CMOs Listen Up! Don’t Leave Active Social Listening Out of the Equation

As a CMO or Brand Manager, it is vital to learn as much as you can about your high value markets.  As a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications program I have been exposed to many cutting edge thought leaders in the industry, and will share my thoughts about why the combination of quantitative data analysis needs to be paired with qualitative social listening to reveal key insights and strategic inspiration for your company.

Active social listening can yield valuable time sensitive insights leading to strategic inspiration.  According to the article Get More Value Out of Social Media Brand-Chatter by Susan Fournier and Bob Rietveld, it is becoming more common for companies to have their ear to the ground when it comes to social media, but it begs the question: what actually happens from there?  Often times findings may be reviewed, but is ultimately filed away.   Listening social just to say you’re doing it is not going to magically produce any results.  To actively listen is to take in the information, analyze it, and turn it into useful insights.  According to Fournier and Rietveld, “Sometimes the correlations are low between what you think you know and what social listening reveals. But that doesn’t mean you should jettison the listening data; it just means you need to consider both sets of findings simultaneously to decipher the true story.” In addition to being a must-have, social listening is inexpensive, with a high dollar-to-insight ratio.  Now that’s something that should be music to your ears.

Image Source: Sales Force Marketing Cloud

The article The Art of Listening Completely to Social Data by Erick Brethenoux discusses how listening completely to social data is essential to truly understanding your consumers.  According to Brethenoux, “The most crucial step to targeting your marketing efforts is vetting consumer data carefully through marketing analytics technology and a disciplined eye.”  Active social listening can reveal emotional triggers that are the driving force behind consumer behavior, however listening to what makes one single person tick on a given day is not particularly helpful.  Some companies view social listening in this light, and therefore discard it as useless.  However, pairing active social listening with Big Data driven insights to reveal what collectively makes a group tick is huge.  From here, a strategy can be crafted to provide a personalized meaningful experience that really speaks to the consumer. 

After analyzing these two articles and combining this information with insights I have gained from my professional experience and courses at Northwestern, I propose that there are 3 actions you can take to put these strategies to work for you:

• Listen Broadly - Get to work on actively listening to social 24/7, and be prepared to pair your findings with data analysis.  Don’t slack off, don’t fudge your results, and don’t discard what you hear because it does not align with what you had envisioned hearing. 

• Analyze Data – Put Big Data to work for you, but don’t use those findings alone.  Get ready to combine these findings with your social active listening.      

• Take Action – Combining the qualitative results of active social listening plus the quantitative data analysis is a great jump point for you to strategize.  Make the most of your findings by providing a meaningful, personalized experience for your consumer that engages them and drives them to action.

Big Data analysis can help to transform what was once indistinguishable noise into insights.  This is a great start, but don’t kick your shoes off and put your sweatpants on just yet.   Where there is noise, you have to listen up!  Combine your new found filtered insight with active social listening, and you can paint a vivid picture of not just where you are headed, but where you need to go. 

Nikki Ilchert is a Communications Coordinator for RealSource Association of Realtors, a not-for-profit trade organization.  She is currently a Master of Science candidate in the Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University with an emphasis on Digital Marketing and Analytics.  Nikki is the proud mother of 2 rescue dogs, Buddy and Goose, and is currently on track to graduate in June of 2015.   Keep the conversation going with Nikki on Twitter @nikkiilchert or LinkedIn.

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

Maximizing the ROI of Your Email Marketing Program

In my years as a marketing communications professional - and especially as an email marketer - I'm constantly told that to maximize results, I need to be constantly testing content, copy, images, and layout to multiple test audiences. In fact, Internet marketing and advertising news publication ADOTAS says it’s one of the things you simply cannot ignore if you want to have a successful email marketing campaign. But in the real world, it’s just not always possible. At many companies, writers and layout artists are stretched too thin and can’t possibly create that many messages.


So where to start? Email Marketing firm iContact has some great ideas about things you can test that won’t take up too much time but will still get results. 

• Subject Lines - If you do nothing else, make sure you’re testing subject lines. If you can’t get people to open your emails, any other content testing you’re doing won’t even be seen. And let’s be real—it takes almost no time to write two or three subject lines.  

• Images - Similar to subject lines, it’s not difficult at all to pick two masthead or main images and see which resonates more with openers. For examples: if you’re selling hotel rooms, test hotel exterior image vs. guestroom shot or spa vs. restaurant. If you’re selling men’s clothing, how about pants vs. shirts or clothes vs. accessories.

• Call to Action - Test text or colors. Does “Book Now” or “Save 20% in Cancun” work better? Orange or blue text? Any of these are easy to change and can get instant results.

With just these simple steps, you'll immediately begin learning more about what tactics will get results with your audience. And even better, if you can prove that you get results with just these simple steps, you’ll have numbers that will back up your efforts and could lead to you convincing superiors to give you more resources.

Pete Roccaforte has been a marketing communications professional for nearly 10 years and is currently a graduate student in the Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School. Follow him at @proccaforte or on LinkedIn.