to the same valuable customer with no knowledge of the other's activity. The result is more than 50 contacts to any one customer in a given year. That's close to one contact a week. But it isn't just the sheer volume of contacts creating saturation and decreased performance; it is also the lack of a coordinated effort to understand who the customers are and where they are in the buy cycle for a given product, relative to their lifetime value.

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Measurement from the Customer's Point of View - Part I

Aug 17 2009

When sales are down, people ask questions. The answers are generally a litany of conjecture about what's behind the fatigue in the list, leads, close rates or market conditions. Despite the flying conspiracy theories, no one in the organization knows exactly what's causing the decline, and fingers are pointing.

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Social media strategy: Three lessons learned

Aug 6 2009

Here at Quaero, we've been slowly increasing our use of Web 2.0 tactics (e.g., blogs, social networking, social media) in an effort to improve our level of engagement with both current and prospective clients.  I hoped that you could benefit from reading about a few key lessons we've learned along the way:

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How do you know your Website is working if you don't "sell" anything?

May 27 2009

I was speaking with a fellow marketer in the not-for-profit space the other day and he asked me how we evaluate the success of our Website, speicifcally, "you don't sell anything online, so you can't look at purchase behavior.  How do you know if your site is working for you?"

It's a great question and one we sought to answer long before the site was built, content was written, and wireframes were approved.  Essentially, we had to determine what the site needed to do for us - what role it would play in the prospect lifecycle (i.e., awareness - education- consideration - purchase.)  Ultimately, we developed the site strategy to influence the education and consideration phases of the lifecycle and to drive conversion.  The design just followed naturally.

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Less Can Be More

May 18 2009

As Marketers try to do more with less, automation is typically at the top of the list of ways companies are looking to increase efficiency and productivity.  In our role as marketing service providers, we're often asked to identify and recommend the right solutions for companies and to identify specific ways the technology can help them meet their marketing objectives.

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Do you know your MarketIQ?

May 5 2009

Do you currently subscribe to MarketIQ, the Quaero e-newsletter?  If so, then you know that our semi-monthly publication boasts an unusual format: all of the content is tied to a central theme, and although the main article is authored by a Quaero thought leader, the remainder of the content is generated by external experts and you, the reader.

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Forrester Marketing Forum 2009: A brief review

May 4 2009

I recently attended the Forrester Marketing Forum held at the Walt Disney Yacht and Beach Club Resort in Orlando, Florida. Click here to read the official Forrester blog post.  I'd like to provide some highlights from a few of the more interesting speakers, with a focus on observations that were not obvious:

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Gearing up for Forrester's Marketing Forum

Apr 15 2009

As you may know, Quaero, a CSG Solution, is sponsoring the upcoming Forrester Marketing Forum, Using the Down Economy to Catalyze Marketing Change.  Held at the Disney Yacht & Beach Club, April 23-24, 2009, this year's conference promises to be the most relevant yet, with an agenda that speaks directly to the marketers' most urgent challenge:  how to spend wisely and make every dollar count.  

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Twitter?

Mar 16 2009

Twitter Are you on Twitter?  Like most people, you've probably looked at the social messaging utility, which allows you to tell the world what you're doing in 140 characters or less, and thought, why?  How on earth could one find value reading about what someone ate for breakfast or what color socks they're wearing?

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A little bit about our own marketing...

Mar 2 2009

I had the pleasure of dining with colleagues the other night, and at some point, conversation shifted from the day's training to the company's marketing efforts.  And although no one verbalized it, the underlying question was, do we practice what we preach?  After all, we are a marketing services firm that helps companies apply insight gleaned from customer data to make better, more informed marketing decisions.

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When the going gets tough, innovation suffers

Feb 4 2009

The popular saying that necessity is the mother of innovation, gave me one source of optimism that the current times might actually engender some innovation in how marketers approach their customers and their markets. Alas, so far, I have not found that to be the case, at least among large companies.

At the beginning of every year, I make it a point to visit with our primary clients who tend to be large companies. This year, these visits were particularly important given the steep downturn in the economy as well as the recent acquisition of Quaero by CSG Systems.

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