Kwasi Neale-May got some mail the other day, reminding him about an upcoming doctor's appointment. The correspondence went on to remind him of some prescriptions he needed to pick up. Click here to meet Kwasi.

Kwasi is Donovan Neale-May's dog – and the un-official CMO Council mascot – and leveraging his name in this simple slice of personalization wrapped around a pet supply publication caught the eye of the CMO Council's executive director and made the consumer side of him take a look. It made the marketer side of him smile because someone got it right. This company leveraged their data about his buying patterns, about his likes and dislikes, and about his four-legged-friend to engage in a conversation.

I point to a paragraph in our recently released report, The Power of Personalization. "Messaging to the mass market in general is simply not going to cut through the clutter and deluge of direct mail, advertising, Internet, email and cold calling overtures. Customers are looking for a sign that the companies solicit them know something about them, and actually care about and understand their personal circumstances and dynamics. And, savvy customers today are very good at tuning out commercial noise and being more selective in who they do they business with."

It wasn't just the dog's name that embraced this customer; it was the fact that there was a targeted message reminding Donovan that Kwasi might almost be out of Heart Guard tablets. This veterinarian figured out how to do what many marketers haven't – how to leverage customer data to deliver targeted, relevant and appreciated personalization messages to effectively reach and engage the consumer. There is great power and promise in personalization to be sure. But the reality is that few are truly leveraging these technologies and services to aggregate customer data to create deeper bonds between customer and vendor.

Personalization - and all of its challenges, successes, strategies and practices - will become a large platform focus for the CMO Council in 2008. To kick things off, I would invite you to download the Power of Personalization report, now available on the CMO Council website. I especially call attention to this report as it is, essentially, one of the many starting points that all lead the CMO Council as a whole to our yearly Summit, the CMO Council Summit Elite Retreat.

This year, we will be gathering in Northern California on December 10 – 11 to analyze, evaluate and pursue new revenue sources, segments and strategies through our theme, "Routes to Revenue." In the coming months, we will be releasing more and more information about this event and will keep you up to date on speakers and participants of this event. In the mean time, I challenge each of you to take a long look at these routes. Personalization can certainly lay a pathway to revenue as it can more wholly embrace the customer in engagement and conversation. But do you know how to get on that route…and once you're on it, do you know if you are heading in the right direction? Let the conversation begin!

MAXIMIZE AND QUALIFY YOUR SALES LEAD GENERATION EFFORTS WITH WEBCASTING

On a recent webcast hosted by ON24, marketing professionals were surveyed on the quality of information available to them about their prospective clients. Over 20% claimed they knew their target market extremely well, with detailed information about decision-makers' names and titles. But in today's B2B sales environment, no matter how effective your sales team is, a name and a title is not enough to sell to well-informed corporate clients. They are not going to tell you what they want. They expect you to know what they're looking for before you call them.

Traditional marketing initiatives do not collect this level of detail about your prospective clients, and there's nothing in your marketing mix that is truly interactive. You need better information. You need to know how your company's solutions meet their specific needs, and how soon they're willing to implement these solutions. You need an interactive marketing tool that gathers client-specific information without intrusion.

Webcasts bring prospects to your doorstep without any direct contact. By inviting your prospects to a webcast, you can capture information required to create customized sales pitches that meet their specific needs. While addressing a large audience, webcasts allow you to engage each individual prospect one-on-one, providing valuable, detailed information on each webcast participant. Thus, webcasts allow your prospects to sell themselves to you.

Qualifying Leads From The Very First "Click"
Start by sending well-crafted marketing e-mails for the webcast to your prospects. Keep the emphasis on the upcoming event (the call to action), but your sole intent (apart from brand awareness, of course) is to entice them just enough to click on the link to register for the webcast.

As soon as your prospects click on that link, they have graduated to "lead" status. Using Lead Scoring technology (such as that provided by ON24), you can begin ranking your prospects immediately. Each point of contact with your prospect provides you with greater clarity on their readiness to purchase your services/products. Let us begin with the very first step: Event Registration.

When a prospect registers for an event, they voluntarily provide crucial information that will help indicate the quality of the lead. There are certain key indicators that can help determine if the person registering is in fact a decision-maker for your service/product. Registration details such as Title, Role, and Industry should help differentiate top prospects even before they attend your live event.

Identifying Your Top Leads At "Showtime"
As you plan your live events, try implementing a few simple steps to significantly increase the quality of your leads. These tips help you to determine which leads your sales team should call first, and provide them with the information they need while the lead is still "hot".

Certain key indicators will immediately let you know if a "lead" is genuinely interested in your services/products or if they are "just browsing". A few common examples include the duration of attendance, which will tell you how long you were able to capture their interest; the downloading of presentation materials, indicating exactly what content your participants are interested in; and responses to polls and surveys, which gives your prospects the opportunity to voice exactly what solution they are looking for, and how soon they need it implemented.

Smaller Bites Are Easier To Swallow
Of course, the most certain way of judging a participant's interest is by asking them directly. But don't wait until the end of your live event to do this in a lengthy survey. Consider placing a brief 3-question survey at the beginning or middle of your event. Take your survey apart and offer it as poll questions that are incorporated into your presentation. Discuss the results of these poll questions real-time with your audience to encourage greater participation.

Remember, some participants may leave the webcast before the end of your presentation. Pushing out a short survey and a few quick polls allows for greater feedback at times when your audience's interest level is at its peak.

Your Leads Will Tell You When They're Ready
Following the live event, your lead scoring options increase dramatically. You've already collected all the information that you need. All you need to do is identify which registration details or poll responses (or any other user action) help you determine the quality of a lead. You can assign scores to any number of specific elements, creating a ranking order for all your leads into neatly defined "buckets"(i.e. from "Strong" to "Weak").

As you progress through your program, you can adjust scores and weights for any lead scoring element and re-rank your leads accordingly. You can also add new elements that you had not originally anticipated as determinants of lead quality. You can even score leads across multiple events, helping you determine if a particular webcast campaign has improved the quality of your leads.

Immediately after a live event has concluded, you can tell your sales team which leads are ready to be contacted, and which ones will require a little more effort. This can significantly increase your lead conversion rate while dramatically shortening your sales cycle.

Archived Webcasts: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Typically, you spend all of your marketing effort on promoting a live webcast. Most of your attendees will watch the live broadcast, with a good portion viewing the archive one or two weeks afterward. But then you're on to the next webcast and the previous webcast is stored on your website somewhere. Hidden from view and no longer providing value to you.

When working with our customers, we recognized that archived webcasts could generate leads for months. In order to extend the shelf life of this content, ON24 launched Insight24, a B2B directory of webcasts, videos and podcasts. Insight24 enables marketers like you to further maximize the ROI of your webcasts by reaching new audiences who are specifically looking for your content.

The thing to remember is that the value of a webcast does not end with its live presentation. It can continue on in cyber space.

Now ask yourself - Have you maximized the value of your webcast leads from beginning to end?

DO YOU NEED INTEGRATED MARKETING?

Today's Marketing departments are being asked to deliver stronger results with fewer dollars. Finding new ways to increase your marketing effectiveness is becoming more of a necessity rather than a desire. Developing an "Integrated Marketing" strategy leverages technology and process change management that can dramatically improve your Marketing ROI.

Why Do You Need Integrated Marketing?

Because Integrated Marketing provides an enterprise approach to the way you plan, budget, create, collaborate, communicate, execute, settle and evaluate your marketing strategies and tactics. Integrated Marketing facilitates visibility to your results while reducing administration costs and minimizing errors. More importantly, Integrated Marketing can create a competitive advantage for your company in the marketplace!

Brand Marketing Managers are constantly seeking new and innovative ways to accelerate demand for their products or services. Their goal is to connect with customers to build long-term, profitable relationships. To actually do this, you must plan and implement marketing campaigns that create demand across all customer segments in a measurable way. Streamlining the various marketing processes will improve efficiency, lower overall costs and improve your Marketing ROI.

There are many tools available for today's marketing professionals but leveraging all components of the marketing process without using technology has proven to be very difficult. Let's examine some of the Key Marketing Functions where utilizing technology to create true integration can provide a substantial benefit for marketers:

Marketing Resource Management

Integrating MRM across your enterprise offers the ability to manage and optimize the use of internal and external marketing resources. It also allows you to collaboratively develop strategic marketing plans and budgets, manage and account for all marketing spending, develop and compare multiple marketing scenarios to identify the best marketing strategy, provide a centralized view to manage and schedule all relevant enterprise marketing activities, centrally develop and manage marketing collaterals via a Digital Asset Library, and better manage and distribute marketing funds to your Channel Partners.

Segment and List Management

Provide a centralized view of all relevant customer data. This integrated capability will empower business users to manage customer and prospect data without the traditional dependencies on IT. Marketing attributes define and leverage unique customer profile information to target and personalize specific marketing messages. You must be able to quickly identify and segment customers to target. Utilize list management to generate target lists in the support of marketing campaign activities.

Campaign Management

Successfully connect with customers to drive demand for products and services. Analyze, plan, develop, execute and measure campaign activities through all inbound and outbound interaction channels. Collaborate with internal and external team members to manage resources to plan, develop, and execute coordinated, multichannel inbound and outbound campaign activities. This results in an ability to build long-term customer relationships with relevant and personalized customer interactions. Leverage Call Center, E-Marketing and E-Commerce where appropriate to drive customer demand.

Lead Management

Seamlessly manage processes between sales and marketing organizations. Generate highly qualified leads and follow up on every lead to closure. Increase the lead conversion rates and the lead cycle times. Automate the lead distribution process to the best qualified sales representatives, brokers, agents and / or partner agents. Utilize closed-loop lead monitoring to maximize effectiveness throughout the entire lead life-cycle process.

Trade Promotion Management

Optimize TPM for the use of trade funds to generate end-customer demand and increase profitability for planned products. Use a centralized planning approach with full visibility into all enterprise marketing activities. Leverage integration to Supply Chain and Demand Planning to develop accurate sales volume forecasts. Leverage integration to Financials for accurate accruals and deduction validation. Use TPM analytics to close the loop on planned and actual trade activities and effectiveness.

Marketing Budgets

Integration of Marketing budgets and actual expenses to your financial system can offer huge benefits. Automate the payment, settlement and redemption processes eliminates the need for complex excel spreadsheets to manage individual campaign expenses. Financial evaluation is critical for evaluating which campaigns are successful and which are not. Having financial visibility in real time can provide the opportunity to cancel campaigns early on and redirect funds to more effective opportunities.

Marketing Analytics: Convert reports and data into actionable insights. Leverage powerful marketing analytic capabilities that will help empower marketers to make smart business decisions. Use predictive analysis where possible to anticipate customer behaviors and identify hidden trends and patterns. Use customer analytics to gain insights into customer profiles, behaviors and profitability. Understand product profitability and the selling correlations to drive increased product demand. Use Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) to manage all marketing activities against a set of goals and targets.

Integrated Marketing requires you define a corporate strategy for Knowledge Management. Think of how you would set up a centralized repository of your corporate knowledge that would include your marketing plans, templates, guidance, insights, and more. If you were a new marketing employee, having a centralized Knowledge Management repository would be the ideal place to begin learning about all relevant historical information pertinent to your company, division, brand, product or service.

Marketing Dashboards are used as Brand scorecards and individual campaign performance KPIs. This enables consistency in your marketing planning and execution and improves predictability, particularly with your marketing budget. Dashboards are a quick and easy way to connect brand, sales, and finance, operations, and logistics users to marketing processes. This reduces overall administration time and helps the sales organization focus on results.

Centralized marketing planners and development tools are helpful in many functional marketing areas. Standardizing best practices with appropriate work-flow and approvals will help define your endto- end integrated marketing processes. Senior Management is generally very supportive of these types of consistent operational processes that will maximize your Marketing ROI.

Integrating your marketing processes is a strategic enabler that will help increase profit margins through more efficient and effective marketing.

EXPERIENCE MARKETING: HYPE VS. FACT
KEY FACTS ABOUT ONE OF MARKETING'S HOTTEST GROWING DISCIPLINES

Responding to a growing frustration stemming from the mounting volume and clutter of marketing messages, the marketing industry appears to be embracing the power of experience marketing. Yet even as its power is recognized, questions remain about what it is exactly, what distinguishes the good from the bad, and what kind of agency partner is best suited to help you execute.

The recent EventView 2007: North America report - sponsored through a collaboration between the Event Marketing Institute, Meeting Professionals International Foundation and George P. Johnson (GPJ) - reveals that 82% of more than 1,000 senior sales and marketing executives in large enterprises worldwide have implemented some form of experience marketing.

If you are one those who are experimenting with experience marketing or considering doing so, here's a brief overview of the discipline that may prove useful for charting your course:

Definition of Experience Marketing

Experience marketing is the practice of engaging target audiences in personal experiences in which they internalize a sense of how their personal or professional life is improved by the brand. The result is a powerful increase in the depth and volume of brand differentiation, conversion and loyalty.

Isn't Experience Marketing the same as Event Marketing?

Although both share live interactions as a format for communication, there are significant differences between these two forms of marketing.

Traditional event marketing is tactically based and attempts to influence an audience through a largely features and benefits sales approach. It is based on an interruptive model in which the brand inserts its products and services (and information about them) into an audience's professional or personal life.

Experience marketing immerses the audience in a welcome storyline that plays out through physical action and emotional and intellectual interactions that motivate audiences to see themselves as bigger heroes in their own stories.

Traditional event marketing asks something of the individual or audience ("stand in my trade show booth while I tell you what you must know") and often requires the audience to do its own translation of how the features of a brand or product will improve one's lot.

In contrast, experience marketing (even in the trade show setting) requires little of the individual, and instead relies on their own motivation to find their way into the interaction, giving the individual or audience what it has (knowingly or not) longed for in ways that empower them - through co-authorship of an experience that unfolds by their own direction.

Lastly, effective experience marketing is vigilant about being on-brand and more importantly, providing a heightened sense of brand attributes. It's painfully obvious when a traditional event marketing program doesn't work because the experience isn't evocative of the brand or not truly engaging the audience in the right way. Faithfully executed experience marketing prevents this from happening.

Is Experience Marketing Just Product Sampling and Stunts?

If you don't look too deeply you might think that bringing the brand to life means product sampling or headline-making stunts. But while experience marketing can include these tactics, they aren't a necessity and some types need to be avoided.

Product sampling offers participants momentary product exposure but no long lasting brand affinity. Too often, live experiences that use these tactics dangerously dilute the brand by using techniques that are wildly misaligned with the brand's attributes.

Moreover, not all products lend themselves to sampling. Experience marketing however can apply to the promotion of any product or service, and always does so in a faithful context of the brand and the life of the audience.

So it's not necessarily about sampling, nor about stunts for stunt sake; it's about building the brand attributes into the entire experience, in every way possible.

Is Experience Marketing a Stand Alone Discipline?

Actually, just the opposite: experience marketing may just be the best enabler of integrated marketing communications in the marketer's tool kit. Companies frustrated by the siloed nature of their marketing channels find that effective experience marketing drives integration because it inherently relies on the natural interdependency among the disciplines. For instance, since pre and post event communications create audiences for face-to-face events and extend their experiences beyond the physical interaction, integrating these tactics isn't a nice-to-have, but a must-have, and professionals in this space plan and execute on this model unfailingly.

Isn't My Advertising Agency the Right Partner in this Space?

Maybe yes, but maybe no. Most successful marketing agencies understand branding, positioning, messaging, segmentation, reach and many other sub-disciplines of the industry. But experience marketing entails several differentiating key characteristics, and therefore requirements, on top of the basics referred to above.

It requires a deep understanding of physical, multi-dimensional, immersive and interactive storytelling combined with motivational psychology. It also requires the competence to marshal an enormous scope of details from development to execution well beyond the typical 30 second spot or print campaign.

Experience marketing is often a one-take world, with no possibility of editing. And while the discipline is a lot more than just logistics, make no mistake, on the ground competence on the execution end of things can make or break the best experience marketing idea.

Why Experience Marketing?

A recent GPJ white paper examining experience marketing makes this argument:

Marketers are facing an unprecedented wave of change that is creating a new imperative about how to create and manage brands. Globalization, near-worldwide connectivity through an ever-expanding array of electronic devices, the lowering of barriers to entry via the Internet and the resulting volume of competition and marketing clutter, as well as the commoditization of nearly everything, makes brand value the ultimate differentiator and competitive advantage.

Thus, marketing efforts that enable brand engagement and offer audiences the opportunity to "live the brand promise" are those that will drive people to buy products, share their experiences virally, demonstrate loyalty to a company and resist competitors' entreaties.

RELEVANCE AND REINVENTION

Mike Carlton poses the questions: Are advertising agencies losing their relevance? And if so, are there ways that agencies can reinvent themselves to recapture that relevance?

Today's world is different. It's a world in which marketers are redefining the role of agencies. The consumer (including B-to-B) has changed. In the past, everything was under control of the agency. Today, the consumer is in charge and they expect one-to-one marketing. It's a complete role reversal.

Various studies have shown that senior executives of marketers tend to view agencies, even their own, quite narrowly. As a result, many marketers have assembled their own teams of outside providers.

A Forrester study shows that only about 50% of marketing executives believe that their agency is capable of handling changes in Internet advertising. Only a third of those executives believe that their agency can help them with consumer generated media.

*******

Rel-e-vance

The dictionary defines relevance as: bearing upon, or connected to, the matter at hand.

The question today is how relevant are advertising agencies to the needs of contemporary marketers? How well do they bear upon marketers' vexing problems. How well are they connected to the interests of marketers?

Could it be that agencies are losing their relevance? And if so, what does it mean. And what can be done about it?

From Whence We Came

The setting for AMC's hit show Mad Men is a Madison Avenue agency in 1960. If you haven't already done so you owe it to yourself to view it. I'm often asked, "Is that the way it really was back then?" My answer is, "Yes."

Obviously, as in any dramatization, Mad Men tends to overstate the intrigue, the smoking, the drinking and the sex. But they were all definitely there. But the lurid stuff is really beside the point.

As an agency practitioner, the important thing to watch is the dynamics between the agency people, the clients and the impact the agency's campaigns had on the marketplace. The show's portrayal of how the agency related to its clients and how the agency's ideas leveraged consumer behavior are quite accurate.

The influence the agency had over the client's economic success cannot be overstated.

This is an excerpt from a White Paper written by Mike Carlton of Carlton Associates, Inc. For the complete article, visit: http://www.carltonassociatesinc.com/wp1.cfm?id=53.

CLOSE LAUNCHES FIRST GLOBAL BENCHMARK TO ASSESS THE SALES AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT

There are plenty of theories about how sales and marketing functions link and align. But we want to learn about this directly from the people it most affects: you! The Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE) presents the first Sales and Marketing Integration Audit. By aligning sales and marketing, the sales process can become more efficient, can qualify better leads, close bigger deals and sustain longer, more positive relationships with customers. But the reality is that sales and marketing functions in many companies don't align, departments don't interact, and often executives are braced for battle in the blame game rather than working together to move the bottom line.

This is your chance to find your own voice in this discussion and let us know what you really think of the other side.and what you really need from them.

TAKE THE AUDIT

THE DOWNLOAD

According to the 2008 Global TMT Predictions reports sponsored by Deloitte, LLP, market segmentation will play a key role in creating new product target markets. The reports consists of a series of three individual reports examining emerging developments and how they will shape the technology, media and telecommunications market. Download a copy of each report in the 2008 Global TMT Industry Predictions series.

http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,cid%253D187463,00.html

Key trends identified:

• Technology Innovation Blowback: Technology industries are demonstrating increased interest and investment in developing products to reach large, low-income populations in emerging economies. Expect to see at least one of these innovative products, services or management practices be introduced back into Western economies in 2008 and act as a disruptive force.
• Online Advertising: Despite increased spending on online advertising, there is growing antipathy by consumers to the online advertisement and the tracking of online behavior.
• Accessibility as a Business Driver: Demographics are creating new market opportunities for communications services and products. Market segmentation will play a key role in creating new product target markets.

UPCOMING EVENTS

CMO Summit Tokyo 2008 
Date: March 21, 2008
Location: Tokyo, Japan

A collaboration between the CMO Council and IDG Japan, speakers representing the CMO Council include Masami Takahasi, Executive Director of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Miki Tsusaka, global director of Boston Consulting Group. Topics include discuss the issues of today's marketing and how they relate to the mobile solution. more »

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

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