Thursday, March 24, 2016

Survey: Marketers Bank on Personalization Success

Senior marketing professionals are optimistic about the success of their personalization strategies, according to a survey of senior marketers from the CMO Council and Microsoft. As recently reported by MarketingProfs, 26% of the 179 marketers interviewed said they were totally confident in how their companies approached personalization. Another 49% were "hopefully optimistic" about personalization results. The marketers were primarily business-to-business focused (48%), with 18% in business-to-consumer marketing and 34% involved in hybrid B2B and B2C marketing. When asked what criteria they thought would be key to personalization success, 37% of respondents cited a unified view of the customer, 29% counted on an omnichannel approach, 22% stressed flexible tools to enable engagement, and 12% listed predictive analytics as essential. Download the white paper for more details at http://www.cmocouncil.org/current_program_details.php?pid=139

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Don't Let Basic Flaws Doom Content Marketing

Content marketing may top 2016 agendas, but, as Ernan Roman, president of ERDM, points out in an insightful post for Forbes magazine's CMO Network, too many content strategies are headed for failure. Roman notes that although 81% of marketers are involved in content marketing, only 28% of organizations say they are effective, and he can cite five sources of that ineffectiveness. He starts with a basic failure to craft content based on customer research rather than general assumptions. Second, even if marketers know what engaging content looks like, too many don't know what an effective content strategy looks like; research shows only 32% of companies actually have a documented content marketing strategy, he points out. Third, part of the strategic vacuum is lack of content marketing success metrics. Such metrics could include increased lead quality/sales, increased web traffic, brand awareness lift, increased SEO ranking and increased renewal rates/subscriber rates, Roman suggests. Fourth, companies may not fully commit to content marketing because they don't realize its impact on brand perception; Roman points skeptics to research showing 60% of consumers seek out a product after reading content about it, and 82% feel more positive about a company after reading custom content.  Finally, with inbound marketing delivering 54% more leads than traditional outbound marketing, marketers miss ROI if they fail to use content to drive inbound web traffic. For the full post: http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2016/03/07/five-ways-cmos-are-failing-at-content/#6a926bc8420a