Using Social Media Metrics to Improve Marketing ROI

In today’s business environment, many marketers are using social media to connect brands with consumers. For marketers, measuring the return of these social media programs is still elusive. Even with the plethora of great social media monitoring tools (e.g., Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony, Radian 6), there is a constant struggle how to manage social media marketing in the context of overall business and marketing strategies. In particular, we see marketers are struggling with evaluating the return of social media initiatives relative to other marketing and public relations activities.

Marketers need to incorporate social media measurement in the context of all marketing ROI activities. This alignment excercises are the key to unlocking a marketing organization’s true potential to contribute to company’s financial and business performance.  As Larry Flanagan, CMO at MasterCard puts it, “To answer the ultimate question of how you get a seat at the table… Our response was you build the table… [Our] analytical tools aren’t just for marketing…when you build these, everyone comes to the table because they want a part of that… it informs what the company does.”

To learn more, get our Social Media Excellence white paper via email at whitepapers@theammgroup.com.

Why Advertisers Need a 4th Party to Manage Analytics Technology

As I speak to more and more advertisers, one discussion that keeps emerging is the role of the business intelligence technology companies in development, delivery and execution of marketing and advertising ROI systems. To understand the value of a 4th party involved in the management of marketing analytics, we first must look at all the players involved in the inputs and outputs of marketing ROI. Second, we must think through all the points of optimization that are currently underutilized since internal systems are not connected with external ones. By connecting the dots, advertisers can materially improve their ROI.

The way we think about it is for every brand a typical advertiser will have several internal teams and several external partners that need to plug into their marketing analytics. Internally, many marketing teams across a myriad of marketing disciplines (e.g., marcom, merchandising, etc.) should be involved in the creation and use of a marketing ROI system. Second the marcom and media teams should be specifically interested in plugging the marketing ROI system into their day-to-day partners: media and creative agencies. Lastly, as many advertisers outsource some of their marketing analytics work to third parties (e.g., mix-modeling consultants) these analytic partners must be able to publish new finding into the marketing organization.

The Analytic Apocalypse

The most recent releases of browsers, Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome will have the capacity for consumers to control which cookies they will permit to have access to their information. Although each browser has a differing strategy to enable consumers to identify and manage “good” and “bad” cookies, they all put consumers in control.

At the same time, new bills have been introduced in congress that, if passed, will greatly limit what information cookies can track and how 3rd party cookies can interact with browsers / users.
Read More on Digiday Daily at: http://www.digidaydaily.com/stories/the-analytic-apocalypse/

Driving Marketing Performance Excellence - Alignment

In today’s business environment, marketers need to apply financial performance management techniques to improve marketing ROI. A simple definition for performance management from Wikipedia is, "...performance management is a set of processes that help businesses discover efficient use of their business units’ financial, human and material resources." For marketing, we need to apply this improvement logic to marketing operations, intelligence, information and ultimately, optimization. We call it Marketing Performance Management.

Marketing Performance Management is the science of using marketing intelligence to drive business improvement by optimizing marketing and media efficiency and effectiveness. Our scope must be beyond traditional advertising alone, we must include direct marketing, online marketing, CRM, public relations, employee communications, and so on. That is, we must align all marketing activities with business and financial objectives to improve the impact marketing can have on our corporate goals. Historically, most marketers have under-utilized business performance management (BPM) techniques and systems to improve the impact marketing can have on a company’s success. We must manage marketing as a supply chain

To learn more, get our MPM Excellence white paper via email at whitepapers@theammgroup.com.