Download 5 Trends Today`s CMOs Must Recognize

5 Trends Today’s CMOs
Must Recognize
By David Rodnitzky, CEO
Introduction
That digital marketing is an ever-evolving field is nothing new. Good
CMOs are always researching and analyzing new elements that can
benefit their teams.
But in an evolving field, the proliferation of things – data, devices,
channels, technologies – is becoming overwhelming, especially when
CMOs are faced with the challenge of managing all of that complexity
at scale.
So what five trends – we all like lists, after all – are going to be most
influential in shaping (and re-shaping) the CMO position over the years
to come? In our opinion, they boil down to:
-- Understanding the interplay of online and offline
campaigns
-- Comprehension and utilization of 1st-party data
-- Knowing what to do with all of that data (not just
1st-party but 2nd-party and 3rd-party as well)
-- Understanding the balance of many, many marketing
channels and devices
-- - Scaling complex digital marketing campaigns
Let’s break down these topics – and why they need to be at the
forefront of the mind of today’s (and tomorrow’s) CMOs.
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Trend #1: Online and Offline Blur
If your company has both an online and offline presence, you already
know the pain of trying to measure the impact of one on the other.
Here are a few familiar scenarios:
Customer A gets a mail-order catalogue, flips through the pages, and
goes directly to the eCommerce site to place an order.
Customer B sees a Facebook ad on his smartphone for your
eCommerce site, does some browsing, finds a few products he’d like
to check out in person, visits the branch of your store in closest
proximity, and buys the product that feels best in hand.
Switching gears from eCommerce to B2B, let’s say Customer C picks
up a trade magazine, learns a bit about your company, and types in a
brand query a few days later.
In each of those offline/online cases, one had a direct effect on the
other. And in each case, the exact impact is very, very tough to
measure. Yet as businesses shift more and more advertising dollars
online (particularly in mobile), it’s never been more important. We’ll
talk about possible solutions first, then what you stand to gain if you’re
on the right side of what I like to call information asymmetry
(I’ll explain more below).
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
So we’ve outlined the issue of online/offline blur. How can you solve
it? Keep in mind that none of the techniques I’m about to suggest are
foolproof, but they can start you off in the right direction, which is a
huge first step.
Here goes:
1. Create unique URLs on offline campaigns. Let’s go back
to that mail catalogue scenario. Let’s say you’re
advertising a seasonal sale with hundreds of items at 10%
off – if people type in the URL provided on that catalogue
and place the order on your website. You could construct
a landing page (or just a URL) specifically for that
catalogue, e.g. store.com/summer-sale.
Tag and track it properly, and all conversions/actions
taken through entrances with that particular URL
can be attributed to your mail catalogue.
2. Online coupons redeemable in stores. This works in
reverse, too. If you plaster coupons all over your site
with the qualifier that you need to redeem them in stores
(and then make sure to track the source of those sales
at the point of purchase), you can analyze the effects
that your online campaigns have on your offline sales.
3. Use proxy online actions to approximate foot
traffic. For businesses with local stores, there are several
online actions that show a degree of
intent to make in-store visits, including:
5 Trends Today’s CMOs Must Recognize
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• Click to call
• Click for directions
• Hovering over a map
the lift in website traffic and brand search in the Chicago
area (using a city without the billboard campaign
as your control).
WHY IT MATTERS
I mentioned “information asymmetry” a few paragraphs ago…and
what I mean by that is when one advertiser has access to information
another advertiser doesn’t have. This, as you can imagine, is a huge
advantage for the more highly informed advertiser; more data can
lead to smarter decisions.
Here are some of the advantages an advertiser on the right side of
information asymmetry can utilize:
-- More precise device-based bidding (mobile vs. tablet
vs. desktop) in response to different purchasing behavior on each device
-- More strategic use of different advertising channels
(e.g. using Facebook ads to drive in-store traffic)
• Signups for a brand’s newsletter
• Click for Free In-Store Pickup
If you assign a value to each of these actions, you can start to assess
-- Better demographic-based bidding and targeting
thanks to customer personas developed by blending
in-store and online purchase patterns
the effects of online marketing on in-store sales. Granted, it’s not
Of all the trends we’re going to explore, this is the outlier, in that
perfect, but once again it’s a step in the right direction. And if you’re
there’s an established need for more data and not enough advanced
really sophisticated, you can assign different values depending on
technology to solve the problem. Like the other trends, we’re
device to account for different consumer behaviors on mobile, tablets,
confident that there will be plenty of evolution in the coming years,
and computers.
and it’s something with which the best CMOs will be keeping pace.
4. Do some control tests by geography. For instance, if
you’re running a billboard campaign in Chicago, measure
But now we move on to the data part of the program.
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Trend #2: Know Thy Customer
Through 1st-Party Data
There’s no data like your own data – that is, data that you’ve gathered,
not data that resides with a publisher. We’re talking about 1st-party
data, which can include:
HOW AND WHERE TO USE 1ST-PARTY DATA
Over the last couple of years, publishers have gotten wise to the idea
that advertisers will spend more (and reap more) if given ad products
-- Email addresses
that let them use 1st-party data. There are two key use cases in play.
-- Demographic information
Advertisers can: upsell/cross-sell/try to close the deal with existing
-- Referral activities
-- Shopping cart activities (size, abandonment, etc.)
customers; and target people (through Lookalike audiences) who most
clearly resemble their best customers. In other words, 1st-party data
works to broaden the top of the funnel AND make the bottom of the
-- Purchase/payment info
funnel more effective. (For more on how to use it, check out my recent
-- Database (email) marketing info (opens, clicks,
purchases, unsubscribes)
column on SearchEngineLand.)
(To be clear, 1st-party data is NOT owned by a publisher (e.g. Google,
Facebook); that’s 2nd-party data. And it’s not data you or a publisher
rents from a behavioral targeting company like Datalogix or Blue Kai;
that’s 3rd-party data.)
So what ad products do you have at your disposal? Here’s a quick
rundown:
-- Facebook: Custom Audiences/Website Custom
Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, and the Facebook
Exchange (FBX)
-- Twitter’s Tailored Audiences
-- Google’s RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) and
CRM retargeting for Gmail Sponsored Promotions
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-- LiveRamp (for display campaigns)
-- Tedemis and Trigger Mail (for email campaigns)
For most of these ad products, you’ll use the data, including email
addresses, from your own CRM or database (Salesforce, for example).
To take advantage of others, like FBX, you first need to place a pixel on
your site that will help track user behavior. It’s recommended that you
get the pixel installed ASAP to start collecting data – even if you don’t
have any plans to act on that data for a few weeks.
Now that you’re off and running and gathering your own data, let’s
move to the second trend in focus: what to do with the data.
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Trend #3: Attack of the Data: Tags,
Analytics, Attribution, and DMPs
We covered first-party data and the ease in which you can collect
If you haven’t already, chances are good you’re going to be approached
it. 2nd-party and 3rd-party data is also readily available; you get
by someone telling you that you need to procure some help within
2nd-party data through partnerships with platforms like Google or
every one of the above buckets. But before you invest too heavily, there
Facebook, and you buy 3rd-party data from behavioral marketing
are some questions you’ll have to answer in order to get the most out
companies (this data’s accessible to everybody).
of your spend:
So the problem is not getting data; the problem is knowing what to do
-- How do all of these providers fit together?
with it.
-- What would be nice to have, and what do I need to
have?
Tools for collecting and sifting through data are popping up
everywhere; many a company has been founded over the last couple of
years in an attempt to provide the data-analysis solution. These tools
and companies fall into a handful of key buckets, including:
-- Attribution (e.g. Convertro, Adometry)
-- Tag Management (e.g. Google Tag Manager,
Ensighten)
-- DMPs (e.g. BlueKai)
-- Analytics (e.g. Google Analytics, Coremetrics)
-- Business Intelligence (e.g. Tableau, Clear Analytics)
-- What kind of a team do I need to interpret – and act on
– the data I’ll get from these providers?
-- Does the cost of data collection (money, time, other
resources) outweigh the benefits?
These are, of course, questions you’ll have asked before, about other
as-yet unassimilated features and services. You know the drill; the
trick is not to fall prey to the mentality that you need to pay for all of it
to keep up – at least, not until you know how to use the new
functionality and what you’ll aim to get out of it. Especially when you
consider that it’ll be multiplied across our next trend…
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Trend #4: Overwhelming Choice:
More Channels and More Devices
CMOs of yesteryear (let’s say 2006) had it relatively easy when
-- LinkedIn
assessing the landscape of digital marketing channels and devices.
-- Facebook
Back then, if you optimized your SEM and SEO campaigns and made
-- Twitter
sure your landing page looked good on a computer, you were good to
go.
-- Pinterest
Today? Well, even ignoring the fact that SEO and SEM themselves
-- Tumblr
have evolved radically from previous incarnations (Pandas, Penguins,
-- Instagram
Authorship, PLAs, Search Retargeting, Enhanced Campaigns…), the
landscape is infinitely more complex, thanks to many (many) more
marketing channels and many (many) more devices on which those
-- Reddit
• Owned
channels are now viewed.
-- Social brand pages
Let’s start with the channels, breaking them down into eight (!) broad
-- Corporate website
categories, with some well-known examples:
-- Blog
1. Search
• SEO
• SEM
2. Social
• Paid/Earned
-- Newsletter
3. Display
•
•
•
•
Ad exchanges (DoubleClick, AppNexus, etc.)
Premium
Private marketplace
Retargeting (AdRoll, Retargeter, etc.)
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4. Video (YouTube, BrightRoll, etc.)
If your head is spinning by this point, it’s a good time to bring up the
5. Mobile
fifth trend.
6. Native Advertising (what is it, you ask? Here you go)
7. Affiliate Marketing
8. Email Marketing
As for where those ads and marketing campaigns are served, it’s
not as simple as computers – or even computers, smartphones, and
tablets – anymore. CMOs of the future need to consider wearables
(Google Glass, smartwatches), the Internet of Things, and IPTV – along
with other platforms we haven’t dreamt of yet.
Each of those devices has a very different user experience and consumer mentality. As we’ve all learned by now, what works on desktop
can’t simply be transferred to mobile…now multiply that principle a
few more times, across all of those advertising/marketing channels,
and you’ve got some decisions to make.
What this boils down to is major “opportunity cost” issues – whether
your marketing team is in-house, a single agency, or spread out over
multiple agencies (we’ll get to that discussion in a second), you’ll
almost certainly have to concede that not every combination of
channel/device can, or even should be, optimized. This means that
CMOs will need to balance sufficient testing budgets with the pursuit
of ROI targets to discover which new channels may be more crucial
than others.
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Trend #5: Scaling Online Marketing
Requires Help!
For even Fortune 500 companies, in-house teams simply don’t have
should be dedicated to finding outside experts where needed – for
the resources to manage every single combination of
technology/software, for campaign management, for collecting all that
channels/devices. And rare is the single agency that can do the same.
data you’ve been craving. At some point, you may tire of paying other
CMOs, therefore, will need to get better and better about specialty
parties to do something for which you believe you have the resources…
staffing and shopping for service providers and technologies.
but again, know the opportunity costs before you go too deeply into
For most SEM campaigns, fewer than 5% of the keywords drive more
one or two rabbit holes.
than 90% of revenue and profit. The last 10% of revenue is coming
from often-unoptimized keywords that, if given a little attention, could
prove hugely beneficial – but who has time to address the other 95%?
Moreover, while a few publishers – Google and Facebook in particular
– are dominating online marketing, competitors like Twitter, LinkedIn,
Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo loom. If your company is only keeping track
of the top channels now, you may well need help as new channels
emerge (remember back in 2012, when many experts predicted that
Facebook would never be an advertising platform?).
Your company can’t keep track of all the data and all the devices
and all the channels we’ve identified in the previous sections – and
it doesn’t have to. Instead of starting off on the impossible task of
building a marketing department that can manage everything, CMOs
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Conclusion
Could this whitepaper be obsolete in a year? Sure, in that features and
platforms will have advanced, we may have access to more and
different types of data, and different companies will certainly have
emerged as leaders. But if you’ve taken anything from this, it should
be that the industry is becoming more and more complex – options for
channels, devices, and data have radically changed what it means to
be a digital marketer. (Your best-run campaigns in 2013, if
unexpanded, look pretty unsophisticated right now.) That general
trend isn’t changing anytime soon.
The takeaways: be sure to stay on top of the trends, and know when
to engage top partners rather than spread yourself and your team too
thin trying to keep up with everything. Good luck!
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About the Author
David Rodnitzky is founder and CEO of 3Q Digital, the largest
independent digital marketing agency in the Bay Area. Prior to
founding 3Q Digital in 2008, he held senior marketing roles at
several Internet companies, including Rentals.com (2000-2001),
FindLaw (2001-2004), Adteractive (2004-2006), and Mercantila
(2007-2008). David currently serves on advisory boards for several
companies, including Marin Software, MediaBoost, Mediacause, and a
stealth travel start-up.
David is a regular speaker at major SEM conferences and has
contributed to numerous influential publications, including Venture
Capital Journal, CNN Radio, Newsweek, Advertising Age, Marketing
Land, and Search Engine Land.
David has a B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago and a J.D.
with honors from the University of Iowa. In his spare time, David
enjoys salmon fishing, hiking, spending time with his family, and
watching the Iowa Hawkeyes, not necessarily in that order.
5 Trends Today’s CMOs Must Recognize
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About 3QDigital
3Q Digital believes clients deserve three things from a digital
marketing agency: passionate service and complete transparency
(EQ); channel-specific intelligence and knowledge (IQ) to develop new
strategies as digital marketing evolves; and rock-solid execution (XQ)
to ensure optimization of every campaign.
The company developed these beliefs as PPC Associates (2008-2013),
which made its mark as a pioneering, results-oriented SEM agency
before expanding to offer best-in-class services in display advertising,
social media advertising, mobile advertising, video advertising, and
SEO. 3Q Digital works with some of today’s fastest-growing clients,
including GoPro, Square, California Closets, RelaxTheBack,
SurveyMonkey, Fitbit, and Eventbrite.
If you’re interested in learning more about 3Q Digital’s services, please
call us at 650 539-4625 or visit http://www.3QDigital.com/contact/.
3Q Digital is based in Silicon Valley and has offices in San Francisco,
Chicago, San Diego, and Burlington, VT.
5 Trends Today’s CMOs Must Recognize
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For more
information on how
3Q Digital can help
your marketing
campaigns:
CALL US @ 650.539.4124
EMAIL US AT
[email protected]
REACH OUT ON
3QDIGITAL.COM/CONTACT/
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