Tag: marketing

  • Three Ways to Use Big Data to Understand Your Customers

    big data 3 2015

    How effective marketers use customer intelligence data to build relationships

    Marketers have more connected data to work with these days– but many of us struggle to find a place to put it to use. The Internet of Things has delivered unprecedented visibility and connectivity between:

    • Sales data (what leads yield results and why?)
    • Customer data (who is your customer and where do they go to learn about your products?)
    • Product data (what customers need from your product and where are your next innovations?).

    As your company’s social media marketer, sales lead choreographer or product marketer (yes, many of us wear several hats) what should you do to gain the most customer intelligence from this data?

    I have gone in fits and starts using data to drive my customer intelligence quotient. I want you to know this list is a product of some good choices but also a few false steps! But after doing some serious research; contracting with the best in the business to install programs to manage the data; and learning what not to do from peers and colleagues—I think these three areas are a good place to start:

    Lead with Your Heart

    Use improved sales data to figure out how to manage your leads better. Then you can comb the data to see how you’re doing in retention and with suspects and prospects – and craft your marketing messages accordingly.

    In my case, I was able to drill down to who was downloading our product resources—and also what search terms they used to get to those pages. After following that path, I was able to see who was looking for terms that described our product mission—rather than our product features or benefits.

    Synchrono champions demand-driven, Pull-based manufacturing philosophies because we believe using these will help manufacturers succeed. We had been crafting many of our messages around that “brand purpose” – which defines for your customer why you are doing what you’re doing before they know what you are selling. The “heart” of your mission, if you will.

    According to Jim Stengel, former CMO of P&G, companies that transmit their brand purpose effectively are three times more profitable than those that don’t. I found that our potential and current customers were on board with our brand purpose—they needed to know how to start to apply these principles to their own environments. Once I knew we were hitting the mark with our brand purpose, all of our marketing resources and tactics became aligned behind it.

    Reach Out

    Customer reach is farther and more diverse than ever, thanks to the proliferation of social media B2B programs that can hit your decision makers where they live. The good news is that by targeting your customers’ preferences and activities via online data (in many cases, from your social media channels) and response rates (from targeted customer emails) you can expand your reach to the highest potential groups.

    You need to figure out a way to do this using social media. In fact, research by Forrester suggests that businesses that spend only 6 hours a week using social media experience a 74% increase in website traffic.  Getting your customers to experience your purpose through your website—and keeping them there with great content, allows you to create an engaging conversation. This conversation often turns into a great sustainable relationship.

    Get Social

    info_topThis infographic shows that 85% of the decision-makers polled said that at least one social media channel was very important to them in making technology purchase decisions. That’s why I urge you to include your most valuable social media channel in your outreach. The good news is that by managing your customer intelligence appropriately with back-office, big data-capturing processes, you can identify what channel will bring you closer to the people who will sign the checks. Nurturing this intelligence, trying new things, such as repurposing white papers, blogs and infographics across different channels, will give you all of the feedback you need to refine your strategy.

    These are just three places to start to mine your data and come up with solid, actionable customer intelligence. Let me know if you’d like to add to this conversation…I’d be pleased to hear your great marketing ideas and how you communicate your purpose to spark new opportunities.

    – Marketing

    6.0-Pam Three Bottlenecks the Modern Marketer Must Overcome                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Big data, the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, Factory of the Future, the Visual factory – what do you really need to pay attention to and what do these concepts mean to most manufacturers? A sceptic and trend-spotter, Pam’s posts leverage a background in technology marketing to apply these big concepts to the real world – and real work – of demand-driven manufacturers.

  • Three Bottlenecks the Modern Marketer Must Overcome

    demand-driven

    How a manufacturing theory helps Jeff Bezos—and you—focus on what really matters

    The Week recently ran a story about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos making all of his senior managers read, The Goal, by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox. So why would Jeff Bezos – widely considered one of the most visionary CEOs today —want his team to buy into a business book’s philosophy that’s mostly concerned with manufacturing effectiveness?

    Bezos is one of the most influential marketing minds in the country. When thinking about your marketing strategy, what should you know that he knows about, The Goal?

    Theory into Practice

    I have been building marketing strategies for software manufacturing companies for many years. I’ve read The Goal and understand its philosophies because I have had to learn about its main topic, the Theory of Constraints (TOC), and how it can change the way manufacturers do business. If you want to know about this aspect of TOC, definitely see our resident guru, Rick Denison’s blog. However, to summarize from my perspective, TOC tells us to look at the limiting factor – or constraint – to understand a system’s output.

    In Bezos’ story, writer Pascal Emmanuel Gobry says: “The reason why this is so profound is that most managers spend their time trying to improve every part of the system they oversee, often with very mixed results. But if the output of the whole process — even an improved process — is still limited by the bottleneck, then any effort spent optimizing anything else is basically wasted (and can even be counterproductive).”

    If your marketing efforts feel unfocused, find your bottlenecks to get moving again in the right direction. Here are the top three bottlenecks that I have found empowering to overcome:

    1) Data Mashup – That’s my term for unsynchronized, or data without any context. You can have the best automation software out there, and the biggest of big data, but if you’re unable to synchronize that data so that it is transformed into meaningful information, what’s the point? When executing on Pull-based, or modern marketing methodologies, you’ll want to identify the specific constraints of the system(s) and/or marketing programs you’re running and whether you’re able to not only measure your desired KPIs, but influence them. Often, this means integrating your marketing automation, CRM and even financial systems to paint a complete picture.

    2) Taking Your Eyes off the Prize –Let’s face it—marketers are busy people. We’ve got multiple stakeholders all fighting for our attention. I have found that retaining customer focus is the hardest job of all—but remains the true “prize” in any marketer’s eyes. Find out where and why your teams are taking their eyes off customer needs and get them back on track.

    3) Getting Real- At Synchrono, we are all about meeting our customers where they live. We spend a lot of time and effort out there in the production environment, constantly refining our software to make manufacturers more consistently successful. We look for their pain points to find out how we can help. In “Lean speak”, our continuous improvement efforts helps customers with their continuous improvement projects.

    What are your marketing pain points and what are you doing about them? If you’ve got problems with your product, with your processes or with your people, don’t sugarcoat them or sweep them under the rug. Get real about the constraints you need to address in order to execute a marketing strategy that positively influences your desired KPIs. Is it your ability to access the right data? Your customer focus? Messaging and content that hits the mark – or something else? It takes courage to be objective and brutally honest, but if I were pressed to tell you one thing you can do to improve everything about your marketing, it would be this—be real about your issues and meet them head-on.

    Promote Continuous Improvement

    Our synchronized manufacturing software helps identify and manage constraints that inhibit the flow of production. At the same time, our systems provide meaningful information to guide continuous improvement efforts. The same principles hold true for effective marketing – identify issues, make informed adjustments and measure the results. And don’t settle – stay sharp and continuously refine.

    Certainly, Jeff Bezos has been pretty fearless in his career. . . I think he’s right on the money about looking for bottlenecks first to gain incredible insight into our business—but more importantly—our customers’ business. Pay attention, it will point you in the right direction!

    – Marketing

    6.0-Pam Using Big Data to Tell Your Story                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Big data, the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, Factory of the Future, the Visual factory – what do you really need to pay attention to and what do these concepts mean to most manufacturers? A sceptic and trend-spotter, Pam’s posts leverage a background in technology marketing to apply these big concepts to the real world – and real work – of demand-driven manufacturers.

“test”