Your customers' money talks. And it's saying "I want you to be more relevant! Use more data!"

In techie marketing, I’m going to be breaking down the walls of the jargon that marketers use to discuss end goals into the tactics and understanding of how we (as techie marketers, of course!) can begin to execute on these end goals. The key to this whole thing is sifting through the fluff. When looking at how you can begin to understand your customers or prospects and what they’re going to do, you must first understand what they have already done (read: lots and lots of data). In the techie world, we call this a “relational database.” Establishing relationship points within your data will help you bring it together to actually use it.

Data on your prospect or customer can come from many different places:

• Web analytics: What he is doing on your website on web application
• Profile data: Tracking how he has interacted with previous campaigns, where he’s coming from, what size his business is, what his title is, what industry, etc.
• Previous buying behavior
• Comparative analysis: What the decisions of other people like him (similar industry, title, etc.) have done and what has worked
• Overarching knowledge: Your knowledge and understanding as a marketer what works and what doesn’t work

A CRM like Salesforce.com, Siebel, or SAP will take a monumental effort to implement. If you’re reading this and you’ve gone through migration of services, I’m sure you can relate. Integration can be painful, but the most important thing is that it is set up for success through discovery, requirements gathering, and a deep understanding of the solution by all parties involved (including marketers).

A relational database (your CRM in this case) is constructed in such a way that data moves in and out in the most efficient way possible. A well-designed relational database can maintain a couple of important things to marketers: the integrity of data and the ability to organize & store massive amounts of data that all can be read in a consistent manner. A relational database would be made up of a series of tables that house data related to one another by properties called “primary keys” and “foreign keys.”

A primary key is a unique identifier of any individual product, person, place, or thing in a database. It is identified by this primary key across the entire database.

Example: You store all of your purchases in a relational database. Because it’s different for every customer, a purchase may have any variable number of products and may reference a variable number of shipping or billing addresses. Therefore, to support this structure with a relational database, you would have a table to store orders that would relate to a table that stores n line items & product SKUs. That database was designed to ensure that no data existed in two places—that it was optimized through relationships in your data tables.

How does this relate to the 360˚ customer view?

Thinking about your customer from all sides of your business comes back to thinking of your customer as the primary key of your relational database. Every piece of data that you leverage in your marketing campaigns can be tied back to them based on what you know.

What should I use as my unique identifier or primary key? Especially when it comes to one-to-one marketing or email marketing, many companies struggle with what to do here. My answer is always that you should store a unique identifier on your subscriber and map all other unique identifiers to your own. Always try to have your own so that you can easily create integration points with all the tools in your tool belt.

How do I begin to unify all my data to create a holistic customer experience? The more data you use in your campaigns the better. A customer is always more likely to buy when an offer is relevant. By keying in on how you can establish relationships across your data tied to your customer as the primary key, trends start to come through on how to better target your customers.

The data is always there. It takes more effort to analyze it first and foremost, and then to make nimble, efficient business decisions based on data that you will soon be able to compile in your own way.

(And if the data is not there, I’ll have just the post for you next week.)

What is Techie Marketing?

Techie marketing is applying the inner workings of sophisticated technology, data analysis, and integration to drive higher success metrics in online marketing campaigns. Here’s how it begins…

You’re a marketer for an organization responsible for launching and deploying (a lot of) campaigns including paid search, email marketing, landing pages with direct mail, web analytics, segmentation, analysis, … and the list goes on. What’s the end goal? To be the best marketer possible by increasing sales & exposure of your brand in the marketplace. One of the marquee pieces of online marketing today is the numbers that you’re able to get from all of the campaigns. Online marketing truly is the easiest avenue to determine success metrics, define goals, and monitor and easily adapt the execution of your campaigns to accomplish those goals.

Wait a second… Online marketing? Easy?

Is this something along the lines of what you’re thinking…?

I’m not technical. What about all the integrations? I don’t know HTML. I don’t know SQL. I don’t even know where to begin on designing a relational database or what to do technically when I design my campaigns!

Or maybe you’re thinking…

I don’t need to be technical, I’ve got my IT staff to help. We collaboratively figure out what the right approach is. And then they tell me what’s possible.

So to answer this: “How do I become a marketer that can truly navigate and understand the inner workings of the technology I’ve got in place?” I am going to dedicate my blog to simplifying the technology you need to deploy truly successful online marketing campaigns, and how some of the most successful marketing teams in the world have incredibly nimble teams and embrace technical knowledge.

This blog will be dedicated to the teachings of Techie Marketing. Welcome.

Once I decide on which song or album I want, it’s one click, I type in a password, and it immediately begins downloading to my computer.

Everyone knows how iTunes works, but what I really love is how they get it: by making this process even *simpler* than giving someone the opportunity to pirate music, it will provide an alternative that is incredibly successful. Ease of use winning time after time.

Almost all regular consumers have to work harder to pirate music than to just go ahead and buy it. It’s addicting to get music, and with the Genius functionality, it will only get more addicting. Hats off to Apple, as always.

So their business model is not to drive revenue through the website but more focused on driving engagement of interested parties. Although they sell merchandise online, their ultimate goal is to drive workshop attendance. The site features a top-notch speaker and the main message of the website is to engage with him, get to know him, and fork over the dough to listen to him talk. Another note: Totally worth it, and I’m not just saying that.

I suggested something simple: “Whenever they need to download the PDF of an article, why don’t we ask for their email address?” We would then email the link to the PDF. I suggested this for two reasons:

1. Email marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to nurture leads and keep a steady stream of communication going with interested existing/prospective customers.
2. It provides a method to push communication to engaged visitors to the website.
3. It could ultimately lead in a workshop attendance. It’s all about timing. By delivering an email message to an interested party at the right time, we are far more likely to earn their business than if we were just provide the download outright.

Of course, we’ll only find out how successful this methodology, but there is significant value to having someone’s email address. Not so we can SPAM them–though, I’m sure it can be tempting to email them until they never want to be emailed again–but so we can get to know them better while also getting the message out to more people through multiple channels. From there, we can garner tons of data about what is successful at driving workshop attendance, and tailor our marketing programs even further to better our revenue-generation strategy.

Google offers an incredible API for use with their Charts capabilities. You have the ability to pass numbers to a URL and define that URL for the source of an image. That image will render a graph or chart that you specify.

That means any time, any where, through any medium, you have the ability to better prove your point through charts. By the way, this really requires no development work. The only things you need to know are…

1. chart size (width x height)
2. the data points
3. chart type
4. chart text

That’s it. From there, you can either direct your browser to the URL that you need to build—and go to File > Save As… to save the image—or you can insert the chart in a Web page using an HTML “img” tag.

The URL would look something like…

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=250x100
&chd=t:60,40
&cht=p3
&chl=Hello|World

And will render like this…

And that’s amazing. This stuff should be on every website. Seriously.

So get out there and go check out how you can start using Google Charts.