Tag: data

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Nothing in Business is Free

Let me just repeat what you have heard before, NOTHING is free, especially in business. Free will cost you something. The individual or company that offered you something for “nothing” is expecting “something” in return, whether it is your time, your information, or your money.

Yet, we seem to easily succumb to free offers. Marketers have been ringing that bell for centuries and we continue to show up! Pavlovian Conditioning has taken hold of our reactions and behaviors towards free. It is as if we are hardwired to respond to free. It often requires thought-processing and discipline to not react to “free,” even for curiosity’s sake.

As defined in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we are motivated by our hierarchy of human basic, psychological and self-fulfillment needs for survival. Free brilliantly feeds our deficiency and growth needs, as it can be perceived to be less work, little time, no money. It’s free! Or is it?

Businesses have long engaged in serving up plenty of free. It’s common practice in sales and marketing to drive a response and entice you into engagement. It is every consumer’s responsibility to select and filter what is offered for free. Determination of the right outcome should be guided by the general economics rule that there is nothing for “free” and everything costs something, including doing nothing.

Ways Businesses Utilize Free to Win You Over

  • FREE Content and Media
  • FREE Software and Hardware
  • FREE Goods and Materials
  • FREE Expertise and Advice
  • FREE Tools

What did you give up in exchange for free?

The holy grail for any business, beyond revenue, is data and intelligence about your identity, your activities, your interests and most importantly, your needs.

Quid Pro Quo

Content is king to marketers. It’s the best “perceived” free offer to get you to engage. What is understood in the exchange of information, is that the all important free whitepaper you download, webinar your register to attend, article you read online has a price – usually your identity. Simply, content has economic value.

You see, it wasn’t free to produce the content and the business needs a return on their marketing investment. For you, that give-back will undoubtedly end up in a difficult unsubscribe moment if you aren’t really ready to commit to an ongoing relationship. If the marketer is savvy, they will want to also get your phone number, address, title and some other profiling data bits for future courting. It is quid pro quo.

Quid Pro Quo: Something that is given to you or done for you in return for something you have given to or done for someone else.

Your action, your click, your interest is valuable to a marketer. The intent was there all along and if you play along, it is assumed everyone understands how “free” works. Businesses will entice you with expertise, knowledge, fun facts and top secret insights to get you to volunteer your privacy and enter the game of quid pro quo.

Game or business, it is how the process works. Nothing is assumed and nothing should ever be hidden in the way it all works. It should all be out in the open and transparent in the collective activities. You opt-in, you share, you provide open ownership of your data and you are officially connected as a prospect. A lead of sorts, unqualified perhaps; however, still a potential buyer. A customer in waiting.

In the end, this work of trying to engage you all leads to the creating a “pool” of contact-worthy participants. What is often not considered by the willing participant in the quid pro quo game is the cost of the free content that openly converts you to the property of that collector, and potentially being sold to other “like” collectors who have a shared interest in your interests.

Free Creates Data

It’s money, it’s transactional, it’s business and you are now an asset. You see, there are fortunes to be made in owning your data. In fact, we are now in a new era where capturing and encapsulating it all has led to a lot of hording of data that businesses are trying to now figure out how to better monetize.

Businesses have become data-driven in all aspects of how they function, market and drive growth.

Data is entwined with nearly all facets of sales and marketing today. Being the controller of interested buyers or attentive consumers is gold to a business.

The data economy is driving corporate growth. Your data has value and it requires ROI for those that are putting the effort and resources into the collection process. Your data fuels the pipeline of opportunities, so there should be no surprises when the emails land in your inbox, the phone rings or there is a knock at the door to pry into your true interests when you responded to free. It’s just business.

Marketers strive for a qualified participant in the free quid pro quo game that willingly provides some level of profiling qualifications to subject themselves to continuous follow-up by people and technology. These subjects become part of the bits and bytes in corporate databases and lists, that may or may not be sold to others. Of course this doesn’t only apply to the collective efforts around “free” content and event trafficking.

Quid pro quo is not just a philosophy, it’s a tool for businesses.

Sometimes it isn’t as visible as a registration to get free content. The agreement to engage is deeply embedded into automation and intelligence to drive deeper relationships. To a business, that means converting you to a customer and driving up your customer lifetime value.

The free hardware to use the service provider or software, that’s not free. That’s a tool to get you to be committed to a long-term relationship. The coupon for a free sandwich is to get you to pony up for another item on the menu. The offer to buy-one-get-one-free is to drive you to put that item in the shopping cart, along with more items because you got such a great deal.

And the offer to use the software for free at the basic level (also known as a freemium offer), is to get you in as a subscriber. Once converted to a user, the intent is to upgrade your service to the feature-rich version. Nothing new or nefarious, it’s just the software business.

Marketing wants you to engage, face-to-face, virtually or through your actions. You are part of the customer acquisition costs (CAC). Companies are heavily investing in and relying on technologies for gaining your identity They are collecting IP addresses. they are buying into marketing tools and utilizing sniffing techniques that can identify your geography, company email extension and maybe full contact details to win you over as a customer.

Actions Pay Volumes

These digital sniffer advancements watch, harvest and store your every move. Yet, you didn’t get anything for free… or did you? Your free browser, your free social platforms, your free operating systems, your free applications, your free videos are NOT free. You are paying for them through your actions.

Smartly, the collectors of all this “free” stuff then sales the insights and actions based on your profiles to advertisers and other businesses for a hefty premium. Businesses exist and thrive on your shared experiences. It is what has built today’s largest global companies. Of course we all know (or should know) that it’s never really free. There is a cost to using what you perceive is free. It’s your mind-share and eventually, your wallet-share.

One of the most costly free offers to business is corporate advice. We all like to believe that advice from experts, who willingly share expertise and opinions, is all free. Actually, it can create quite a bit of distraction to those that willingly collect “free” tidbits from those that don’t have a truly vested interest in your success or business. It’s easier to give without consequence. As the receiver, you are the one that must pay the price for how your respond and react.

Advise is also quid pro quo. Advisors might want your like, your share, your referral, your call, maybe just an bit of recognition and praise. Taking the advice has a cost in your time. How you apply the advice will determine the actual cost. If right, it may be a total win. If it’s the wrong “free” advice, it could cost you and your business a fortune.

You may think you are getting something for nothing, but there is a price to pay for everything in business as well as daily life. 

Opinions cost you if they are generic. The best advisor needs to spend time understanding your vision, strategy, goals and anticipated outcomes.

There is no doubt that the voluminous amounts of content in all forms is flowing fast and can be head-spinning. There are countless free ideas, suggestions, opinions, facts and sometimes falsehoods to help you do better. Proceed with caution! Words have consequences, even when they are free. Even if you are just giving your eyeballs and time, it has a cost to you and value to the creator of free.

My free advice, remember it’s quid pro quo and there is no free lunch.

Jamie Glass, CMO + Founder of Artful Thinkers, a sales and marketing consulting company.Additional Read:  What is the Real Value in Free

 

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Analytics and Data-Driven Marketing Trends

Transformation has taken hold of corporate marketing in a big way. Analytics and data are framing the top priorities for current investments by CMOs, who are increasingly responsible for predicting profitable growth for their organizations. This shift requires advancing and centralizing the practice of data-driven marketing people, processes and technology in order to effectively achieve the defined business goals and expected outcomes.

Data has long been part of every major function within a company. However, the current intention of CEOs and stakeholders is to unite the massive amounts of acquired bits and bytes to better inform decision-making throughout the organization.

It is the expectation that marketing, sales and finance data be combined and proactively analyzed to help understand the customer journey, improve company performance, predict revenue growth and increase profitability.

In order to bring together these disparate data sets and effectively utilize collected insights to predict, businesses are heavily investing in marketing technology (MarTech). In a recent survey of marketers by Squiz, these investments are essential to better understanding customers and prospects (62%), which is a key priority and as well as a challenge for enterprise marketing teams. The survey also noted that 55% of marketers are investing in MarTech in order to take a data-driven approach to marketing and 97% of the respondents said marketing technology has enabled them to be more strategic. (Source)

Businesses expect marketing to lead the way in achieving revenue growth targets. Data-driven playbooks are critical tools used to define the journey, understand customer preferences and capitalize on trends. Key to the playbook is the interpretation and translation of data through marketing analytics to support the tactics and activities.

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).

Analytics empower businesses to recognize patterns and set priorities. Analysis centralizes the focus on outcomes and achievement of business goals by moving beyond standalone marketing metrics and reporting, to fully realizing the value of marketing from data insights.

Success comes from applying the insights that marketers acquire through data, learning from the input and then creating actionable playbooks to manage performance.

Because of the vast amounts of data and the fact that many of these complied repositories are nested throughout the organization, marketing leaders must work with the entire corporate landscape to realize the vision of data-driven marketing and decision-making. This includes researchers, digital and financial analysts, technology and innovation team members, IT, data scientists, product developers and sales operations. Collectively, this group must work together to continually challenge assumptions, push for collective understanding and master the “math” to increase predictability and usability of business intelligence.

What should marketers measure and analyze in order to create an effective data-driven marketing playbook?

Common Data Sets Analyzed by Marketing Data-Driven Organizations

  • Customer Journey Analytics: CJA data is acquired from CRM and MarTech to identify, analyze and measure each stop in the customer journey, from prospecting through acquisition to retention. Marketing data sets come from target data, marketing activities, lead generation and segmentation. Sales data sets come from pipeline activities, conversion, satisfaction, loyalty and retention programs. Financial data provides revenue, acquisition and retention costs and profit information.
  • Mobile and Web: Data from digital systems and online properties, including CRM, call center and web analytics platforms. Data sets include search, behavioral, and demographic information gathered via SEO, ecommerce, conversions and engagement.
  • Voice of the Customer: VOC includes perception and opinion data learned via sources such as structured surveys and feedback mechanisms, as well as unstructured data from open-ended survey questions, texts, reviews, customer service emails, social media, and human interactions via phone and in person.
  • Customer and Prospect Personas: Target and customer data gathered in profiling, segmentation, lead scoring and personalization campaigns. Data sets used in persona analysis includes demographic, physchographic, transactional and behavioral.
  • Lifetime Customer Value: LCV data measures net profit attributed to the entire relationship with a customer, often valued over defined periods of time. Net profit of a customer is lifetime customer value measured against customer acquisitions costs.
  • Media Analytics: Attribution and marketing mix modeling (MMM) data is used to analyze paid media results in all channels and includes campaign and spend details.
  • Social Media Marketing: SMM data includes all acquired information from social and digital media platforms such as Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Data is often used to measure targeting, reach and engagement.
  • Product Life Cycle: PLC data is acquired as a new product moves through a sequence of stages from introduction to growth, maturity and decline.
  • Reach Cost Quality: RCQ data, gathered at each touch point, measures the number of target buyers reached, cost per unique touch and the quality of the engagement.

In contrast to the obvious need and growing investments in data-driven marketing, it is a widely reported fact that most companies today are far from getting the “full value” of all the data available to them to help make better decisions. Most organizations are in the early or mid-stages of the shift to bring all data together in order to effectively guide and predict growth and profitability decisions. The undertaking is often very complex and expensive.

Marketing must press forward and lead the way!

Good news, a recent study by the Global Alliance of Data-Driven Marketing Associations (GDMA), Winterberry Group and MediaMath shows eight in 10 advertising and marketing professionals worldwide use data-driven techniques to maintain customer databases, measure campaign results across both individual and multiple marketing channels, and segment data for proper targeting. (Source)

Now, we must work together throughout the entire organization to ensure that driven-data marketing and analytics provide the proper insights that we can learn from and create successful outcomes, like increased growth and profitability.

Jamie Glass, CMO + President, Artful Thinkers, a sales and marketing consulting company.

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Increasing Your Content Value

Black and white numbers backgroundMarketers today are faced with the increasing challenge to produce more and more online content. The volumes are staggering. We now refer to the amount of online content and words in terms like metadata, moving from terabytes to zettabytes and beyond!

Publishers like Buzzfeed, HuffingtonPost, Business Insider and even the New York Times are pushing out an estimated 350 new content pieces a day according to Digiday. Consumers of content have a continuous twitter feed of new content. UGC, social media, newsletters, blogs… it’s endless. How much is really out there? As of today, the size of the Internet is estimated to be at least 1.79 billion pages. (Source:http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/)

So where is the value? Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves as publishers, marketers and content producers, this question. Is there greater value in trying to win the daily news feed cycle by overwhelming the feeds with our words or should we take your best performing content we have already produced and make it available to a broader audience?

The volume and frequency strategy is supported by the eye-ball attraction game. It’s high risk, sort of a gamble. You hope you hit the mark; however, in the end you just keep pushing out more content to hedge your bet. Hitting it big is measured in minutes and hours. Instead, the expanding reach strategy is taking an investment into quality content and growing it exponentially. Doubling down. If your content is worthy and has universal appeal, perhaps the best best is localizing or translating that content to increase the value.

One informative whitepaper on business intelligence could prove to have 3x or 10x the value when translated into the equal number of languages. Granted, not all content has a global appeal. It requires a measured assessment to determine if extending your geographic reach could leverage your existing asset by simply taking your “words” and making them available to a broader market.

Frequency or expanding your reach – what’s your gamble?

This article was first published on LinkedIn.  You can visit the article and subscribe to updates here: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140221011502-149124-increasing-your-content-value

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Good Business Leaders Use Intuition to Make Decisions

IntuitionDecision making is constant in business. Advancing products, engaging employees, responding to customers are top priorities, all while keeping a careful eye on the bottom line. It is the basic function of a leader to be continuously selecting priorities and taking action. Multitasking and constant awareness come with the territory of being in charge. The only stop to the ongoing process is shut-eye. Not resting, deep sleep.

Every person, whether in a leadership role or not, confronts hundreds, thousands even tens of thousands instinctual decisions throughout a given day. Some are instantaneous, or as we classify “automatic”, while others require in-depth analysis.

We all have an internal analytic engine, taking everything we know, we collect and can reference based on experience to churn out a decision. We are the greatest sources of our own big data!

As technologists find ways to host, gather and exploit bytes by the billions and trillions of data from others, our own brain functions as the largest processor of data. Enabling us to act quickly or deliberately, at the speed of which best suits the need for a decision. Not everyone utilizes their “big data” engine in the best way, whether from a lack experience or knowledge, impairment or perhaps ignorance to what the data shows. The result, bad decisions.

In business, some can be plagued by the constant role as Decider-in-Chief. This often results in procrastination or delayed decisions. The common impact is action taken “too late”. The organization depends on a leader to make impromptu decisions, while also taking deliberate actions to lead to the “best” decision given a certain set of facts. Organizations need deciders to execute plans, activate programs and assign activities that drive results.

Good leaders often have a good sense of intuition. They use gut check analysis and set plans into action, without the noticeable analysis that others might use in trying to determine the path forward.  Where did they acquire such skill?  Repetitive decision making. Leaders know they have to make decisions, they are accustomed to their role and have the experience of accepting fault and risk with taking action. This training builds confidence and a strong basis for intuition. Making decisions over and over again in practice builds an intuitive leader.

Some researchers claim that intuition results in a physical experience, a shiver, an image or the often unexplained deja vu.  Others may use the intuitive nature of a dream to set a plan into action. The remembrance seems to create a comfort in the decision, having the sense of knowing the outcome. Beyond the intangible means from which confidence results, the facts are that when decisions are needed, strong leaders will act. Knowing inaction often results in increased pressure, stress and potential problems, making a decision, right or wrong, seems to give a sense of relief.  Decisions invoke power and progress.

There is no magic in intuition, it’s brain power. It is knowledge. Intuition is using information, filtering and making a judgment based on experience. The continuous practice of using intuition creates a platform to control quality of decisions and use of perception or quick insight, without compromising confidence.

Intuition is not “inherent”, it is learned.  The origin of the word dates back to the 1400′s as a reference to contemplation. There are many times that intuition will lead to proven conclusions; however, a leader will not always use it quickly and without process. There is often a misnomer that intuition means instant, without regard for facts or experience. It does not. It means using your better judgement and trusting your thoughts, your ideas and your role as a decision maker. It is using your intuition to move forward.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” – Steve Jobs

Jamie Glass, President and CMO at Artful Thinkers @jglass8