Key Findings of the study:

• The most proactive CMOs are trying to understand individuals as well as markets
• CMOs in the most successful enterprises are focusing on relationships, not just transactions
• The outperformers are committed to developing a clear ‘corporate character’
• Most CMOs are struggling in one vital respect – return on investment

The report goes on to explain each finding and concludes by saying  that the vast majority of CMOs believe there are three key areas for improvement:

1. They must understand and deliver value to empowered customers
2. Create lasting relationships with those customers
3. Measure marketing’s contribution to the business

If the internet was seen as a major game changing due to the opening of new sales channels, now the advent of social media is definitely turning everything on its head once more. Customers are not only more savvy when it comes to researching before buying, they are empowered and can lift or destroy a brand in a manner of a few well executed tweets. Interestingly enough, the IBM study shows only 48% of CMOs feel prepared to face the new complexity digital channels create.

Part of the new challenge is also making sense of all the data. Despite the myriad of tools available to monitor the many channels consumers now use to express their feelings about products and services, effectively mining this data is still a big obstacle.

The report, which is available for download for free, is an interesting read and can generate some debate in your company about whether you are prepared or not to face the realities of the modern CMO.

According to a recent study by the Lenskold Group, 44% of marketers have no idea. That’s why Marketo’s eBook “The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics” is a welcome guide. And, best of all, is free!

Marketing Metrics Demystified

The eBook is broken down in 4 parts:

Part 1: Accountability, ROI and Framework
Part 2: Revenue Analytics
Part 3: Program Metrics
Part 4: Forecasting, Dashboards, & Implementation

Marketing measurement has been a tough problem to crack. It used to be that we lacked the necessary tools to accurately give CFO’s and CEO’s the answers they wanted and so, marketing was mostly an exercise in faith. Now, with CRM, Marketing Automation, Web Analytics, and other technologies marketers are running out of excuses.

76% of B2B marketing professionals agree or strongly agree that their “ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect.” – Forrester Research

Marketo’s eBook sheds some light into the process of finally being able to measure marketing activities.

Calculating Marketing ROI

As a companion to the eBook they point to a marketing calculator created by the Lenskold Group which lets you tweak your marketing numbers and see how the different metrics affect your overall ROI.

Lenskold Group Lead Gen Online Calculator

But most importantly, they give a useful framework for creating your own marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and segment those metrics into three different groups:

• Business Performance Metrics and KPI’s: These look at the past, answering the question “how did we do?”
• Diagnostic Metrics: Focus on the present, answering the question “what is working?”
• Leading Indicators: Those forward looking metrics, answer “how will we be doing?”

If you can arm yourself with these set of metrics, you’ll be well prepared for the next time you have to justify your budget to the CEO.

Measuring Your Marketing Performance

The 70-page eBook may seem daunting at first, and it could use some trimming here and there to make it a bit more palatable. If you’re already convinced you need to start tracking results and just want to get to the key steps for doing it, you can skip ahead and start on Chapter 3, A Framework for Measurement.

Filled with examples and suggested metrics, you’re sure to fill up a notebook with ideas and metrics you can use in your own business. The Program Measurement chapter is especially interesting because it brings up typical questions marketers ask themselves when it comes to measuring, like first touch or last touch, lead velocity, and what makes a good control group.

“The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics” – Check it out!

It’s a quick read with nice graphics that walks you through the evolution of content marketing, from the late 1800′s to current times. Did you know that…

• Michelin started producing free tour guides in 1900?
• Jell-O was close to shutting down in 1904 and was saved by giving away free recipe books to housewives?
• In the early 1990′s fax machines were touted the next big thing in automated marketing messaging?
• The first corporate blog coming from a Fortune 500 company was Microsoft’s Channel 9, released in 2004?
• It wasn’t until 2008 that QR Codes started being considered by US companies as major components of marketing campaigns?

Looking at past marketing success stories can give you some good ideas for your own future campaigns. I encourage you to check out the slideshow and download the eBook to learn more.

How Jell-O’s Content Marketing Tactics Saved the Company

In the early 1900′s, gelatin desserts were not a new invention. Housewives were already familiar with crystallized gelatin from Knox and Cox, which were first developed in 1890 by Charles Knox. The idea was to simplify a very difficult process (making gelatin required hours of work in the kitchen, boiling, cooling, adding ingredients, etc.) by offering ready-made gelatin crystals that would save housewives time and produce the same, if not better, results. Furthermore, the new gelatin became an affordable food item that anyone could make.

But then Jell-O came along, with a great new way of preparing gelatin. It offered the same crystallized gelatin known by housewives, but with flavor. You see, making gelatin still required housewives to add flavor during the process and Jell-O now offered a very practical way to shorten and simplify it! It became Americas first packaged dessert mix.

Since the great appeal to Jell-O was the fact that it was easy to make, many ads touted its virtue by saying things like “No baking! Simply add boiling water!” and “No recipe book required!”. That was in direct competition against the Knox product, which had already been distributing recipe cookbooks to housewives showing them how to make gelatin using their crystallized gelatin packages for some time.

The Appeal of Free and Wide Distribution
Sales, though, didn’t take off until Frank Woodward, Jell-O’s new owner decided to go the recipe book way much like Knox had been doing for years. He sent salesman door-to-door delivering the recipe books – for free – in a last attempt to jump-start sales.

While Knox’s recipe books were already being offered at grocery stores (whether they were free or not is not clear), Woodward’s audacious move of sending his salesman directly to households was a winner. The wider reach (millions of households) of his recipe books ensured Jell-O became a recognized name and literally saved the company.

Knox Gelatine Recipe Book, 1896

Jell-O Recipe Book, early 1900's

Customer-Driven Advertising is Born
In 1920 it seems Jell-O’s manufacturer (the Genesee Pure Food Company) had inadvertently bought a series of ad placements in the American Legion Weekly magazine. It’s not clear what made them do it, but they definitely regretted doing it. And so after running a couple of ads, they decided to change tactics and created a Jell-O ad featuring a recipe book offer. In a “letter to the reader” the magazine’s advertising manager explains that the magazine was in financial trouble and that it was trying to convince food companies to continue advertising with them. If only requests for the new Jell-O cookbook came in, they could then convince Jell-O to renew their advertising with the magazine.

Whether the whole thing was true or not I don’t know, but what happened next is what is important. So many requests came in from readers for the cookbook, that Genesse decided to create a “reader-advertising contest“. The winner had his drawing published and won $200 (a good sum of money for that time). If this reminds you of companies asking customer to submit their own Youtube videos of using the product or creating their own ads, you now know who was the first one to do it!

Content Marketing History Lessons
It’s interesting to note that over 100 years ago some of the same marketing tactics touted today were already being applied. What are some lessons we can draw from this story?

1. Quality content can go a long way.
2. Make it free.
3. Distribution is key.
4. Listen and engage your customers.
5. Just because someone else has already done it doesn’t mean you can’t beat them.

Any other lessons you think we can learn from Jell-O? Let us know!

The Content Marketing History eBook

If you are interested in other lessons from the years gone by or would like to take a quick look at the evolution of content marketing, download the free eBook “A Brief History of Content Marketing”.

Further Reading

For more about the history of Jell-O, check out:

• Jell-O: A Biography
• Dining with Antiques-Gelatin Molds
• Knox Gelatin
• Jell-O: A Shimmering Slice of Americanan
• Wikipedia Entry for Jell-O

The Evolution of Content Marketing

What would you do if your sales were down, merchants were not interested in carrying your product and there was no Twitter, Email, or even no Internet for you to leverage? That’s the problem Frank Woodward faced back in 1904 when his Jell-O product proved to be a disastrous investment.

His last effort was the printing of a huge quantity of Jell-O cookbooks to be distributed by his salesmen throughout the United Sates. The recipe books were given away for free. It was content marketing at its best.

A Brief History of Content Marketing eBook

Stories like that is what motivated us to compile a brief history of content marketing into a free eBook you can download today. This small PDF download walks you through key moments in content marketing history, from the late 1800’s until recent innovations in technology showing us how content marketing was use throughout the past 100 years.

New and Old Content Marketing Stories

Did we miss a great content marketing moment in time? Do you know of an interesting story we should have included? Let us know! Add a comment to this post with your thoughts and suggestions so that we can improve this eBook and release an updated version.

Marketing Strategy and Business Strategy

I like some examples @cspenn uses when defining strategy from a business and campaign perspective. In his post about the nuances of strategy, he talks about a “grand strategy” being the “what” of the entire war. This is like business strategy, defining what is the company trying to achieve. And the next “what”, the campaign strategy, is related to individual campaigns.

While helpful, I think the examples fall short on really clearing up the definitions. Think of it this way:

Business Strategy: What will the company do in order to fulfill it’s mission/vision.
The business strategy lays out the overall plan to steer the company in a direction that will align all departments to work in tandem to achieve the company’s goals (usually translated into specific values such as revenues, EBITDA, market share, etc.).

Strategic business decisions may involve:
- what markets to go after
- what partnerships to forge
- which departments will get more funding

Marketing Strategy: What will the marketing department do in order to support the company’s overall business strategy.
This where the marketing plan is generated. Once you know the company’s goals and it’s overall strategy, the marketing strategy will serve as the guiding principle to get the whole team onboard knowing what their mission is.

For example, while the business strategy may dictate that the company will sell their products via resellers and will penetrate the European market to establish a stronghold there, the marketing strategy will support these decisions by laying out plans to help the resellers (collateral, training, etc.) and plans to help build the European stronghold (awareness campaigns, market research, etc.).

Marketing Strategy And Tactics

The second level is the tactical one, which defines how you will accomplish something. So if the marketing strategy defines that we will support the European expansion by providing thought leadership, doing joint campaigns with local resellers, and engaging in market research to better know the local customer, the tactical plan will contain the specifics of how that will be carried out.

A tactical plan will have, for example:
- The specific topics, formats, and delivery methods of the thought leadership campaign envisioned by the marketing strategy
- Specific targets for the joining of marketing campaigns with planned topics, dates, and content
- More details regarding the market research to be carried out, maybe a breakdown of countries to be surveyed, specific desired outcomes, etc.

Dissipating the Fog

“The reason that there’s so much confusion about strategy is that we’re trying to lump two very different things together under one label”- Christopher S. Penn

I couldn’t agree more. We all talk about ‘marketing strategy’ and use terms interchangeable without realizing we may be explaining tactics instead of strategy and mixing business strategy with marketing strategy. It becomes even more confusing when talking with marketing managers of larger organizations where you may have the overall company marketing strategy, then Business Unit specific marketing strategy and even product-centric marketing strategies. Ouch!

A recent article on HBR Blog, “Strategy on One Page“, gives us a nice and easy “strategy tree” that can help guide discussions for both the business strategy and the marketing strategy. It asks you to answer the questions:

1. Why do you exist / what is your purpose
2. What is your value proposition
3. Who are you trying to serve/target

I like this question format to help guide the creation of the marketing strategy, so here’s what I suggest you ask yourself when putting together your overall plan, the strategy questions:

1. What is marketing’s role in carrying out the corporate strategy?
2. What campaigns and projects should marketing execute given its role?
3. Who are we targeting with our campaigns?

The tactical questions will be:

1. For each of the campaigns and projects outlined before, how are we going to execute them?
2. What resources do we need to execute on the campaigns and projects?
3. How are we going to reach the proposed target market and when?

Supporting Tools for Marketers

The typical marketing strategy and tactical plan usually is born out of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and a bundle of Powerpoint files. The problem is then laying it all out in a way that will help you on a daily basis without losing track of the higher level strategy.

This is one of the reasons why when creating Aprix Marketing Manager, our marketing project management solution, we decided to give you three levels for planning and executing your marketing campaigns.

• First Level: Project or Campaign
• Second Level: Marketing Deliverables
• Third Level: Action Items

However you decide to work on your marketing strategy and marketing tactical plan, I hope this post clarifies the terms and helps solve the confusion.

The typical scenario is:

• Outlook (or other email client) open all the time
• Excel files that the team has to constantly refer back to
• Scattered files on the network

Want a better example of how this works and why is bad? We created a short video to illustrate this scenario. Check it out below.

We’ve all been there, with the myriad of Excel files, the endless emails and lost files… that’s why we created Aprix Marketing Manager. Our goal is simple, “simplify management, maximize marketing”!

Bulldog Solutions

What I liked about the results is that IDC grouped them into three different categories: companies with less than 10 people in their marketing staff, with 10 to 100, and those with 100+. It makes for a much better comparison when you want to benchmark your company against similarly staffed marketing organizations. We all know that if your marketing organization has over 100 people your processes, your budget, your key initiatives and how you allocate resources differs a lot from smaller (1 to 10 people) marketing departments.

That’s a problem I see frequently with other benchmarks and research reports out there where they give you results but down break them down based on how big your marketing department is. Nice going, IDC!

Survey Participants

The research study involved B2B (59%) as well as B2C (41%) companies. A total of 97 companies responded the surveyand the average marketing spend reported per company was $26.8M. I would have liked to see a bigger sample size, but not everyone is willing to spend 30 minutes answering an online survey. By the way, if you’re interested in maybe winning an iPad 2, IDC still has the survey open and (for the time being) is accepting new entries.

The respondents by size of marketing staff were distributed the following way:

Marketing Budget Changes for 2011

According to their research, IDC reported that marketing budgets for 2011 had the following change from 2010:

The 41% of marketers reporting that they saw an increase in their budgets compared to 2010 is a good sign, and you may see that in specific industries that have been recovering better than the rest (technology, for example).

Spend and Staff Allocations

This part was one of the more interesting ones, it shows where the budget is being spend on companies with different sizes of marketing departments, and how they are allocating their marketing staff.

The top categories for marketing spend (percent of marketing budget for programs) for small and medium sized marketing departments are:
1-10 Marketing Staff

• 21% Events
• 20% Advertising
• 11% Direct Marketing
• 9% Public Relations
• 9% Website and content

10-100 Marketing Staff

• 18% Advertising
• 17% Direct Marketing
• 15% Events
• 10% Web and content
• 9% Marketing Sales Support

According to IDC, the biggest budget increase for staff is in product marketing, followed by field marketing. This is true especially on companies with over 100 people in their marketing departments.

From a spend perspective, there has been increases in Marketing Support and Sales Enablement, while Direct Marketing spend has been decreasing, as well as budgets for PR and Events.

Marketing Goals for 2011

Bulldog Solutions shared some data based on their customers, saying that customer acquisition was top of mind for marketing executives. The breakdown of the top priorities for marketing for 2011 are:

• 69% – Customer Acquisition
• 19% – Brand Awareness
• 13% – Customer Retention

Another trend Bulldog Solutions shared was the move towards qualification of leads (marketing qualified and sales qualified leads) and in especial the identification of specific goals for quality. The goal setting is a key move since without understand and sharing common goals for lead quality, sales and marketing won’t be able to get along.

Another interesting data was the move of budgets to online categories. Bulldog Solutions showed the following break down of 2011 marketing spend increases:

Increase % and Category

• 70% => Website
• 68% => Email
• 62% => Social Media
• 57% => Search
• 51% => Video

And these are just the top categories.

The benchmark report should be available online within the week. I’ll make sure to post a link to it when it becomes publicly available.

“Who is doing what” and “when is that task due” are probably the two most common phrases you hear in a marketing department. Especially a few minutes before a marketing staff meeting where everyone has to discuss progress and update the marketing manager on status of campaigns.

For the marketing manager, knowing what’s happening in her department is more than a routine task, is at the core of her responsibilities. Having to report back to senior management on where the money is being spent and getting support for additional marketing campaigns, the marketing manager can’t afford to lose control of what’s going on.

So if you see yourself in this same situation, walking to a meeting with your marketing staff to get updates and walking out of there with notes that will eventually go into an Excel spreadsheet, we have some news for you. Aprix Marketing Manager gives you the power to see, all in one screen, all your projects, campaigns, tasks, and status of each.

Seeing What Your Team is Doing

When you logon, you see My Tasks screen. It lists all tasks assigned to you with due dates and status. As a manager, you can see tasks assigned to every single user in your team, without having to keep asking for email updates.

List tasks by user, or see all tasks for everyone

This way you can quickly judge workload and track what’s going on with campaigns and projects.

Create Your Own Marketing View

Another powerful aspect of using a Marketing Project Management application like Aprix Marketing Manager, is the customization options that are given to users, allowing you to create the ‘view’ you need. This simply means you can change what you see on the screen so that you can quickly focus on the important tasks or projects.

We give you the option to customize what you see on your My Tasks screen, letting you chose to show or hide fields, filter tasks by status, display only project names, deliverable names, or trade shows, and much more. The goal is to give you full control over how you want your (and your team’s) marketing projects displayed.

You define what you want to see on the screen

Simplifying Management and Maximizing Marketing

Our goal is to simplify your daily management tasks by giving you the necessary tools so that you can focus more on doing marketing. If you have to rely on Excel files, email exchanges, or whiteboards to keep track of what’s going on on your marketing department, then you are wasting precious time. How about next time you walk into a meeting already knowing “who is doing what” and “when is that project due”? That day has already arrived.

For a company that was unknown 5 or 6 years ago, Salesforce.com is undoubtedly the 100K pound gorilla in the room. And with an appetite for acquiring companies (8 companies within the past 12 months), is also reaching farther onto other branches outside pure-play CRM. As the core of most sales and marketing organizations, users of both departments are heavily dependent upon the data and the features the solution provides and so it only natural that the marketing team will start wondering if there’s anything else they need besides what SFDC (as it is commonly abbreviated) provides.

Salesforce.com for Marketing

Long-time SFDC users know that the key characteristics of the system are related to its basic function as a Customer Relationship Management product. In other words, leads come in, data is added to contacts and companies, sales opportunities are created, and deals are closed. The full sales cycle is managed via SFDC and sales managers rejoice in the myriad of reports available to track the performance of the sales team.

Marketers also like SFDC for its simplicity and as the center of all customer and prospect data. The problem is that the needs of marketers are not fully met by  a CRM system. Sure, having all kinds of data about the target market is good, but from an execution standpoint SFDC falls short on delivering what marketing needs. Email marketing, Landing Pages, Marketing Automation, and even some basic reporting are key features marketers need.

Wait, you will say. I can create custom pages in SFDC to track marketing projects and even assign activities for my team. Yes, you surely can and I’ve seen many people creating custom pages for all kinds of things and if your marketing organization is small and you are not dealing with a lot of campaigns, it may work very well for you. The problem begins when you have more than a couple of people in your marketing staff and you start having to keep track of multiple projects, exchange files, and pay attention to looming deadlines.

Marketing’s Call for a Salesforce.com Extension

How do you track all your marketing campaigns? Assign people to tasks, collaborate on activities, and report back on results (financial and otherwise)? Most marketing departments are still dealing with Excel files and endless email threads. Salesforce.com, for all its power, is still powerless when it comes to basic marketing project management. That’s why we want Aprix Marketing Manager to bridge this gap. Our customers that also use SFDC for their sales processes realize the limitations of their CRM system and are clamoring for a marketing solution that will give them the tools to accurately manage their marketing projects and make their team more productive.

Can we accomplish this? Contact us and find out!