I rarely get new questions I haven’t written about before in this column – as I approach my 11th year as a ClickZ columnist. Yet, at SES Chicago this week, one of the attendees asked me how you go about building out a marketing optimization team. What kind of people do you need? What kind of backgrounds should they have? I know I’ve discussed this with clients but I haven’t written about it before. First, please notice that, I did…
Our mentor, Roy Williams, described shoppers as operating in either one of two modes: transactional or relational, a few years ago. At that time some of us loafed around virtually, exchanging emails with friends, trying to complete a list of reasons that motivate people to buy things. (Thank you, Tom G. & Brett F.) More recently, we returned to compiling the list with the rest of my colleagues. Trying to understand these types of things is what drives us. It…
There was a surprise last minute addition to the agenda at my last presentation. I keynoted in Oslo for the SEM Konferansen on September 22nd and then was offered an opportunity to present something brand new (lucky I was working on something brand new) to a small group on the last day of the conference. Not many people were able to attend, but it was videotaped. The presentation you can watch was originally intended to be part of a 90 minute…
Let’s get right to that list…. 1. Online Marketing budgets aren’t allocated to enable you do to the job right. 2. Because of #1, I am sure you could list 98+ more reasons! Too often the C-Suite has not figured out that your digital marketing (I include web, email, mobile & social here) activity is the glue that binds their brand together. They miss that online is that initial first impression before most people even decide to step into your…
I just presented the keynote at the European Conversion Summit in Frankfurt, Germany. It was the best attended conversion-oriented conference I’ve attended to date. In a discussion with the conference organizer, André Morys, about the number and backgrounds of the people attending, André apologized that Germany was at least two years behind the United States. Baloney! I told him I couldn’t agree and that I was very impressed with the number and quality of people in attendance. Nevertheless, I told…
Building an optimization culture is hard and it seems that it might be getting harder. My friend Avinash Kaushik, the analytics evangelist at Google, recently shared an important stat and his observation on Google+: Only 22% of companies have a strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives. Down from 25% last year. [Source: Econsultancy Online Measurement & Strategy report http://goo.gl/OGscu] The problem is not the tool. The problem is you and me and our management. Think of it…
I originally published Accidental Marketing on ClickZ September 10th, 2001. How much in our world has changed in the last decade? Has your organization changed to make sure they aren’t doing any accidental marketing? What are the obstacles holding organizational change back? Here is the article as it appeared when I first wrote it: —————————————– No, no, that’s not the title of Seth Godin’s next book. “Accidental marketing” refers to a pervasive Web-based trend that is focused on the “how”…
I was recently discussing online retail with a colleague and the challenge online retailers face in proving their value to their traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts. It made me wonder why no ecommerce platform (that I know of) has added the ability to send a shopping cart to someone’s mobile phone. Imagine you are on the Nordstrom website and you are looking at a number of outfits but you don’t want to commit to purchasing them until you can touch and feel them or…