I never intended to become an intermediary between Marketing and IT, but somehow, even from my early days of internet marketing consulting back in the ‘90s, I ended up there. There were times when I wasn’t sure whether I was a marketing consultant or a technology consultant, but that blurring was the exact balance needed at the moment.

The field that needed this blurring became Digital Marketing. To function, a digital marketer needs to know how technology plays in defining the customer experience, in delivering strategic customer insight, and in the digital engagement itself. Technology is, quite simply, inherent in digital marketing.

The danger that comes with this is falling in love with technology, and forgetting that technology must always be subservient to purpose.

2 Problems Working With IT Solves

One example is that Marketing will often take on a technology project in the name of it being a “marketing project”, when they would be better off collaborating with the IT department. Marketing doesn’t have the technical expertise to do it well, so they end up in various sorts of trouble, often with with scaling or security. These are particularly problems with mobile and social technologies. Either the company ends up in trouble, or IT has to come in and fix up the mess, both of which aggravate the relations between the two departments.

The worst result, from a corporate perspective, is that Marketers spend their valuable time tinkering with tools rather than engaging with customers (You’ve heard of the Social Media black hole, haven’t you?).

A second example is the use of analytics tools. Marketing people all too often fall in love with their analytics tools, as if the tool will replace thinking, empathy and insight. The result is motion, commotion, and much action, but not progress. What is missing is the human-to-human connection that comes when people read past the data into the lives of their customers, and then adjust the marketing campaigns in ways that result in more conversions.

Oddly, the problem in this case is simply information overload, and that is where collaborating with IT would help.

Marketing needs to communicate KPIs and other marketing goals to IT, and let the tech department tune the analytics system to them. Then the Marketing people can spend their time doing what is most important — adjusting the campaigns to meet the KPIs, not sifting through mountains of confusing and largely irrelevant data.

Finally, taking the reverse relationship, I found in my organizations that tech didn’t hate marketing as much as lore would indicate. They just wanted a little respect. They really appreciated it, for instance, when I involved them in our website technology analysis work instead of only calling them when there was a crisis. The analysis was for marketing purposes, but the request showed respect for the expertise and capabilities of the people in the IT department.

I could give you more stories, but the moral of each is that the two working together can do more to create kick-ass customer relevance than either working separately.

Take a fresh look at your organization and see where the two departments can seamlessly work together. See how much better things will go when they do. See if you can get the collaboration started.

Related articles

• Avoid These Top Five Digital Marketing Mistakes (customerthink.com)
• Digital Marketing: What’s Next For the Digital World? (digitalvegetarian.com)
• Adobe To Acquire Digital Marketing Agency Efficient Frontier (searchengineland.com)
• The Evolution of Marketing Agencies and Consultancies (marketingprofs.com)

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Here’s the slides I used in my talk to the next gen of digital marketers (I’m so proud to see the next gen-and I feel sooo old!):

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In my 6 years of corporate and small business social media consulting, I’ve come to believe that the biggest problem around social media ROI is figuring out which digital marketing efforts should get credit for a conversion. It’s easy to say that social media needs to prove that it delivers ROI, but companies make that very hard to do with the analytics programs they have in place to track conversions.

Most website analytics programs attribute conversions to the most recent referrer source for a particular visitor. If they came from a Google AdWords ad, it will get the credit for the conversion. But it’s much more likely that a customer actually decided to buy your product because of exposure to your brand in various channels (i.e. A search bringing up your organic listing, your email list, your twitter and Facebook links, then finally your PPC ad). Which of these channels should take credit for the conversion? They were all responsible.

Multi-touch attribution, unlike the “last-touch” model most companies employ, allocates the conversion value across all of your marketing programs — all touch points receive an equal share of the credit for the conversion. Since social media is rarely a last touch referrer, and traditional web referrer methods break down in social channels, a multi-touch mode of ROI tracking works much better to give marketers the ROI justification their CEOs are demanding.

Additionally, building better links with campaign, content, medium, source, and term parameters built in, is an integral part of the multi-touch mode of measuring social media ROI. Obviously, adding all of these additional parameters will result very quickly in an unweildy URL, so baking all of this inside a short URL is the way to go. The only problem with many short URLs is the one I mentioned above — the analytics programs generally only actually attribute a conversion to the most recent referrer.

Like any new marketing channel, we’re seeing social media continue to make its way through growing pains as it reaches scale and maturity. The experimental and promising sets of tools and methodologies in the works can provide real answers for marketers.

Send me a line if you’d like to chat about some of the innovate social media ROI tools I’m using with my own clients. I’d love to chat with you about how they can also help you measure and boost your social media conversions.

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Thanks for visiting. Will you please rate your reading experience?

Wait, this one is even better…

We’d like your feedback.

Thank you for visiting my website. You have been randomly selected to participate in a customer satisfaction survey to let me know how I can improve your website experience.

The survey is designed to measure your entire site experience and will appear at the end of your visit.

This survey is conducted by me.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet that’s what we as marketers constantly do in our efforts to gain brand recognition in a world increasingly led by social media. We poke our customers to give us better ways of serving them. Something’s wrong with this picture.

The promise of social media for marketers is the customer information it makes available.

The challenge of social media for marketers is how to use that information to create better brand experiences for the customer.

But even with social media tools, getting this information isn’t always easy. So, simple customer survey tools, like Survey Monkey, are crutches many marketing managers rely on to manage this complex task.

Why Should You Care What Customers Think?

The idea is that if you ask a customer directly what they like or want in their experience with a particular brand, the company can better meet their needs (i.e. sell them more stuff, more often).

Certainly, a high degree of customer satisfaction directly correlates to a company’s financial success on both micro– and macro-economic levels. The link between customer satisfaction, sales, and ultimately loyalty is powerful, because data often links customer satisfaction ahead of sales by approximately a week.

But slow down, cowboy. Don’t start crafting your survey questions quite yet for that big boost in sales next week…

How Can We Better Serve You?

The problem with simply asking a customer a few questions about what they liked about their brand experience  is that it doesn’t work.

One of the most eloquent examples of what customers really think when they’re taking your survey is at Laraine Herring’s blog, where she writes:

Am I satisfied with my teeth cleaning experience? Well, what were my expectations of that teeth cleaning experience? Were they reasonable or were they what I wanted rather than what I might have needed? Why can’t it be enough just to have my teeth cleaned? If the dentist stabs me in the gum with a sharp tool, I promise I’ll say something. Otherwise, just please clean my teeth. Were the heavens supposed to crack open? Should I have expected a Hallelujah chorus when she put the bite wings in for the X-rays? Did they serve me wine and cheese? Please. It’s the dentist.

How did I like my recent car’s tune-up experience? Well, actually, I would have preferred if you’d have used Bay 3 for the work as my car really is sensitive to north-facing windows. I also think the tool boxes should have been in red instead of that sad metal color, and I would have really liked it if my mechanic looked like Johnny Depp. What can I tell you about tuning up a car? Nothing. Because I. Don’t. Know. How. To. Tune. Up. A. Car. If the mechanic slashed my tires, poured oil in the gas tank, and drained and forgot to refill the radiator, I promise I’ll say something.

And, I would be remiss if I didn’t include this beauty from noozhawk.com:

Z: You can’t buy any goods or services anymore without being asked, “How did we do? Are we good enough for you?”

She: It’s very needy. It’s like that boyfriend who’s way too concerned with how he kisses. “Am I kissing you too hard? Should I peck more? What do you want me to do?”

Z: I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to man-up, corporate America. I want you to own your products and your services.

She: Seriously. The entire world is not your focus group

Customers have complex motivations, and simple customer survey tools, used to excess, fail to address these needs. Routine customer surveys often damage more than they benefit a brand.

So how do marketers get more customers in this experience economy without conducting surveys?

Your focus must be on understanding and delighting the customer, which can’t happen just by putting together a survey. Most of the customer surveys I see are really focused on the needs of the business, even though they’re packaged as focusing on the needs of the customer. The customer taking the survey intuitively knows they’re not likely to see a complete change in the product service if  they don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other.  Surveys become like white noise.

Surveys are really putting customers in unnatural circumstances, all the while being asked to share deep feelings about a brand. It’s certainly not the best way to get the truth of how customers really feel.

How To Understand Your Customer

The social web’s transparency and powerful tools allows you, as marketers, to gain a deep level of intimacy with your customers. Web analytics allow you to track and measure many of the dimensions of a brand’s relationship with their customer that simple surveys can’t touch. There are millions of searches daily using the words and phrases related to your business. Now you can use web search engines, as well as social searches (of which Facebook analytics is excellent).

You extract the ultimate value from these searches when you seek to understand the intent behind the search. You may have all of the demographics and survey results on your market, but can you extract ‘why’ they buy from you with that data? Not likely.

To really understand your customers, you need more than a customer survey, you need to understand their behavior. For instance, if you’ve purchased Vespa Scooter accessories, you’re likely to purchase some again. If you’ve gotten Botox, you’ll probably do it again (and that, in itself says volumes about you — from a marketing aspect, that is). Getting behavioral data from customers takes some time, but is relatively much easier to gather given the social monitoring and listening tools available.

Bottom line, don’t annoy your customers with surveys. Do the work of segmenting customers. Understand your customer’s lifestyle choices and personality preferences with psychographics data. Glean the behavioral choices I wrote about in the previous paragraph from the psychographics data.

And most importantly, be sensitive to this depth of aggregate customer information you have, by showing empathy and compassionate understanding in your campaigns. This empathy creates a memorable customer experience — much stronger than answers to a simple survey after they’ve purchased your product. When customers experience the empathy in your interaction with them via a campaign or on your website, they will make their satisfaction known. Without a survey to prod them along.

Related articles

• Monitoring Relationship Status (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The folly of getting customer feedback through automated surveys (thecustomerblog.co.uk)

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At the 10 Year Agile celebration, the conclusion was to focus on “Improving the entire process of value creation”. Notice that here again, the thinking on value stops…Click here to continue reading

Related articles

• Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto (allaboutagile.com)
• Agile Innovation (neilperkin.typepad.com)
• Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in) (agilefocus.com)

I’m presenting a webinar on  this subject Feb 10. Please join me!

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• Cisco Projects Enormous Mobile Network Growth (CSCO, VZ, T, S, CMCSA, LVLT, NFLX, GOOG, AAPL) (247wallst.com)

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• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on Women in the Workplace. (daveenjoys.com)
• WATCH: Advise To Aspiring Women Leaders From Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (psychworld.com)

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I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore, I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

And yes, I grabbed this post (with very minor additions and edits) from Daily Post to get me started again. A lot of transformations have occurred in the interactive marketing industry in the past 12 months, and my goal is to help you, as a marketer, keep up with and own a specific niche of this ever-growing space.

To your success,

Ghennipher

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