4 perspectives on finding profitable growth

Jonathan Hornby
Jonathan Hornby|May 18, 2012

There are no silver bullets that guarantee success for marketers. Betting on a single channel, technology, process or team is very much like betting everything on “Red” in a casino – there’s no more than a 50% chance of success – for each item.  Make bets on each, without understanding and aligning the relationships between channel, technology, process and team and the odds for success rapidly decline.

Helena Schwenk, Principal analyst at MWD advisors

Helena Schwenk, principal analyst at MWD advisors, a European IT advisory firm who consult with organizations to create tangible business improvements from IT investments, talked to us about the:

  • Capabilities
  • Issues
  • Technology and
  • Other considerations required to find profitable growth

She started with a focus on leadership, and then went on to discuss how issues will shift – from a single channel to multi-channel; from creating a picture of what’s happened to predicting what will happen in the future.

Helena walked us through the technology required – from data management to high end analytics and everything in between.

When focusing on other considerations, skills were top of her list – not just the skills required for analytics, but the changes that could ripple across your organization – wherever a staff member interacts with a customer.

Want to learn more?

Visit the driving profitable growth site on our Customer Intelligence Knowledge Exchange.

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The future of customer intelligence (CI) and integrated marketing management (IMM) solutions

Jonathan Moran
Jonathan Moran|May 16, 2012

Over the next few weeks, I will address the topic of where I see Customer Intelligence (CI) and Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) solutions moving over the next 3-5 years. I have been doing some work around strategy and really considering how our marketing strategy will align with our product vision going forward. At the core, there are a few trends I’m seeing in the marketplace that I think all vendors in our arena will need to account for. Being able to answer how your solutions accomplish the following 3 P’s (McCarthy and Kotler would be proud) will be crucial when selling in to customers interested in Integrated Marketing Management.

Profitable. How do your solutions help my company generate profitable growth? Not just value for one group, but profitable growth throughout the organization. I’ll provide some specific examples here of how companies move from just deriving value into sustained profitable growth.

Productive. How do your solutions make my entire organization more productive? The mandate going forward will be to simplify my processes, provide a superior product, and tackle tough day-to-day issues that my organization faces with simple user interfaces. How can SAS Customer Intelligence solutions make the individuals inside my organization more productive? With higher productivity comes improved business processes.

Pervasive. – Are your solutions pervasive? When I say this I mean are your solutions a staple or a “go-to” when needing to solve an issue (marketing/customer/marcom/brand) across the enterprise. Do your solutions provide results and information that can be leveraged across the organization by departments outside of marketing – in order to further the overall prosperity of the business?

I’d like to touch on each of these and tell you a bit about how SAS is providing solutions that help generate profitable growth, increase productivity, and can be used pervasively across an organization.

Stay tuned for more details coming soon!

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Effective customer engagement strategies in health care

John Balla
John Balla|May 10, 2012

I had the pleasure to sit in on a panel discussion at the  the 9th Annual SAS Health Care and Life Sciences Executive Conference focused on the topic of understanding and managing customer behavior in the changing health care landscape. This panel was moderated by Dipti Patel-Misra Senior Manager in the Center for Health Analytics & Insights at SAS, and included executives from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Physicians Pharmacy Alliance and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

Many business segments provide services similar to health insurance to consumers on a renewable, annual contract basis. However, the understanding that those other industries have of consumers is different and more advanced compared to a health plan’s understanding of its customers.  This panel explored how rising health care costs and consumer value priorities are affecting how health care is sought and provided, and how health plans are looking at new ways to engage with their members to retain them and attract new ones.

A recurring theme in the sessions at this event is that the individual plays a critical role in any potential "fixes" to spiraling cost of healthcare. Another recurring theme is that technological advances in recent years provide the possibility of harnessing various forms of technology to drive innovation and positive change, including customer analytics among others.

Michael Parkerson from BCBSNC began with an optimistic view of our exciting times in terms of technological innovation as being a potential source of the problems we face in our current healthcare situation.

UNC Healthcare's Dr. Rubinow emphasized the potential of the individual patient as an interested stakeholder in helping shape what the future looks like for healthcare.  He proceeded to highlight the new collaboration between BCBSNC and UNC Healthcare, called Carolina Advanced Health, which not coincidentally differentiates itself as being patient-centered. The emphasis at Carolina Advanced Health is on one-stop shopping, access and convenience, self-management and technological support, effective encounters and coordination of care.

Ron Smith from the Physicians Pharmacy Alliance highlighted problems with information and communication as one source of issues.  Healthcare information is often incomplete and it's fragmented. Their observations from studying patients with complex medication regimens showed a significant disconnect whereby patients are generally doing what they think they are being asked to do, but they don’t generally understand what they are being asked to do.

 The view from the panel is that analytics can play a key role in helping change the system from one where the patients with conditions have to seek the solution providers to one where the solutions are instead provided in ways to meet the patients where they are. Marketers, of course, recognize that kind of talk as "music to our ears." It's all about customer centricity, which is not a simple matter in an industry where the patient as a consumer of healthcare services deals with health insurance companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies and other entities. Not simple at all, but decidedly necessary and perhaps long overdue.

More broadly, we need to have a cultural change away from the idea that there's a relationship between good quality care and a large number of tests and procedures. Other good nuggets from this panel included:

  • A statement that UNC's Dr. Rubinow made that HIPAA has been one of the biggest obstacles imaginable to enabling an integrated healthcare system.
  • Social Networking holds great potential to drive desired behaviors and cultural change. Dr. Rubinow highlighted an "offline" example of a boomerang club in Chapel Hill and how its members all had life-altering weight loss experiences.
  • Incentive systems can be very powerful at driving healthy behaviors.

Closing thoughts includes the idea that individuals, data, communications and driving understandings with patients are together what holds the most promise for driving positive change. It all comes back to the patient/member /customer.  Customer-centricity certainly sounds good to most marketers. What do you think?

 

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How Independence Blue Cross predicts attrition in health insurance markets

John Balla
John Balla|May 10, 2012

I am at the 9th Annual SAS Health Care and Life Sciences Executive Conference, an extraordinary event that draws the best and the brightest leaders as both speakers and attendees from the pharmaceutical, health insurance, health care and related industries.  One session featured speakers from Independence Blue Cross sharing their experiences in predicting attrition in the small group market.  Christine Colombo, Senior Director of Informatics and Consultative Business Services presented along with Anna Sickler, Research Analyst.

Christine Colombo of Independence Blue Cross

Colombo leads a team that consults with functional areas within Independent Blue Cross (IBC), as well as customers and providers, to improve performance using data and analytics. This includes program design and evaluation, risk stratification, marketing models, predictive modeling and analytics, and return on investment studies. Sickler is responsible for marketing analytics and has experience in data mining, predictive analytics and segmentation analytics. Since joining Independence Blue Cross, she has helped increase membership by building and implementing predictive models. 

The path to using customer analytics began with a request from the marketing department, hoping to gain a profile of individuals most likely to enroll in individual coverage. Their initial models used a combination of both internal and external marketing data, with the goal to improve on the previous work done by an external vendor.  That project resulted in driving enrollment rates that were double of what the vendor was getting.

Those encouraging results paved the way to applying the same methodology to the small group segment.  In that market, customer retention rates had been declining, so the goal was to create a model that would predict the likelihood of small group customers to terminate.

They focused on 2010 customers with a group size of 2 - 50 individuals, and they found that the segment had about 24,000 customers.  They approached their model with two samples - one for development and one for validation (which is used to show the true results) and they were able to identify key predictors of their cancellation. Membership metrics were averaged at the customer level, and then they used a logistic regression model and group customers with membership in 2011 were scored and used as targets.

The models had seven variables, and two variables were found to be significant when predicting termination: group size (lower number of subscribers had a higher rate) and lower risk scores.  Other factors showed that customers with lower premiums and lower tenure also had a higher attrition rate.

As a direct result of using customer analytics, marketing at Independence Blue Cross will be more effective because they will drive forward-looking behavior.  They will score customers with upcoming renewals and communicate it through regular reporting.  Once they have the data, they will be able to identify the target segments and tailor the communications with those segments with meaningful messages.

They will be able to tailor their marketing in this way through indirect channels, such as brokers and producers, as well as direct channel outreach with messages that might highlight different products, or emphasize value, based on the profile of the segment. 

 The experience of Independence Blue Cross is a great illustration of how the use of customer analytics can drive excellent business results. During the Q&A at the end of the session, one audience member said that as a marketer, if they were able to achieve a doubling of results with this kind of collaboration with their internal analytics group, they would quickly become their new best friends.  I'd love to hear any other stories of data-driven friendships marketers are building.  I know they're out there...

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Taking care of marketing the Office Depot way

John Balla
John Balla|May 2, 2012

Alan Adams, Senior Director of Customer Analytics at Office Depot, took part in a great panel discussion on integrated marketing management at the 2012 SAS Global Forum Executive Conference along with his colleagues from Seminole Gaming and Best Buy. The session included a short presentation by each panelist, followed by a fascinating discussion period moderated by Lori Bieda from SAS. By the end of the session I had so many notes there was no way to fit it all into one post, so this is the first of three from that session.

Office Depot is well known as a large retailer of office supplies and services, and earns over $12B in annual sales.  About 43% of their earnings are from B2C retail operations and the rest is from B2B and international. Other impressive facts about Office Depot is that they operate 1,100 stores in the USA and they are among the top 5 of online retailers, with about $4B in online annual revenue from that channel. Based on those numbers, their company would be described as large and complex no matter how you categorize it, and it should come as no surprise that they are sophisticated users of customer analytics.

Marketing's delicate balancing act

Alan shared a view that many marketers can appreciate, that their customer landscape has changed radically in recent years by the shift to search-driven online activity. As a result, there is a great deal of effort put into making sure their audience can connect with Office Depot content. And in so doing, he described a business environment known to most marketers today where the online experience holds great promise, but also presents new risks that need to be managed. The result is a delicate balance that includes:

  • Being where the customer is, at the same time respecting their desire for privacy.
  • Being available and top of mind for the customer, but not intrusive.
  • Knowing many details about the customer, but not letting them know how much we actually know because that could become creepy.
  • Justifying how we have the customer relationship and also making sure we provide real value and treat them as special.

The bottom line, Alan acknowledged, is that at any point, the customer is one click from gone so they recognize the need to manage the many balancing points carefully.

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Peak Performance from Marketing Optimization

John Balla
John Balla|April 24, 2012

Annette Green, Executive session host introduces Lori Bieda - SAS, Stephan Chase - Marriott and Adam Burgess - Bank of America,

SAS Executive Lead for Customer Intelligence Lori Bieda moderated this panel and introduced the concept of Marketing Optimization as the "Holy Grail" of marketing for the power it holds to enable marketing to fulfill its mandate as driving profitable growth for organizations. Joining her in this session was Stephan Chase, VP of Customer Knowledge at Marriott International and Adam Burgess, SVP of Marketing Strategies at Bank of America.

Marriott's Stephan Chase began by sharing how the implementation of optimization is relatively new to marketing at Marriott, and that they've seen some remarkable results even at a very early stage of implementation.  He considers optimization as the destiny of marketing, where most successful companies will see marketing as a demand creation center that manages to best outcomes.

A very enthusastic proponent of predictive Analytics, Stephan described optimization as an analytical discipline that is inherently outcome-oriented.  He described how optimization means you need to have a very well defined objective and have the data be available, and be willing to engage in experimentation.  While reporting focuses on what happened, and predictive modeling focuses on where we're going, optimization asks the question: How do I perfect an outcome, based on the levers I have access to and knowing when to pull the levers? You can't do it without starting with an outcome in mind.

He described Optimization's deep roots in logistical problem solving, solved by addressing mathematics to achieve the best outcomes. Why marketing is relatively late to the optimization party?  He believes there are four reasons - first, historically you could not easily connect cause and effect in marketing, especially before the advent of digital media.  Second, you need to have easy data availability, which again has not been easily available before digital media.  Third, once digital media made measurement and tracking more feasible, then scale became an issue because suddenly there was a torrent of data.  And finally, with all that backdrop, marketing historically developed a culture that's not conducive to measurement. How quickly that has changed!

Adam Burgess, Senior Vice President at Bank of America described how their card area has used marketing optimization for quite some time.  The banking leader's operating environment naturally makes their customer relationships very complex and spread across multiple business units, so challenge number one was to get all the data in one place.  Also, it's not just about marketing anymore - it's more about interaction management, which means they are also considering the possibility that there are times the customers may not be ready for the next offer but needs an interaction with the bank.

Other challenges Adam described related to how to get the data analyzed meaningfully and then communicated out to the places in the organization that needed it. In their environment, meaningful analysis and modeling account for fixed constraints, such as legal and regulatory and discretionary variables, which can be as complex as the makeup of your target market. Since optimization is really only as good as your imputs, the more granularity you can get all the way down to the individual customer, the better. It means that good optimization is a blend of the science of the data with the art of modeling.  Another interesting point for banking is that optimization turns out to be great for managing credit risk because it can help describe the scenarios that deliver results that fall within acceptable bounds of credit risk. Perhaps that's a whole other dimension of customer analytics we don't usually address in this blog, and it's certainly an important one.

The latter part of the session had Lori Bieda leading a discussion about marketing optimization that touched on some important points:

  • Process changes can be as important as the software itself in realizing the full potential of the solution. At early stages, proof of concept to gain wide internal acceptance is certainly achievable, but depends on access to data and the clear definition of the desired end outcome.
  • Optimization works very well, yet there is always room for improvement.  In the short term, it may come from process improvements that help the organization catch up with the capabilities of the solution.
  • Real-time decisioning is increasingly becoming an imperative due to marketplace expectations, and as data sets grow into "big data" issues, high performance analytics may show the way to continued value creation.
  • For our panelists, optimization has not meant a need to bring in an army of PhD programmers in spite of the great potential of the solution.

In today's market, companies have many ways to interact with customers across multiple channels, and the complexity of managing direct-to-consumer campaigns has exploded with the proliferation of customer touch points. Seeing this session being standing room-only confirms that all marketers today need ways to get the best results with limited resources. Marketing optimization is a great way to achieve those outcomes.

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Guy Kawasaki on enchantment for achieving influence

John Balla
John Balla|April 24, 2012

Guy Kawasaki, keynote speaker at SAS Global Forum Executive Conference 2012

I had the distinct pleasure today to hear Guy Kawasaki deliver a keynote address at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference 2012.  I thought of his engaging address as a nice guide for personal effectiveness, particularly in a professional realm.  And my main takeaway from yesterday's keynote address by Joe Theismann was that in an ever-changing world, the one constant I have 100% control of is my own attitude. As a result, the points that Guy Kawaski shared could not have come at a better time to help me grow as a marketer.

Guy Kawasaki is known as a best selling author, a former visionary at Apple and many other things, and I can also confirm that he's a very good speaker. His address described how to influence people's hearts, minds and actions, and he started out with the thought that there are 3 pillars to enchantment: likability, trustworthiness and quality.  And in order to achieve those 3 pillars, he offered 10 steps to follow:

 

 1. Achieve likability.  A vivid example here is how Richard Branson started to polish Guy's shoes with his jacket upon learning that (until that point) that Guy had never flown Virgin Airlines.  The shoe-polishing incident changed that. So other than extreme shoe polishing, how can you achieve likability?

  • Have a great smile - the "Duchenne smile."  It uses the jaw muscles and the eye muscles to give you a twinkle in your eyes.  Therefore, crow's feet are a good thing. (Guy won me over with this one!)
  • Accept others.  If you want to be likable, you have to accept others as they are - period.
  • Default to "yes." It means that when you meet people, you should always be thinking "how can I help this person."  Do that consistently and you will be very likable.  There are occasional downsides when the person would like something unreasonable, but that seldom happens and the upside is more common and far greater.

2.  Be trustworthy. The surest way to do this is to sincerely trust others first and you'll find that they will trust you in return.

  • Great examples of companies that are trustworthy are Amazon - which allows returns on ebooks within 7 days,  Zappos - which always pays for shipping both ways, and Nordstrom - which accepts all returns without question.
  • Bake - don't eat.  Using the example of a pie, Guy says an eater doesn't share their pie because they see it as zero-sum and if you consume it they won't have it.   Bakers share their pie because think in terms of always baking more.
  • Agree on something.  It's a great starting point to trustworthiness. When dealing with others, find a place you can agree upon and start from there.

3.  Perfect your product.  It's far easier to enchant with something great than it is with something schlocky.

  • Focus on doing something DICEE.  Deep, Intelligent, Complete, Empowering, Elegant. For Guy, DICEE is a new 500 hp Ford Mustang - fast, cool, elegant and includes a feature that enables him to limit the top speed on the car so he doesn't have to worry about his driving-age sons borrowing the car.
  • Another example he used is SAS itself.  For our customers, it's not just the software but the "whole package" of online support, VARs, consultants, webinars, whitepapers, conferences, etc.

4.  Tell a story.  Do that to launch your product, and make sure your story tells how it impacts a person's life.  The channels you use and the content in the story are both important.

  • Plant many seeds. Because in the web 2.0 world, @lonelyboy15 is the guy who could possibly make you successful justas easily as David Pogue, the tech writer at the New York Times.
  • An excellent example of planting many seeds is Twitter.  7 years ago when Twitter was launched, who would have thought that a platform that limits you to 140 character-messages about the long line at Starbucks or how nice the weather is could also take down governments?
  • Use salient points.  Consider a bag of chips - they print the calories on the package and inform the person how many calories they might consume. What if they instead printed how many miles the eater would have to run if they ate the bag of chips.  Is that salient? It might not sell many chips, but...

5.  Overcome resistance.

  • Provide social proof.  Apple's white earbud was brilliant, especially when they launched the iPod using silhouettes using white earbuds. What do you think of when you see a white earbud?
  • Use a dataset.  Show your data visually - demonstrate  your point so your desired conclusion is easy to reach.
  • Be sure you enchant ALL the influencers. For consumer markets, you may think you have to enchant the dad in the family and you'd be wrong 80% of the time. Focus on the mom, daughter or even the sister in law if you're in a B2C environment.
  • The impact of social media cannot be more powerful than showing how Justin Bieber and his mother launched his career entirely on YouTube. But it didn't end on social media, when he went on tour, there were many times his handlers went into the parking lots and gave away tickets to girls who did not have them. Talk about adding fuel to the fire.

6  Endure

  • Consider the Grateful Dead.  They have actually cordoned off areas of their stadium for people who record the concert so they go out and share. It contrasts with how many other artists and music companies approach the ownership of the content, and it decidedly helps them endure.
  • Build an ecosystem - consultants, developers, resellers, user groups, websites and blogs, conferences.  Doing that will help you endurs, as surely as it did for Apple in the 1980s.
  • Evoke reciprocation, so when someone does you a favor you should look for ways to respond in kind.
  • When someone thanks you, respond that "you would do the same for me," but then help them by telling them how they can do that. When someone owes you, enable them to pay you back. It builds endurance.
  • Do not rely on money.  It should not be the core reason people are enchanted by you.

7.  Present. Great enchanters are great presenters. 

  • When you present, customize the introduction so it shows that you've thought about them and you build a bridge to them.
  • Sell your dream.  The iPhone is not $188 of parts and built in China.  The iPhone is thin, cool, sexy and it will change your life. That's the dream that was sold and it made Apple a leader in mobile phone set sales.
  • The optimal number of slides in any presentation is 10 slides.  Optimally, you'd use 10 slides and deliver them in 3 lines per slide.  The optimal font size is point 30.

8.  Use technology.  We live in a great time.  Social Media is fast, free and ubiquitous.

  • Remove the speed bumps. Captcha is a speedbump. If you have a global audience, are your captcha characters the same as all your users' keyboards? Probably not - so why do it?
  • Provide value. It's the key to being relevant in social media.  Value is information, insights and assistance.  Provide what happened, how did it happen and how can it happen for you.
  • Engage.  The life of an average tweet is 2 hours.  If you have email, respond in 48 hours or less.  It's fast, flat and frequent.  You have to do it all the time.

9.  Enchant your boss.  This is very important in any organization. Seriously.

  • Drop everything else - this is how you enchant your boss.  Prototype fast.  Guy offered that as a married man, he believes this rule applies for married men too.  I presume it applies for married women as well.
  • The other way to enchant your boss is to deliver bad news early.  If you can, do it early enough so that you can figure out how to prevent the bad news.

10 Enchant down. You are in an organization and if you have people reporting to you, you depend on those folks to help achieve your collective success.

  • Provide a map - demonstrate how your folks can master new skills and how they can do it with autonomy and an understanding of your organization's purpose.
  • Empower action - enable them to do it and not have to check in along the way.
  • Suck it up.  Be willing to do the dirty job and never ask employees to do something that you would not do.

So, the bottom line to influence through enchantment, you should aim to have the quality of Apple, earn the trustworthiness of Zappos and achieve the likability of Richard Branson.  It's really that simple.  What do you think?

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Business Lessons for Marketers from Joe Theismann

John Balla
John Balla|April 23, 2012

I just saw the legendary NFL quarterback Joe Theismann deliver his keynote address today at SAS Global Forum 2012, and as expected, he provided us with vivid anecdotes and recollections from his experiences both as a championship athlete and as a businessman. By delivering an engaging mix of humor, lessons learned and candid reflections on his own experiences, he highlighted the many parallels between success in business with success in sports.

On the subject of change, he commented on how the SAS Global Forum experience is all about sharing information, and sharing often brings about change. What's interesting, he continued, is that change means different things to different people. To the fearful, change is threatening because it means that things can get worse. To the hopeful, change is encouraging because it means that things can get better. And to the confident, change is an opportunity, or a challenge, to make things better. The difference, of course, is your attitude.

And attitude also drives how you interact with others, which directly impacts your effectiveness on a team. Joe firmly believes that teamwork is essential to success, specifically saying "You cannot, will not, be a success in life if you think you're going to do it yourself."  Clearly teamwork is essential in team sports, such as American Football, and considering the complexities of marketing in today's business environment, teamwork is also an essential ingredient for great marketing. And once again, it comes back to starting with your own attitude. In today's business environment of constant change, the one constant is you - and the one thing you have 100% control of is your own attitude.

Joe asked us to think about what our passion is and be sure that whatever we do, to do it with enthusiasm. His perspective is that passion comes from really caring about whatever it is you're doing. And  before you get to caring or embracing your passion, you need to first start by believing in yourself. As he put it, "If you don't believe in yourself, then you can be sure nobody else will."

Other truisms and Joe-isms he shared include:

  • I’ve never had a failure in my life – only educational experiences that did not go my way.
  • People don't care how much you know until you show them how much you care.
  • Character is who you are, and reputation is who people think you are.
  • If you look for the good in people, you will find it. If also look for the bad in people, you'll find it.
  • It's nice to be important, but it's much more important to be nice.

Those are the biggest take-aways I got from his session, and to me they all apply for marketers today.  If you were able to attend and have any favorites I may have missed, please add to them with a comment.  And thanks again for following!

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Customer Intelligence at SAS Global Forum

John Balla
John Balla|April 23, 2012

As a marketer at SAS, there are few better moments than being at SAS Global Forum, happening right now at Walt Disney Dolphin Resort and the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, FL.  It's like an annual family reunion of SAS users from around the world, all coming together to reconnect, share ideas and work on solving business issues together.  In parallel, we organize an annual event for the executives of our user organizations called the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference (#SASEC12 on Twitter), which is happening at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, FL.  There are inspiring presentations by thought leaders planned, as well as fascinating sessions with executive viewpoints on ways to get the most out of SAS solutions.

There are almost literally dozens of user presentations and demos at the SAS Global Forum User's Conference, and we have two great sessions focused on customer intelligence at the Executive Conference:

Optimization for Peak Marketing Performance
In the Tuesday morning session, we will have speakers from Marriott International and Bank of America sharing details of how their organizations have embraced marketing optimization to drive optimal business outcomes by finding the best allocation of limited resources - a situation that all marketers face today.  Following brief presentations by our customers, there will be a moderated discussion followed by audience Q&A.

Session Speakers:

  • Stephan Chase, Vice President of Customer Knowledge, Marriott International,
  • Adam Burgess, Senior Vice President of Marketing Strategies, Bank of America, and
  • Moderator:  Lori Bieda, Executive Lead - Customer Intelligence, SAS

Improved Outcomes with Integrated Marketing Management
In the Tuesday afternoon session, speakers from Best Buy, Seminole Gaming and Office Depot will outline how they achieve better business outcomes with relevant offers that drive increased loyalty, improved customer spending and better profit margins.  This session will also include a moderated discussion followed by audience Q&A after each of these executives has presented highlights of their company's use of integrated marketing management.

Session Speakers:

  • Alan Adams, Senior Director of Marketing and CRM Applications, Office Depot,
  • Ralph Thomas, PhD., Vice President of Strategic Analytics and Database Marketing, Seminole Gaming,
  • Scott Friesen, Senior Director of Analytics in Consumer Insights, Best Buy.

I will share details from these sessions in near real-time tomorrow, so please click on the "subscribe" button to the right, or check back for the updates.  In the meantime, check out how we are live-streaming selected features from SAS Global Forum at this LINK.  The features are archived and then made available on-demand after they happen.  How cool is THAT?

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Search marketing brings us full circle

John Balla
John Balla|March 23, 2012

We recently held a half-day session devoted entirely to search marketing that gave us an opportunity to cast a wide net internally about this very important topic. I learned some new things and also had a few moments where it seemed the obvious was being presented, but sometimes even "hearing the obvious" can be valuable because it prompts you to make new connections and draw useful conclusions. That was the case for me.

Search engine marketing vs. search engine optimization

When considering search, it’s helpful to remember the distinction between “search engine marketing” (SEM) and “search engine optimization” (SEO).  SEM is the focus on increasing website visibility in search engines through paid placement and optimization, whereas SEO deals with website improvements to climb to the top of organic search. Simply put, SEM is paying to associate your web content with terms and phrases so your web page shows up in the paid suggestions at the top of the page in search results (or along the side of the page). SEO is giving your web content the best chances of showing up near the top of the page for a given search term or phrase. You earn SEO with relevant content and with a plethora of techniques relating to keywords, links, URL structure and others that I won't delve into here. Both areas are important and are mutually-reinforcing, so paying attention to both is key.

Search – it’s what we do

Search is important simply because so much of our everyday lives are spent online. When online, we search, we find, we read, we react, we comment, we share. Even in the middle of our browsing session, we might open another tab to search for something related or simply loop back to search when needed. Quite simply - it's what people do online. And because of that, if we are not already doing this, we marketers need to rethink every aspect what we do in terms of search.

Search compels marketers to change

Of course, marketers still need to focus on our target market(s) and do all we can to understand what they need. When broken down to discrete activities, our work entails many things (not in any particular order): listening, responding, offering, inviting, engaging, studying, analyzing, segmenting, reading, writing, designing, creating and so on. From that view, what emerges is that the most important interactions with our target market involve content in some form and that's why search matters so much. We might understand how our new whitepaper relates to the business issues, but can our target market make that same connection? Let's hope so. Using search marketing techniques are ways to boost that likelihood.

Search reinforces Marketing 101: Know thy customer

Understanding how our content might be searched for is how we help our market connect our content to their issue. Content can be images, descriptions, PDFs, podcasts, videos, webcasts, webinars or updates. Even Tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates are all content. The new world of digital marketing enables new ways to reach customers with great content. We can also measure our effectiveness in many ways, but it also has empowered the customer to tune you out if you’re irrelevant to them. So content is king, but only as long as the customer agrees that it reigns or they go searching elsewhere to get what they need.

An equally bad outcome is that they never find you because you’ve not adjusted the way you do things to fit the new rules of search-driven digital marketing. The rules are simple, but equally important – keywords, tags, page layout and other factors of good search-driven marketing all stem from what the customer prioritizes.  Get them wrong, and you won’t even show up when they ask for what you can offer.

Whether tuning you out or simply never finding you, either case is a disconnect that is eminently preventable and it highlights the importance of understanding the customer.  It’s come full circle back to Marketing 101, folks, but with a twist – so pay attention and understand how the twist impacts how you are going about marketing.  The stakes for getting it right have never been higher (and they’re equally high for getting it wrong).

Use SAS to get full customer profiles

So a complete customer profile has never been more important, and SAS Customer Intelligence solutions give you the ability to get full customer profiles and make the most of them. For some great stories of how our customers understand online behaviors, please visit our customer success stories for Customer Experience Analytics. Please let me know your views on search and its impact on marketing.

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