CMO's: 3 Recommendations for Personalization Done Right

As a CMO, you know that the power of knowing your audience is only valuable if you know how to target them through specific messaging. As an Integrated Marketing student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I’m sharing my take on AdAge’s and Impact’s ideas for how to use personalization the right way. 

In January of 2018, Jim Rund shared AdAge’s predictions for the future of personalization. He incorporated findings from Epsilon’s study that revealed consumers are 80% more likely to do business with a company when given a personalized experience. CMOs and senior marketers from Cracker Barrel, Walgreens, and GIA contributed with their projected personalization plans for 2018. Among their strategies were identifying and connecting with the right people, building persona profiles, tailoring messaging according to data, and measuring impact over time. 

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While these efforts have been shown to improve the customer experience, Impact writer   Ramona Sukhraj identified the down side of personalization. Using research from Forrester, Gartner, Infosys and more, Sukari reveals some of marketer’s pain points. One of the biggest possible risks is that many brands use large segments to break up targets, resulting in a less customized experience. They also find it difficult to achieve a clear view of customers, admitting to their lack of relevant technology. Finally, she shares that personalization can only be successful once brands have gained a true knowledge of consumer’s specific affinities and preferences. 

From these two articles and my own experience as a Northwestern marketing student, I have developed three recommendations for developing your personalization strategy. They are:

·     Use Personalization Wisely

If you are going to tailor your messaging, craft it based on the actual needs and interests of your customers, not empty demographics.

·     Know Your Target Markets

Understand what is actually important to each segment you want to target without clumping them too broadly together.

·     Create Data-Driven Content

Analyze your data regularly and adjust your messaging strategy accordingly, even if it means reorganizing segments. 

Keep these items in mind to develop killer content that your customers will love.

Teresa De Pinto is a 4^thyear Communications and Marketing student at Northwestern University. She is passionate about creative marketing strategy, positive psychology, and travel. 

You can connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

CMOs: 3 Ways to Accelerate Big Data Analysis Transformation in Your Company

Big data is exciting. As a CMO, you know Big Data is becoming more and more critical to your business' success. As an IMC graduate student in Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications in Northwestern University, I’ve been doing some research in how traditional companies transform into a data-centric company, and here are two articles that best address the issue.

The first article, titled “Getting big impact from big data” by David Court and published in January 2015 talks about how to take advantage of advancements in analytics and mobilize the organization to make a big impact on the company from big data. New data analysis techniques and tools are introduced to deal with the challenge of achieving scale of impact. The real challenges lie beyond new tools, and ask for more focus on change management, more job redefinition, and more cultural change.

Another article talks about data transformation is by Derek Steer, the Co-Founder/CEO of MODE.  This article, titled “Building credibility for your analytics team- and why it matters”, published on January 21^st, 2015 focuses on how to build credibility for the analytics team in the company and over time turns the company into a data-centric firm. First start with simple tasks, then analyze and communicate effectively with colleagues, think data as a conversation starter, not a diagnosis, and make the process of data analysis transparent and understandable to other teams.

After reviewing these articles, and based on my experience through the IMC program, here are three action items any CMO or marketing manager should immediately begin to think about and take actions on:

• Start small - Start with simple tasks that give immediate returns. This establishes the trust and over time builds confidence in the company.

• Redefine jobs - Automating part of the jobs requires redefining job responsibilities to best leverage and support the ongoing development of big data.

• Change culture - Build a foundation of data-driven culture in the company by developing competitions that reward and recognize the teams that can generate powerful insights through analytics.

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I am currently a graduate student in Northwestern University Medill School, and major in Integrated Marketing and Communications. I will graduate in December 2015 and am looking for employments in data analytics. If there is anything you would like to discuss with me, you can reach me @AmeliaChenZhao on Twitter.

Social Media recipes to measure your brand's success

As a brand manager, your brand's presence in social media is critical but difficult to measure. In my selection of coursework at Northwestern University, I have been studying the issue of measurement of social media activities (and activities on other new media platforms). Customers today constantly hop back and forth between offline and online media. Although many organizations have activated social media programs, majority struggle to measure its impact on revenue. In this post, I will highlight some important findings on this burning topic of how to measure social success for your brand.

To tell this cryptic correlation, Altimeter Group, a research and advisory firm based in San Mateo, California, conducted a study to understand challenges, as well as strategies for understanding the financial impact of social media. In her report titled “The Social Media ROI Cookbook”, analyst Susan Etlinger, lays out the best practices and “recipes” that organizations are using to understand its impact.

While the report sites multiple challenges, the prime challenge that organizations struggle with is actually tying social media to business objectives. But, while revenue is important, it isn’t everything. Eighty-four percent of survey respondents reported that the primary business impact of social media was not revenue generation, but “insight that helped us meet customer experience goals.”

Based on this research, the Altimeter team identified six primary guidelines that brands are using to measure the revenue impact of social media.

What is important to remember is that while top-down approaches provide business context and bottom-up approaches provide granularity, they are most valuable when viewed in context of each other to evaluate the complete picture.

Based on the Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) model, the lesson for a brand manager is that the criteria for choosing the right measurement mix are:

· Identify your business type: the way your company goes to market (exclusively online or multi-channel) largely drives what is possible when it comes to revenue measurement.

· Assess your service or product type: sales cycle is key criteria in determining revenue measurement strategy, sales cycle vary considerably for low consideration and high consideration purchases

· Factor in your media mix: the type of medium (Paid, Earned and/or Owned) also influences your measurement method, as you can only measure online properties that you control.

· Consider your customer profile: possibly the most important factor, the type of customer (business, consumer and/or highly social) will determine what measurement is possible

To conclude, it’s important to remember that in real terms we are still at the very beginning of social business and no one set of measures can tell you everything. But looking at the granular data in context of broader trends will deliver a more representative view of the revenue impact of social media.

By Nikhil Kaul


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nikhil Kaul is a technophile, shutterbug, avid traveler, and foodie. When not indulging, he seeks problems in the ever-evolving marketplace to rattle his brain for solutions. A masters' student of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, he enjoys wrestling with the challenges that businesses face due to the increasing influence of new media and changing customer behavior.