CMOs: 3 Tips to leverage real time marketing and improve KPIs

As a CMO, you are always trying to follow trends in the marketplace and making use of new technologies and tools to drive up your marketing results. As a graduate student in the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program at Medill, Northwestern University, I keep digging into the cutting-edge field of digital, social and mobile marketing and have found 2 articles that may be insightful to you.

With vivid examples, Peter Miller stressed in his article, “Five lessons learned from leading brands' real-time marketing efforts”, that by using real time marketing marketers must differentiate their brands, add value to customers and brands, consider the long term value of every content, keep to beconsistent if not outstanding, and last but not least, stick to their strategy and show off the brands’ personalities and humors.

Source:http://www.juanmarketing.com/

Anne-Marie Kline played with the concepts of real-time marketing and right time marketing in her article “Failed at real-time marketing? Try right-time instead”, but what she meant by “right time marketing” is to provide right content at the right time to right customers, which is making good use of real-time marketing. Her insights about real-time marketing can be concluded into 5 parts: people don’t share ads, events can make temporary great content, data prevent waste, content can come from everywhere and the entire web is social.

Based on these 2 articles and my graduate education, here are 3 tips from me to help you leverage real-time marketing and better reach your target customers:

• Create Relevant Content - Make sure your content is really relevant to customers so you can better trigger their interest.
• Use data wisely – Leveraging data can help to personalize the content you would like to send out to your prospects and optimize timing.
• Deliver consistent content - Keep your content consistent to your market strategy and your brand image, otherwise your target market might be confused.

The 3 simple tips will help you to avoid send irrelevant content to your target market and cut down costs as well as eliminate any possible harm to your company’s reputation. Follow the 3 tips and you can deliver the right content to right audience at the right time. Sounds great? Then just start from now!

Junhui ‘Jenny’ Zhu is a full-time M.S. candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, focusing on digital marketing and data analytics. She is interested in how market research and big data can help in optimizing marketing plans. She will graduate in Dec. 2015 and would like to work in the market research field. You can contact her at:

LinkedIn: Junhui Zhu   Twitter: @jennyjunhuizhu

#CEO #CMO, 3 Steps to Turn the Little Hashtags into a Powerful Tool

As CEOs and CMOs, you are definitely familiar with those little hashtags that appears everywhere, some of which might be #yourcompany. As a graduate student in Northwestern University Medill School’s Integrated Marketing CommunicationsProgram, I have put my emphasis on leveraging social media to boost brands and have found two articles that are of interest to CEOs and CMOs who are willing to better understand the powerful hashtags for their brands.

In his article How to Use Hashtags to Increase Your Social Media Presence, Warren Knight indicated that hashtags, when being used strategically, can create huge popularity around your brand. Tweets with hashtags could double engagement rate. You could use hashtags at various occasions like sales promotions, special offers or educate others of your brand, but you have to make the hashtags you use concise and unique. Furthermore, you should also measure some KPIs (e.g. number of reposts, number of replies, link click etc.) in order to see whether your hashtag strategy works and if not, you should make adjustment accordingly.
 

Source: gregbeazley.com

In another article written by Warren Knight, 8 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid in 2014, he specified 8 mistakes to avoid, all of which could be applied to hashtag usage and eventually could be broken down into the following three points: First, don’t use hashtags to build your brand without a strategy. You should first know social media well and then build a strategy specifically for hashtags. Second, don’t blindly create social media presence on every possible social media platforms. Figure out where your customers aggregate and use hashtags to engage them where they are. Third, don’t use too much hashtags in one tweet. Confusing your customers is the least thing you want to do.

After reviewing these 2 articles, here are 3 actions CEOs and CMOs should consider taking:
 

l  Monitor Social: Do consumer research and social monitoring, know where they are and what they are talking about.
 

l  Define Social Strategy: Develop social media strategy as well as hashtag strategy and act accordingly.
 

l  Track KPIs: Constantly keep tracking your KPIs and make necessary adjustment.

Those three actions should be done in a sequential way and should form a loop. Though as CEOs and CMOs, you don’t have to change your strategy constantly, some minor update resulting from changes in consumer behaviors should be reflected in the strategy. If all three actions could be followed in a sequential way, hashtags will be at your service and create huge returns based on little investment.

 

Qingyang (Fernando) Ding is a Master of Science Candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill School, Northwestern University concentrating in Social, Digital Media and Branding, who is expected to graduate in December 2014. He is a four language speaker with multi-cultural background and is good at uncovering insights. With previous internship experience in automobile, industrial design, cosmetic and international commerce industries, he is aspired to be an exceptional customer oriented brand builder. Contact him on Twitter at @fernando_ding

Digital Analyst: New mindset to excel in the New Data Economy

In the new data economy, digital marketing and analytics is not a should-do thing but a must-do thing. As a graduate student in Northwestern University Medill's M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications program, with a focus on marketing analytics and digital marketing, I have discovered 2 essential articles for Digital Analysts who want to help companies in the new data economy to leverage digital analytics towards better performance.

One of the fascinating things in doing digital marketing is that it is always changing and evolving. According to an article by a blogger Joe McKendrick on Informatica Blog, Analytics 3.0 – The Emerging Data Economy, he summarizes, from a report by International Institute for Analytics, the evolution of data analytics from Analytics 1.0 which was based on relatively small and structured data sources internally to current Analytics 2.0 which are leveraging big data stores and employing prescriptive analytics to target customers. Then the arises Analytics 3.0, which is “Large organizations across industries are joining the data economy and they are not keeping traditional analytics and big data separate, but are combining them to form a new synthesis.” This new state of management “Analytics 3.0” coined by the International Institute for Analytics are the concepts and practices of competing on analytics are no longer confined to data management and IT departments or quants rather analytics are embedded into all key organizational processes. That means models in Analytics 3.0 are often being embedded into operational and decision processes, with dramatically increasing their speed and impact. So as a digital analyst, it is really important to understand this trend and seize the value of Analytics 3.0 to embed real-time analytics into business decisions.

Source: http://blogs.informatica.com/perspectives/2014/03/05/the-emerging-data-economy/

Another important step in doing digital analytics is to have a clear framework to guide through the all process. Digital analytics can be confusing as data is overflowing, so as a digital analyst, you should have the clear objectives and goals to do the analysis and move them into business suggestion and decisions. In an article written by Avinash Kaushi (Author of Digital Marketing, Evangelist – Google and Co-founder - Market Motive), Digital Marketing and Measurement Model it introduces a digital marketing & Measurement Model to guide you as digital analyst to integrate digital analytics into digital marketing. According to Avinash Kaushi, you should always start with identify business objectives whether it is to create awareness, generate leads or highlight events. Then you identify the specific goals for your business objectives and identify the Key Performance Indicators associated with these goals. Finally, you should identify the Targets and valuable Segments for analytics. In a nutshell, the article maintains that it should always be associated with the objectives to have the better measurement.

After reviewing these two articles, as a digital analyst, there are three action items you should immediately consider for your company.

1.   Go real-time with Analytics: Integrate Analytics into real time business decisions.

2.  Always relate to the business objectives: When doing digital marketing, start with business objectives, stick with business objectives and end with them to measure.

3.  Just identify your Key Performance Indicators: The KPIs you measure when doing digital analytics should be specific to your digital marketing

Today digital analytics is the new sexiness in business world. However, as a digital analyst you should really following the framework in this data economy-Analytics 3.0, which means you should embedded real time analytics into your business decisions, always be aware of the business objectives, and identify your KPIs to better measure the ROI of digital marketing.

Feng Liu is a master candidate of Integrated Marketing Communications in Medill, Northwestern University. Previously, he had experience as a market analyst and marketing researcher in China. And he has always been interested in marketing analytics and digital marketing and is dedicated to purse a career on these fields. If you have questions or comments,  please contact me through Twitter @blakeliu0711 or Email: blake.liu@u.northwestern.edu