CMOs: The Right Way to do Inbound Marketing

As a CMO, you know today’s consumer is more empowered than ever. Not only are they finding more and more ways of avoiding disruptive marketing, but actively seeking the media content that they do want to consume. As an undergraduate at Northwestern in Medill School of Journalism’s Integrated Marketing Certificate program,  with an interest in Inbound Marketing, I have found two articles detailing the do’s and dont’s of effective inbound marketing. Based on these two article, I have drawn three recommended action items that I think would truly maximize your company’s marketing efforts.

       In “5 Key Inbound Marketing Considerations for Marketing Managers”  Kerry Butters from XEN life discusses five essential strategies and tactics to employ for a successful inbound marketing campaign. She encourages (1) high quality blogging to drive cross-channel traffic and build trust with consumers, (2) developing a well-informed and holistic strategy, (3) implementing marketing analytics to prove ROI and inform budget allocation, (4) mobile advertising to reach the widest audience, and (5) using banner ads that are valuable to the consumer, visually attractive, and relevant to a particular site’s visitors.  

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On the other hand, in  “5 Catastrophic Inbound Marketing Mistakes That Can Risk Your Brand in 2016” Vibhu Satpaul from iamwire highlights some of the mistakes to avoid when it comes to inbound marketing. He writes against (1) publishing content that is not directly relevant to your consumers, (2) ignoring the importance of keywords in consumer search queries, (3) not blogging regularly enough or disregarding it  from your inbound marketing strategy altogether, (4) excluding call-to-actions or links to further information to help consumers in their decision process, and (5) not basing an inbound marketing campaign on an appropriate buyer persona.

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After reviewing these two articles, and from my experience with this topic as an undergraduate in Northwestern’s IMC program, I have developed three recommended actions items to help make your marketing campaigns more effective and increase profitability:

• Educate and entertain. Aim for high quality blogging by educating and entertaining your audience with thoughtful pieces, avoiding self-promotion, having industry expert or specialist writing your content, and posting fresh content regularly (in order to increase your site’s visibility).
• Construct a persona. Develop an appropriate buyer persona by seeking to understand the unique needs and challenges of your target audience and develop a focused content strategy based on these insights.
• Use smart keywords. Make sure to insert the keywords that you know your customers are using in trying to find solutions to their concerns.

About the author: Tania Argüello is an undergraduate student at Northwestern majoring in Communication Studies and pursuing the Medill School of Journalism’s Integrated Marketing Certificate. Upon graduating in June 2016, she is interested in pursuing a marketing position in a creative, advertising or branding agency. For more content or just to chat about the marketing, branding or communications, you can contact her at LinkedIn or Twitter.

CMOs: 3 steps to implement Big Data road map

Big Data helps to bring excellent customer experience that not only improves company’s performance but also reduces costs and boosts profits. It facilitates marketers to get tasks done more effectively and efficiently. However, many marketing managers face the challenge of capturing, integrating and analyzing Big Data when carrying out the practice into daily work. As a Northwestern Medill Integrated Marketing Communication graduate student, I have found two articles closely related to the topic: the benefits of Big Data, and the current challenges of implementing Big Data into practice.

eMarketer’s article “Big Data Helps Reveal Consumer Behavior” indicated that more and more companies began to see the positive returns of their investment on Big Data in various areas. According to the survey conducted by Forbes Insights and Rocket Fuel, among US agencies and brand managers, 85% indicated that big data helped to yield more than half of marketing initiatives regarding to increasing insights into consumer behavior. It helped the company to yield improvement in sales, sigh-ups, registrations, ROI and customer satisfaction. Both advertising agency and marketers recognized benefits of developing insights into customer experiences, identifying products customers wanted, and establishing the corresponding strategy.

(Source: http://www.emarketer.com/)

According to Kevin Geraghty in his article “The CMO’s Guide to Bid Data” Big data allowed marketers to create a highly effective marketing program that can connect with your customers closer and beat your competitors. It enabled marketers to retain the customer, identify new customers, reveal new marketing opportunities, driving profitable advertising, and measure ROI. However, the author also argued that when implementing the big data into work, the company was facing some challenges such as developing efficient infrastructure that supports big data and identifying ways to connect disparate data together. It’s important for marketers to consider those problems when approaching the process.''

Based on the insights in my research, here are 3 efficient and effective ways for CMO to implement Big Data into practice.

1.     Develop Your Team - Appoint an experienced data scientist in charge of the data analysis.

2.     Aggressively Collect Data - Marketers need to collect data from both inside and outside of the company.

3.     Develop Insights - Find the right technologies and software to clean up the unstructured data to fine insights.

In order to deliver great experience, marketing managers need to find the right person with the right message and product at the right time in the right place. Machine-generated data, personal productively applications’ data, and mixed-media data all help markets to understand the increasingly complex customer decisions journeys and improve the experience during each touch-points to enhance the interactions with the company. It’s important for marketers to leverage big data to understand your customers and expand your business.






Yilun Cao is currently a master student major in Integrated Marketing Communication at theNorthwestern University. She is now studying marketing analytics and brand strategy. She has earned Bachelor’s Degree in Communication at the University of Washington. Yilun can be reached by Twitter @yilun_cao.

Marketers: 3 Steps to Make Big Data Work Better for Your Company

Today, marketers are focusing on the power of new types of Big Data to improve their analytic systems, to better drive profits to their company's bottom line. As a graduate student at Northwestern Medill School studying Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), I have been following many thought leaders in the world of analytics to learn where this trend of Big Data is headed. Here are two articles that focus on moving forward from Big Data being just a buzz word to becoming a valuable resource for marketers everywhere.

Alon Even, VP of Marketing at Appsee points out an often overlooked challenge in “Big Data and mobileanalytics: Ready to rule 2015”. Although the volume, variety, velocity and veracity of big data has brought us an abundance of information, the rate at which new data is being collected simply cannot be handled by the number of data analysts in the industry. Therefore, instead of being blindly excited by the abundance of collected data, marketers must shift focus and invest in finding “next-generation analytics” that can effectively and efficiently identify the valuable “whys” among the plethora of “whats”. It is not big data itself, but the ability to sift through it, find the valuable insights, and create actionable plans based on the information that will ultimately bring value to businesses.

Image Source: http://nextgendistribution.com.au/industry-trends/big-data/

Andrew Sheridan of Business 2 Community believes that "2015 Will Be the Year of Turning Big Data into Actionable Insights". While the act of collecting data has provided us with a strong foundation to work with, we must take simple aggregation a step further, really looking into the data to answer “why” questions and provide explanations for customer behavior.

From my graduate learning in the Northwestern Medill IMC program and my review of these two articles, I have developed 3 action items you need to consider to convert "Big Data" into "Smart Data". They are:

• Actively Seek New, Smart Data– Collect information regarding your customers, but  keep efficiency in mind. Today's world offers marketers an endless supply of data so instead of collecting everything, make sure to keep the marketing goals in mind and collect only what is relevant and actionable. Who is the target? If  it is mobile customers, look into data from the company's mobile app users. Using the appropriate sources is key.

• Find Greater Value by Translating Data – Go a step further and ask what the data is saying. What do the numbers mean? Why are the customers behaving in a certain way? What trends are there? What improvements is the data suggesting you to make? These questions will enable marketers to discover the hidden insights within the data.

• Utilize Data for Feedback – In addition to providing insights, data can also provide feedback, allowing marketers to reevaluate their plans and strategies after they have been implemented. What are the results? Rely on analytics to evaluate your performance and make modifications or improvements for the future.

Marketers can transform big data from being simply a buzz word into actionable marketing strategies that will bring positive impact.

Jaeyeon is a graduate student pursuing a M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Previously, she has worked at a travel technology company that aggregated flight data coming in from hundreds of sources into a comprehensive database. After seeing how big data can bring value to businesses, she decided to become a data-driven marketer herself. She also holds a B. A. in Economics from Amherst College. You can follow her on twitter @JaeyeonC or connected with her on Linkedin.