SEM Tutorial Part 3 ( Integrated Marketing )

Integrated Marketing: The New Approach

Integrated marketing is the use of two or more marketing channels to sell a product or service. The same message is sent via multiple marketing channels, such as web, radio, TV, and postal mail. By using several channels, you widen the exposure of a company’s brand or product.

With integrated marketing, you create a product message that is both consistent with and relevant to the target customer. You can produce campaigns with unified messaging for TV, radio, Web, and newspaper print ads. The keywords, the unique selling proposition (USP), the messaging, the look, the sound, and the customer can all be unified into a broad ad campaign that works in multiple channels.

Today, a marketing team can use software from Unica or Omniture to launch and manage literally thousands of campaigns. By switching to digital technology, we can begin to track data. Thus the field of analytics came into play. At first, there were simple web stats packages that allowed the IT team to manage websites by raw aggregate numbers. They tracked visits, page views, and similar, to see if they had to add more capacity. Marketing and sales took over the websites, and they needed tools to track sales. As
a result, the first business analytics tools were created. In the last year, analytics has undergone rapid evolution. The ability to track websites and PPC can be expanded into other digital campaigns.

The ability of analytics to track results is being extended into these media. With unique URLs, PURLs, and tracking URLs, you can now track sales, cost-per-action (CPA), and return on investment (ROI) in radio, TV, and print just as in PPC. Soon, the consumption of nearly all media will be IP-based. This allows tracking of distribution and consumption. This also allows campaign results to be compared against each other.

The goal for marketers is to optimize the customer’s experience. This means giving your customer what they want, when they want it, in the media form they want it in. This is the way for businesses to open the pocketbooks of their customers.

Digital marketing strategies may include the following tools:

Analytics Software to track and analyze the results of marketing campaigns. It allows segmentation and profiling of customers. Companies include Omniture, Unica, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics.

PPC (pay-per-click or paid search) Ad services by the major search engines that let you place ads on the search results pages.

Multivariate testing (MTV) Software that allows you to create and test permutations of your web pages to find the version that performs best. MVT is offered by companies such as Offermatica and Optimost.

Targeted messaging Using databases, analytics, behavioral targeting, and customer profiles to send targeted messages.

Business intelligence (BI) Software that collects and presents the company’s sales and financial activity.

CRM Software to track customers, such as Salesforce and Sugar CRM

Marketing can be digitized. This means it can be quantified and rationalized. New advertising, enabled by digitization and digital tools (analytics, multivariate testing, and so on), allows integrated marketing

across multiple channels.

Previously a small marketing team could only carry out and manage several dozen ad campaigns. Now they can execute and manage several hundred campaigns simultaneously. The tools can collect and analyze

massive amounts of data in multiple dimensions. You use analytics to study the data. You use KPIs to guide your efforts. Digitized marketing can be tracked, so marketing is evolving into sales. Marketing channels are now turning into sales channels. With the ability to compare the various channels and by knowing the KPIs, a company can test channels to find the ones that produce profits. Once they know which ones work, they can turn up the volume by focusing more of their budget on the top-performing channels.

In online marketing, due to advancements in web analytics and BI technologies, we know about our visitors. We know where they come from (approximate or specific location as well as any referring sites or search

engines such as Google), what they are looking for by the keywords they type in, what they show interest in, and so on. We can add to a Claritas demographic profile which tells us about our market’s lifestyle and behaviors.

Because digital technology allows tracking, Directors, VPs, SVPs, and CMOs are expected to show and describe the results of their marketing efforts. They have to boil down many scenarios with many outcomes into clear wins and present this to upper management. Sales-marketing is about generating as well as increasing revenue for your company. Think about how to tell those stories around your big wins as well as incremental wins.

There are a couple of ways to increase revenue. You can market to your target audience or you can find new market opportunities. A number of tools enable this.

To reach customers in a highly fragmented world, marketers must learn how to deliver their messages across many channels. For example, a company selling koi fish can advertise through e-mail lists, radio, web

banners, SEO, and paid search (PPC). This will generate the traffic to your business.

Applying an end-to-end strategic approach, coupled with business processing rules, to your prospects focuses your traffic to deliver meaningful and well-qualified prospects, leads, and customers. This method is also referred to as strategic marketing. Through this, you deliver value to your prospects and customers.

Because the majority of a business’s prospects prefer to visit the business’s website first before engaging in any purchases, it is critical to apply web analytics to help them solve for their needs. Furthermore,

analytics can be applied to your current customer database or CRM system to identify new market opportunities and to sell more products and services to customers based on what they may need.

As a business marketer, it is your responsibility to develop a data mining and segmentation strategy. This helps your teams divide up the customer base into smaller, understandable categories. From this, your teams should be launching new campaigns based on the method of listening to and processing the messages your customers are sending. This cycle repeats over and over in a continuous fashion to improve the sales marketing process.

The advertiser displays a message at the audience through multiple marketing channels. These channels can include search engines, radio, TV, and newspapers. Each of these channels points the viewer to a unique URL. The URLs have tracking code so the analytics can capture data on origin, location, keywords, and so on. Analytics tools can use rules to manage decisions. The rules can use visitor ID, such as IP address, cookies, e-mail login ID, or loyalty card ID. For example, if the visitor came via TV, a video can be offered.

Visitors who use their cell phones to visit the unique URL can be shown content that is formatted for mobile devices.

Manage Integrated Marketing with Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM)

Automated marketing is known as enterprise marketing management (EMM). This is also called marketing resource management (MRM) and marketing operations management (MOM). EMM uses various tools to manage marketing strategies and tactics. This can include analytics, campaign management, automated reports, dashboards, lead management, event-driven marketing, predictive modeling, and more.

EMM is used in marketing to reduce costs, increase productivity, and grow revenue. Companies can identify and act on customer activities. Marketers can collaborate across teams and with their external agencies to

launch and manage complex marketing campaigns. EMM includes:

Analytics to understand and anticipate customer behavior
Event-detection to track and respond to customers
Campaign management to carry out timely, consistent communications with customers
Lead management to track leads
Marketing resource management (MRM) to manage budgets, creative production, marketing content, and other resources

Generally implemented as an integrated solution, EMM reduces time-to-market through automation, improves customer targeting through analytics, and proves the profit value of marketing through closed-loop

measurement and reporting. Two vendors with integrated marketing solutions are Unica and Omniture.

Unica and Omniture

Unica and Omniture, both have analytics tools with automated decisionmaking, but they approach the market from different directions and they offer different solutions:

Unica starts from offline marketing, so their tools are based on the needs of multichannel marketing. Unica includes analytics, segmentation, propensity scoring, lifetime value prediction, predictive modeling, resource management, automated decision-making, dashboards, and tracking. Unica has the most complete EMM solution on the market. Forrester Research ranks Unica as the clear market leader in EMM, both in terms of execution and completeness of vision. It also has the strongest offering and strategy of any EMM vendor. Unica's platform is Affinium NetInsight.

Omniture approaches the market from web marketing, so it is focused on analytics tools. It includes tools to automatically manage PPC, multivariate testing, data warehousing, and behavioral targeting. Omniture is evolving from analytics to business optimization software. It can measure customer trends, enable appropriate analysis for the various levels of users in a company, automate processes, and optimize the customer experience. Omniture's analytics software is known as Omniture SiteCatalyst.

Both of these companies offer extensive support and service, including consulting services.

Seven Tips from Unica

Here are seven tips for integrated marketing from Unica.

Set up your online segmentation strategy based on visitor usage and activity. In this case, the audience is divided up into four segments: couch potatoes (they don’t participate in blogs or other user activities), readers, critics, and content creators. As shown next, you can compare these groups to find which one produces the most value by engagement, conversions, and revenue.

Using your sales database, you can identify new market opportunities across medium and high-value lifetime visitors. You can explore the results from keywords, referrers, locations, and content segmentation, as shown next.

Remember, customers are not defined by clicks alone. Look for groups of customers and try to find additional similar customers.

Use event triggers to manage bids and campaigns. You can set up rules to trigger campaigns based on visitor actions, as shown next. If they abandon the shopping cart, send them a tailored offer. If they buy, send

them an up-sell offer or additional services. Make offers that are relevant or valuable to your customer.

Use cross-channel campaigns to reach customers, as shown next. For example, a visitor comes to your website and browses the pages for bicycles. Do you show them additional ads for bicycles? You find that they

clipped out a newspaper coupon and came to the store and bought a kayak. You use the data from one channel in another channel; you now show the visitor online ads for kayak accessories, including paddles, vests, and so on.

Look at why your customers go away, as shown next. Often, site optimizers experiment with different layouts, colors, call-to-actions, messaging, and so on. But sometimes, you’ll find these site optimization

experiments won’t keep customers. Customers buy because they find something is useful and valuable. Offer them highly targeted and relevant retention offers. Turn your marketing campaigns into a service for your

customer by matching your offer to what your customer is interested in.

Use site map overlays. These show you where the customers are clicking. As you can see next, Unica and Omniture’s site overlay shows you the profitability of the links so you can restructure your website to maximize profits.

Use the reporting tools to create questions about your data, as shown next. You can use predefined questions or create your own. Once your question is built, views and reports are created on the fly for analysis and decision-making.

Interview: Yuchun Lee, CEO of Unica

Yuchun Lee cofounded Unica in 1992. Over 600 companies use Unica for their EMM. Yuchun Lee holds degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Babson College. Mr. Lee is the CEO of Unica.

Q: What is integrated marketing? How do you define it?

A: Integrated marketing is a process by which all communications and marketing programs delivered to a customer or prospect are relevant and consistent. This applies whether the communications are offline or online, inbound or outbound.

Online marketing channels include any e-marketing campaigns or programs, from search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, affiliate, e-mail, banner, to the latest web-related channels for webinar, blog, RSS, podcast, and Internet TV. Offline marketing channels are traditional print (newspaper, magazine), mail order, public relations, industry analyst relations, billboard, radio, and television.

Unica’s enterprise marketing management (EMM) technology delivers a complete platform for integrated marketing. It is uniquely based on a system of record for marketing, which you can think of as institutional memory for the marketing organization. The system of record brings together marketing assets, such as creatives, reports, budgets, and business definitions (for example, customer segments and best practices) so that marketers can manage their creation and usage, rapidly assemble them to execute different programs, and measure performance. This free flow of accurate, up-to-date information speeds marketing execution, reduces mistakes, boosts productivity through automation and reuse, and enables faster, better decisions.

EMM helps companies manage their marketing campaigns, programs, and activities across time and across channels. In that respect, all those pieces work together to help marketers better address the needs of the customer through whatever channel the customer wants, ensuring sensitivity to customer preferences and consistency of message delivery. This is what integrated marketing and EMM are all about.

Q: Can you give a few examples of EMM? How does the customer experience this? How does it work for the company?

A: Marketing is more complex than any other part of an enterprise in terms of the different kinds of processes it requires. If you have 1000 sales people in a company, they’re pretty much doing the same thing. If you have 50 marketers, they are doing 200 different things. The key thing to understand is that EMM enables the automation of dozens and dozens of different marketing processes, which taken holistically add up to what we call “enterprise marketing management.”

Let’s talk about some of the things EMM solves. From an analytics perspective, we have customers, such as Lands’ End, who use our technology to automate their direct mailings. Lands’ End has hundreds of versions of their catalogs. Depending on who you are, you get a special version that is designed to appeal to your interests. Our technology helps them manage the mailings of those catalogs and to assess the effectiveness of

their catalog versions and targeting strategies. An online example is Monster.com, who automates the execution of over 1,000,000 targeted e-mails per day based on job seeker preferences and behavior.

Another example is to look at the different marketing processes and tools that marketers manage: signage, local advertising, store openings, events, etc. All of these activities have multiple moving parts. Customers use our software to define and store information about these activities so that every time they open a new store, it’s the same process, including the same approval process and workflow. If you look at a company

like Lowe’s, which has regular Sunday newspaper inserts, they need to determine which products get promoted, their placement within the insert, the graphics and the approval for those graphics, the prices, and so on. This can involve several hundred people working in different countries. They use Unica software to help streamline and coordinate these complex processes. By and large, EMM helps companies solve their

mission-critical problems in marketing, and that’s what it’s all about.

Q: What is integrated analytics? How do you define it?

A: Analytics are a key part of integrated marketing. If you look at the core marketing processes, they consist of analysis of customers and data, planning of marketing budgets and resources, production and design, including message development, execution of programs and campaigns, and measurement of results. So there are five steps: analysis, planning, production, execution and measurement. Analytics is a vital step in these marketing processes. Integrated analytics, in our view, spans time and channels. It allows marketers to analyze customers in a holistic fashion, synchronizing data about their lifestyle and their preferences, the permissions they’ve given, their purchase and interaction history. Truly integrated analytics enables companies to develop and deliver marketing messages that are so timely and relevant they feel like a

valued service to their customers.

Q: How does Unica deal with a company’s existing analytics tool? Is it a layer on top of the analytics?

A: It depends on the type of analytics tool and the company’s situation. Unica offers a wide range of capabilities , including reporting, web analytics, predictive modeling, event detection, and real-time analytics for delivering personalized offers during web and call center interactions. While many companies often have existing capabilities in some of these areas, they are often isolated, complex applications that are not fully integrated into their marketing operations. Unica can help in two ways. In some instances, we integrate

with existing capabilities. For example, we have many customers that use SAS to build predictive models. These models can be used within our overall marketing automation solution to help segment and optimize campaigns. In other situations, companies find that their legacy analytics capabilities are too complex and costly to maintain and integrate. As a result, we see companies adopting our analytics capabilities because of their ease of use, functional capabilities, and integration within our EMM suite.

Q: Google Analytics is free. What’s the business case for graduating to a larger package? The CEO wants to know why she should spend good money for another tool.

A: Anytime you can get something for free, it’s probably worth considering. Google Analytics is a standalone application that provides basic reporting, but it lacks segmentation and integration capabilities. We believe that site analytics delivers significantly more business insights when you are able to integrate all your critical online and back office data. You are also able to act more effectively on these insights when your web analytics solution is part of an integrated marketing platform.

Q: At what size can a company start to apply EMM? At how many customers or what level of revenue does it become appropriate?

A: We find that companies with at least $30 million in annual revenue have the business need and marketing budget to invest in EMM. We do see smaller web-centric companies investing in our site analytics solution because of the mission-critical nature of their sites. But in general our range of companies is from $30 million to the largest companies in the world. If you look around the U.S., there are about 25,000 companies in that range. Globally it’s about 50,000 companies to be very conservative. It’s a pretty big market.

Q: What’s the ideal size of the team?

A: We often see teams of about 50 to 100 people in the marketing organization, but we have some customers effectively leveraging our EMM capabilities with teams as small as five or six people. Smaller teams tend to focus on our marketing automation capabilities while larger teams also gain significant benefit from our collaboration and workflow management capabilities.

Q: What about Web 2.0? Analytics was based on the Web 1.0 model and tracking of page-by-page click activity. But Web 2.0 sites are actually an application, not a website. Is it a mistake to apply Web 1.0 analytics to Web 2.0? Do we need an entirely new approach to Web 2.0 sites?

A: There’s a common tactical issue that companies must address in web analytics around page tagging vs. event tagging for Web 2.0 content. Event tagging is technically straightforward in most analytics tools, but marketers do need to determine what events should be captured for analysis. There is a tendency to “just capture everything,” but too many client-side analytics events can impact a user’s experience on your site, which negates one of the big reasons people are deploying Web 2.0 interface technologies.

The bigger issue we see with Web 2.0 is a change in paradigm around how consumers interact with a company. Media fragmentation has made it increasingly challenging for marketers to get their messages across. Then there is the networking effect that happens in the Web 2.0 world. It’s the social network that’s influencing people and their perception of companies and brands. Power has shifted to the consumer, and their individual experiences of your brand—both positive and negative—can easily echo across the Web. This viral effect is something that marketers also seek to leverage with compelling and innovative viral campaign strategies. These changing paradigms impact what you need to measure and place a premium on understanding your customer’s experience of your company both directly and indirectly.

Q: One of the problems with Web 2.0 is the lack of a clear business model, which means a lack of clear KPIs. How would you address this?

A: Business models and appropriate metrics are still evolving around Web 2.0. But remember, any time you spend marketing money, you can establish performance objectives or you can treat it as more of a branding activity. A lot of marketers would tell you that marketing cannot be measured. I personally don’t believe that’s true. I think that you can often find proxies to assess your marketing efforts. We are seeing the world move more toward measurable marketing. I think Web 2.0 media and its linkage to web analytics as a technology is the perfect example of why people want to measure usage and apply metrics that range from engagement to more specific ROI models where appropriate. I can tell you that Web 2.0 media is much more measurable than television, but not nearly measurable enough when compared to other types of marketing campaigns, such as keyword search, paid search, and organic search. It depends on how your company defines measurement and how strongly the CFO wants exact numbers from the CMO.

Ten years from now—or sooner—CMOs are going to have to justify marketing spend across all channels and media types.

Q: In the event of a recession, what would you recommend to Web 2.0 sites?

A: One strategy would be to do more with what you have. Another is to invest in technology that offers a strong measurable ROI. Let me give you an example. In the last recession there was a major retailer who had 26 projects. After the first year, only two projects got funded. Our project was one of them because it had measurable ROI. If you spend $1 you will get $5 back.

Q: Where do you think cross-channel analytics vs. web analytics is going in the next few years?

A: I believe that web analytics as a standalone market will eventually disappear. As a result, I think there are three trajectories for web analytics technologies going forward. One trajectory is for web analytics to be an integral part of an e-commerce platform where people are opening up online stores. The second is for web analytics to be absorbed into the more general category of business intelligence using analytics to interpret business data, not just for the website but for the business as a whole. The third trajectory is for web analytics to be part of a marketing suite because a website is a very integral part of the marketing organization in many industries. Our view is that web analytics as a technology needs to be an integral part of EMM. We think web analytics will be a key component of cross-channel analytics and we are seeing clear signs from marketing buyers who believe this, too.

Q: Why is cross-channel marketing important today?

A: The Internet has affected the way a company communicates with the customer and has facilitated a shift of power to the customer. To be effective as a marketer, there are two things you have to do. You have to be relevant to the customer, and you have to be consistent across channels. If you don’t have an integrated cross-channel marketing framework, you can’t accomplish this.

Q: The Web gave us online marketing, which has been a new form of marketing for the last ten years. EMM and cross-channel marketing merge online marketing and offline marketing. Will the Web become “just another media”?

A: Think of the Web as another channel. If you look at handheld devices or e-mail, they each have their own pluses and minuses. As an effective marketer, one has to figure out how to deliver messages to buyers effectively and consistently across these channels. It’s a mistake to view the Web as something so special that it should be a siloed part of a company or something that you don’t integrate with the rest of your interaction channels. Shopping, purchase, fulfillment, and service activity occur across a mix of channels and in different patterns depending on the customer. Effective marketing must operate holistically across channels to fulfill its promise of delivering timely and relevant messages and experiences.

Q: Asia and Europe are far ahead of the U.S. in cell phone use. They’ve moved from desktop computers to cell phones. They shop on their cell phones; they pay for services with their cell phones; they read books on their cell phones. With Apple’s iPhone and the Google phone, we may finally get advanced cell phone services in the U.S. This allows geo-based marketing, plus in-store offers. Where are the opportunities for analytics on mobile devices?

A: I think there is a tremendous potential there. I think overall in Asia and Europe we are barely scratching the surface when it comes to providing a robust channel for communications between the company and the consumer. The Internet and mobile phone infrastructures are on a five- to ten-year convergence course. These two infrastructures will converge, and one will carry the other’s traffic so there will be no difference between them.

Once that happens, the phone becomes a very interesting channel for marketers and individuals. Not only can it enable instant messaging and e-mail, it also offers an Internet browser. Plus, it’s also a geographically enabled device. But, unlike a computer, which can be shared, is not always on, and is often stationary, a mobile phone is personal. It’s almost always carried by someone and is often active 24/7.

It’s a very special channel that marketers can take advantage of, but because it’s so personal, it makes the right type of marketing even more challenging. You can’t just spam everybody who has a phone. We advise companies to think of marketing as a service. With accurate targeting, you can deliver timely and relevant messages to your customers. This turns marketing into a valued service.

Q: What top three tips and tricks do you recommend for companies looking to deploy this?

A: First, I wouldn’t try to buy the whole thing at once. This is a very complex set of technologies that requires thought on which areas to apply first. I would advise working with a vendor like Unica who has lots of experience helping customers formulate a roadmap to adopt this technology. That’s number one. Second, pick a vendor that has the holistic view of marketing. Too often we see companies trying to apply very short-term solutions to complex, long-term problems. That will only add more complexity down the road. Think holistically about marketing.

Third, check references. Talk to companies who are doing this successfully and get the inside scoop. There are few vendors who are delivering the goods.

Conclusion

Both Google AdWords and the various analytics tools show marketing can be managed as a trackable activity. With the broad acceptance of the Web by consumers and unique URLs, the power of online marketing’s digital tracking can be used with traditional marketing.

Digitized marketing creates new abilities: tracking the customers, offering the customers what they really want, better reports for marketers, tools for automated distribution of campaigns across multiple channels, and tools for event-triggered campaigns.

Traditional marketing and online marketing are merging into one. Several years ago, it appeared online marketing would remain a small segment of marketing. That has changed. Online marketing will become part of general marketing. Marketing is a trillion-dollar industry in the U.S. and makes up the largest discretionary budget within companies. The combination of both online and offline marketing opens the door to many new tools and services in marketing.

In writing this book, we talked with senior people at Cisco, Omniture, Unica, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Education.com, Aveda, 24-Hour Fitness, and many other companies. All of them felt these new tools will evolve rapidly in the next few years. This industry has only just begun. In this book, we will cover:

KPIs Digitized marketing allows you to manage your campaigns. You use key performance indicators (KPIs), which are the key numbers. We will show you how to define your KPIs for maximum profitability and use KPIs to manage your campaigns and channels.

Analytics An overview of analytics, along with a hands-on guide to using Google Analytics.

SEO Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you to make sure your website is findable by your audience when they are searching for you in search engines. We will show you how to use analytics and KPIs to manage your SEO.

PPC Use pay-per-click (PPC) to place advertising in search engines, radio, TV, and newspapers. We will also show you how to use analytics and KPIs to manage your PPC campaigns.