I was recalling a situation recently where a colleague wondered why a marketer wasn't making rational marketing decisions. While I sympathized with the colleague, I think I understood that the marketer might have been in a situation where their leadership didn't understand the power of marketing strategy, or the marketing concept. And as a result, was making decisions based on a non-rational marketing basis.
Marketers face such problems constantly, and it is the reason why I'm such a supporter of Agile Marketing. It gives marketers the tools to have a conversation with leaders about what they should be focused on. By looking at the whole scope of what a company should be spending it's time on, rather than the project that's the flavor of the moment, we are able to weigh what will have the most impact to the business overall. Marketers and leaders surely want this.
Agile marketing gives marketers the tools to argue for the benefits of marketing and push back against non-rational thinking. It takes time to show the benefits of agile, but when given, leaders can come around, and understand that if they follow the methodology, they will get more results overall.
How many times have you developed a marketing strategy for your brand, or a client, and it wasn't implemented correctly because of marketing organization, either Martech optimization, or resources required to fulfill?
The issue for me, or rather the organization is the difference between what's imagined, and the effort to create and implement.
While I'm a marketer, SEOs has always fascinated me. Partly I think because ranking technology can help us to understand the meaning of words. Though there are biases at play that need to be addressed with such rankings.
And when I worked in Corporate at Forrester, I learned how the analyst firm attempted to build a brand around a term that related to social media. However, social media was the term that came to be used widely in the industry.
And the reason why I think social media won in the marketplace of ideas was because there were more voices pushing the term social media compared to earlier terms such as consumer generated media, or Forrester’s.
My point here is that topics, ideas, memes only work if you can get most of your industry to jump on board with them.
I've been thinking a lot about agile marketing, and if the term encompasses what's happening with marketing. To me agile for marketers is not just about the process of management, or the effort to iterate, but rather it's a play for the soul of marketers, are we followers or leaders in the struggle for recognition within the corporate place.
And while I might try to expand agile marketing into the bigger sphere, if the community doesn't support that it doesn't really matter what I say or think.
Much better to look for another term that encompasses the ideas and practices of agile marketing but also that larger issue with how to strategically organize marketing to help companies achieve both business strategy and marketing strategy success.
My effort came up with digital transformation marketing. However, it is a term for the moment. Given that so many companies are focused on digital transformation. Digital transformation marketing is all about marketers using AI, automation, and technology to transform their department into a fully functioning part of the enterprise.
But I wonder if marketing operations is a term that's better suited for the role. 1. because more people are using it, and 2. unlike digital transformation once you've transformed, what's next. Operations will be with us for a long time, but I'm not sure digital transformation will be. I'm also reading articles that reference marketing ops that touch on what I want out of another term, or an expansion of agile marketing. A realization that marketing strategy isn't complete unless it takes business strategy into account, and there's an organization of resources, people and technology within the marketing department to execute on a business strategy successfully.
I used to work at SDL. The company was a language translation. SDL wanted to change its business strategy, from a focus on language translation to one of technology services company offering SaaS services to help improve the corporate customer experience. The effort proved too much for the company. And as a result, it’s returned to focus on language translation though retaining the division on content management with integration for translation. The company was bought out by RWC in 2018.
The lesson for me was that SDL didn't have the capability to retool itself to manage all of its divisions, and the reason for that was because it didn't have the correct allocation of marketing folks with marketing resources. Though I’m also wondering if the market had been a little bit farther along, SDL might have optimized more easily. A matter of being ahead of the times. SDL hasn't been the only example of this problem, too many divisions or products, and not enough marketing resources deployed across those products. I think this problem is one that's one of the biggest problems in marketing, or business. Business strategy not keeping up with modern requirements for marketing if you will. That’s where my search for the right term lies. It’s at the heart of the marketing profession too, if we want to see fewer articles about the poor tenure of CMOs, we have to engineer our profession to tackle business strategy problems not just marketing strategy implementation issues. I might have the best marketing strategy in the world, but if my competitors have a better business strategy, it’s going to be easier to sell their products against mine.
What do you think, what should be the right term for this problem? Marketing of course, but we need a term to focus marketer’s energies on the problem.
Chatting today with a colleague in the Agile Marketing community. Marketing as a profession suffers from a lot of stakeholders who think they know how to practice marketing. It is amazingly easy for them to ditch marketing professionals when things do not appear to be working out with expected results. However, a lot of the time, what is happening is that the plan is directed by the non-marketers rather than the marketing professionals.
To me one of the biggest benefits of Agile Marketing is its ability to open up what marketing does and enable stakeholders to see how the process works. It is the transparency of Agile Marketing that is the biggest benefit to marketers and the profession. It enables us to practice marketing how we wish by getting the stakeholders buy in because they have a better idea of what is happening.
Have you been let go as a marketer and thought that you could not do all that you wanted too, because of the constraints of communication, and the direction of stakeholders?
Have you wanted to enact on strategy, but too busy working on one off project rather than the whole marketing organization process?
Agile Marketing affords marketers with not just a process for focusing on what work needs to be done, but also a mechanism for communicating with stakeholders who do not really understand how marketing works.
Check out this great post on average CMO tenure. Down again in 2019!
PeaceHealth's removal of Dr. Lin is likely to be one of the first corporate PR disasters of the Covid 19 outbreak here in the United States.
Not least because everyone remembers the early story of Dr. Li of Wuhan who was a medical doctor in Wuhan China, and when he tried to warn about the coronavirus outbreak he was stopped by the authorities. Dr. Li eventually died of Covid 19.
Dr. Lin in Bellingham, Washington had served at the local PeaceHealth Hospital as an emergency physician at PeaceHealth St Joseph Medical Center. Like many medical professionals concerned about the pace of action, he was using his social media to push his hospital to make changes faster. The Guardian reported, "Dr Ming Lin, repeatedly posted on his Facebook page about not having enough protective equipment, long delays in receiving coronavirus test results, and risky virus screening practices in which patients were evaluated inside the waiting room."
He even helped to organize local resources and companies to help. On Friday Dr. Lin received news that he was no longer required at his hospital. Initially told he was terminated. There are news reports that his employment company, TeamHealth told the Guardian Dr Lin had not been terminated, but the company would be helping him find a new location to work from.
My take:
This is major PR problem for PeaceHealth. Dr. Lin has been posting for several weeks and already has quite a following.
News media across the US and world are picking up the story.
It's going to be difficult for the Hospital Network to handle the backlash. One way they can do that is to be very open about what happened and respond to questions. So, far I don’t see any statement on the company’s website. It’s far better to be open about what happened. Hiding from the media and public really isn't going to help them. Everyone will assume the worse.
This is going to have an impact on the reputation of the hospital network.
PeaceHealth Executive Leadership
PeaceHealth Board of Directors
Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC) – Bellingham, Washington
PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center
Meanwhile Dr. Lin has been focused on the most important issue, getting resources to the hospital in Bellingham and he states he will continue to do that even though not working at the hospital for now.
Samuel Scott wrote 'Agile marketing’ is a crutch for those who do not have a real strategy' where he takes agile marketers to task for borrowing agile from developers, and failing to realize that agile only helps when working on tasks that change rapidly.
Great, we like controversy, because it encourages debate.
My biggest issue with the article is equating agile with speed. In the sense we practice agile because the practice allows us to do things more quickly. I think it is possible for agile marketing to do things more quickly, and it is one of the results you receive, but that's the consequence of enabling marketers to have greater control of what they do. To me agile marketing's benefit is transparency over what work we should be focused on now, the transparency gives stakeholders insight into what marketers are working on and helps negotiate a plan. The speed comes because of focus not because somehow marketers are getting faster at a task, or moving more quickly through development cycles.
Samuel Scott suggested agile marketing had merit when used for SEO. The point being that SEO is a practice that lends itself to agile marketing because it’s constantly changing. Marketing's problem isn't that individual marketing tactics are staid, rather than we have to do so much and decide what we have to do at anyone moment. The constant change for marketing doesn’t lie with the tactics, it's the choice between what tactics we use.
Agile marketing empowers marketing teams to focus, and so the speed comes from dedicating enough time to get a task done. Existing practices don't help marketers to focus because marketer's agendas aren't controlled by the marketer, but rather by sales, the CEO and stakeholders. Transparency helps marketers to point out to their internal customers why giving control to decide what to execute on is so important.
Mike Volpe in an early interview with Frank Days and me on the Agilty Marketing Podcast made this point about HubSpot's use of agile marketing. It was the practice's ability to inform stakeholders on what marketers were doing that was the real value, and the consequences of interrupting them. It was a reality check for the CEO and senior member of staff.
"Hey we can switch to XYZ latest marketing/sales tactic, but it's going to bump off our quarterly marketing plan?"
Folks paused and did a double take realizing that they were bumping the very plans they had agreed upon at the beginning of the quarter. Agile marketers then had the ability to ask,
"Can we move this tactic to next quarter instead?"
because everyone had agreed to the discipline of sticking to sprint plans, the marketers were able control more what they did, and stay focused. Once everyone got to see the consequences of that focus, better results, in terms of getting through more marketing tasks because those tasks were planned and executed on a schedule. Senior managers became advocates for the discipline.
Focus, not the ability to change is the benefit of agile to marketers. Yes, we can still change, but again, if we are undisciplined in managing our overall list of tasks from stakeholders, we will be undisciplined in altering execution of tactics over time. Agile can help us to test more but you only get to do that practice if you have control of what you do next.
As for Samuel Scott’s criticism that marketers borrowed agile from developers, we did, I don’t see anything wrong with that. It actually moved from development, to product managers working with the development team, who then started using agile methods for product marketing.
Developers are a profession where using practices to manage projects is party of the DNA of the profession. Marketers don’t have that DNA, which is surprising because the profession is one of project management on a myriad of tasks. Software development has numerous management practices, I don’t think I could say the same for marketers.
Yes, marketers are guilty of running to the latest fad, I’d argue we invented the concept. But as someone who’s been attempting to use agile marketing since 2009, I can tell you it’s been a slow grinding process to get folks to adopt the practice. We pulled teeth between ’09 and ’12 to find any marketers who were using the practice to interview. And SprintZero really was the largest gathering of agile marketers at the time, 35! I sure hope agile marketing is becoming fad, because then more marketers will sleep better at night because they were able to control what they do, and get support from their CEO in what they are focused on!
Checking LinkedIn recently, I found a few posts by Darlene Hollywood of Hollywood Agency on her trip to Northern England with the British American Business Council of New England here in Boston. As I'm from the Northwest, Manchester I thought I'd take some time to ask Darlene a few questions about her trip.
--------------
John: You recently took a trip to the North of England on a trade mission. Can you describe the purpose of the mission and detail the trip?
Darlene: The trade mission to the North of England was led by the British American Business Council of New England to foster transatlantic relations in the wake of Brexit, which has led to a weakened pound and concerns surrounding European trading. As our two regions share so much in common – in terms of industry, innovation and education –it’s the ideal location for Bostonians to look to bridge business partnerships.
Over the course of a week we met with business leaders in Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle. We were hosted by major corporations including Caterpillar and Paragon and were individually paired with small and mid-sized businesses with whom we could potentially do business.
And, we did also get some downtime dining at wonderful local restaurants, visiting Durham Cathedral and Trinity House. The people we met were extremely hospitable and through this trip I’ve made some lasting friendships.
John: Boston has long been a center for the tech industry. Did you explore the history of the tech industry in the North? If so can you tell us more?
Darlene: The Northern Powerhouse region, as it’s called, is comprised of six cities (Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull and the North East). It is well-educated with 23 universities lending innovative talent to the area. About 20 percent of all businesses in the region can be classified as knowledge intensive business services (KIBS), compared to London’s 30 percent. Industries that are really thriving include advanced manufacturing, creative and digital media, energy and environment, life sciences and healthcare, and financial and business services. Technology clearly plays a part in each.
John: What's the state of the venture and Angel marketplace in the north of England for digital companies?
Darlene: Harriot Cross, the British Consulate-General, Boston, who also attended as a delegate shared with some of our host companies that more venture funding came out of a single floor in her Kendall Sq. office building than in all the UK. So, I’m not sure there’s a parallel in terms of dollars invested. It may be that the cost of doing business and the local talent pool somewhat offset funding issues.
John: What's the current state of tech in the North of England? Companies, employment, and the future?
Darlene: The difference in the cost of doing business in the Northern region vs. London is significant. The cost of running a business in the North is as much as 40 percent cheaper than in London and salaries are also typically 30 to 40 percent less. As such, it appears to have a burgeoning business environment.
John: What are the strengths for tech and digital in the North? Industries etc.
Darlene: Because I have a particularly strong penchant for creative and digital services, I spent a good amount of time meeting with Northern agencies. I was surprised to learn how much business both creative and digital agencies are generating in the US, as they’re able to offer comparable (if not better) service at a fraction of the cost. I expect to see more competition from the region coming into play here in the States and am considering how to offshore work to the region.
John: Lastly, tell me more about your business, and Hollywood Agency?
Darlene: At Hollywood Agency, we make brands famous! We’re a public relations and social media agency partnering with compelling brands whose culture and values mirror our own. We work with innovators in consumer goods, business services, and technology. Named one of the fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts for two years running, we have offices in Boston and San Francisco. To learn more, visit hollywoodagency.com or follow along on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
As a leader in several professional and member non-profits over the years, American Marketing Association, Boston Agile Marketing etc. I've received several unsolicited emails from companies about asking help to market their product, service or more usually their event.
The company might be coming into town and wants to increase attendance at their event. So, they reach out to local professional organizations, and ask them if in return for being a media partner, the company or organization will provide a discount to the professional organization's members.
This adds value, right?
Well no, it adds value to the company or organization giving the discount, and the member gets a small discount. But the member organization doesn’t receive much value, except the discount to their membership. And any marketing to the membership may turn off members, so there’s some costs to marketing.
If a company were to sponsor your group. Or market the group beyond a link on a website. Then there is some value given in exchange for the years of work the non-profit has put into growing their membership. But unless there's a substantial return, I don't think non-profits should sell themselves short.
Think of this from the nonprofit’s perspective, while a discount is appreciated, it doesn't help the organization, as the organization cannot transfer any value to the members directly. Rather a small discount works well for the company seeking to find attendees because every discount is only given when there is a conversion, so instead of having to spend money on marketing, you pay a small amount, which is only redeemed when a conversion occurs. This is a huge ROI for your marketing efforts.
Instead of a discount, what of value can a company offer a member organization as well as the members in return?
· Promote the member organization in every email, show some actual value to the member organization.
· Put the member organization on the home page of the event.
· Sponsor the member organization in some other way in return for the promotion.
One of the frequent questions I’m always asked regarding agile marketing is what tools are available to manage agile marketing. Beyond a Kanban board, excel and Google Spreadsheet. There are increasingly a lot of tools for marketers to use. I’m now thinking about starting another project to query marketing project management vendors who incorporate agile marketing features in their products.
This project would be in addition to the marketing graduates at local Boston college’s project. We've been making some good progress locally in Boston with the Marketing Graduate Colleges, from inviting students to the Boston meetup, and thinking about presenting at local colleges. And I want to continue that project, encouraging more graduate students to learn about agile marketing.
However, this other potential project in highlighting project management tool vendors that incorporate agile marketing in their designs, will help to fulfill another goal, to encourage the development of this part of the industry. To that aim, I'd like to build a list of questions for the tool vendors so marketers can quickly assess their utility and scope in the practice.
If so, what questions should we ask the vendors that would be helpful to marketers?
Here’s a few ideas:
What does your tool do in relation to marketing and agile?
How many marketers are using the tool for agile marketing?
What case studies do you have available in marketers gaining value from your tool for agile marketing?
Once we have a complete list of questions, we can start pinging vendors to answer the questions. I don’t think I have to do all of the interviews, and even the vendors can post their answers on their own blogs. Though it would be helpful if they let me know about their answers, so I can reference them in this post.
Running a community seems a lot tougher today than it did just a few years ago.
Our smartphones enable us to know what's happening, and stay in touch.
We are more connected than ever. And for longer during the day.
While the proliferation of communities means we have less time to cover more touch points.
Recently in a community I help moderate, I wrote a post asking for conversation from the community, suggesting that simply posting a link doesn't encourage conversation. After posting a question to the community, the first response I received was a link to someone's content offsite.
To me the response wasn't helpful because it removes the conversation from the community. Even if the content was helpful to the conversation. However, the link led to a great piece of content, but you'd still have to search through the content to find what was relevant to the question I asked.
So my question is this? Is posting a link to a community forum really conversation?
Here's a few reactions to my question from around the web:
"I think it doesn't do anything. I would guess most people just ignore the link and less it's dropped by a highly respected member of the group.
It's also a missed opportunity from the writer who can reinforce a point of view and possibly a thought leadership positioning."
"That's a very common problem I see with social posts. This practice provides no context to the reader of why it’s important to the discussion, to me or, the brand."
"I just read a post that for example, emails should drop the greetings and salutations and be brief to respect people's time. So that thought is out there. I know that adding context around a link is more respectful of someone's time. It also builds trust and the likelihood that the link will be clicked on."
There are a few voices on the question, what do you think?
Chad Pollitt wrote a post suggesting that Google is the reason we have a huge volume of content in the industry. I'm confused by Chad's statement that Google ruined Content Marketing.
(links here http://relevance.com/how-google-ruined-content-marketing/ and here http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/how-google-ruined-content-marketing for Chad's article)
Panda from 2011 penalized poor quality websites. If you wrote poor quality content on your site, or stole content from other sites. Your entire site could be penalized. As a result many sites that had poor quality content were kicked out of the Google search engine, or their rankings were lowered.
Marketers had to change tactics, and start producing original content that was better quality. So if anything Chad's right about Google encouraging quantity before Panda, that certainly was the case. In fact, there was much criticism in the industry about the state of rankings from sites that had poor quality content.
Google was also encouraging links from poor quality websites. Penguin was Google's effort to penalize links from poor quality content websites, now any site with lots of links from poor quality sites, content farms may be kicked out of Google.
After Panda and Penguin, marketers had to shape up, or face having zero or low traffic. The tables turned, and marketers are now producing better quality content.
If anything Google has encouraged better quality content, and also the realization that you have to make content that speaks to the searches visitors conduct.
If there are problems with the selection of quality content, then I think we can all agree that Google should work harder to improve its algorithm to detect the best content. Advances in search engine technology happen in steps, so expect to see more efforts on the part of Google to find good content.
I’m ex-Forrester Research, during my time there I was in Online Community Management in the Marketing department. My time overlapped Charlene Li leaving to found The Altimeter Group, and Jeremiah Owyang was at Forrester before also joining The Altimeter Group.
The market research industry has changed a lot since those times because social media became so ubiquitous, companies like the Altimeter Group provide their research for free, and instead of selling syndicated research sell consulting services.
As the arbiter of thought leadership, Google needs open content to get rankings, free research is a very effective way to build a name for yourself quickly. If you don’t provide some open research you’ll probably not grow as quickly as a market research company.
Which leads me to the interview I conducted for this blog post with Jeff Ernst from SlapFive. Jeff is also ex-Forrester Research. He was first an analyst serving B2B marketers at the market research company. Then Jeff took a role in marketing, VP of Marketing, to help increase growth at the company.
Forrester was growing at about 2-3 percent a year. Forrester marketing was doing a great job running field events, webinars, email campaigns, etc. Prospects were consuming free content, but they just weren’t converting to sales opportunities at a high enough rate. The approach Jeff took to help grow Forrester was to embark on a customer voice program at the company. He started by interviewing buyers and asking them detailed questions about their buying process to determine why they were not purchasing.
Forrester had developed a role-based strategy many years earlier, all marketing and research efforts were directed at the 7 IT based and 6 marketing based roles. Jeff wanted to take a step back and really understand if those roles reflected their buyer personas. They didn’t and so Jeff developed four personas for marketing and messaging purposes:
The marketing leader
The corporate librarian/market research person.
Vendor analyst relations person
At a recent Boston Agile Marketing I spoke with one of the speakers about how to spread the word so other marketers can gain similar benefits from using agile marketing. The speaker recommended we reach out to college masters programs, and encourage the professors and graduate students to attend the local Boston agile marketing meetings.
I think this is a great idea, and so, I'd like to start a project to conduct outreach to all of the marketing professors at local colleges in Massachusetts. If you are a Masters graduate, or know of a professor at one of these locations, let me know we'll like to make that connection.
http://business-schools.startclass.com/d/a/Massachusetts
WorkFront is a comprehensive solution for agile marketing project marketing. Formerly known as AtTask, the solution provide marketers with project management either by waterfall method or agile. Check out some of the videos from the WorkFront marketing team:
WorkFront Agile Marketing Video
Agile marketing case study - Advance Auto Parts
I've not used WorkFront, but I believe I've previously used AtTask at another company, a few years ago. It looks as if the project has come along way.
Jeff Julian from Aji Software gave a presentation on content marketing and agile marketing at the Boston Agile Marketing Meet up tonight in Woburn, MA.
Jeff's background is programming. He is passionate about Microsoft, and works with the company at his programming and content strategy agency in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been using agile since 2001, early days, but is also an early pioneer in the blogging community. Having built a programming focused blogging network. Jeff founded a startup software community in 2003, called Geekswithblogs.net. He sold the site in 2012, when the traffic to the site had grown to 2.5 million unique visitors each month with over 100,000 pieces of content.
Overall my big takeaway from Jeff was that for marketers to remember when you are writing content, remember who your audience is, and make sure your content is both giving something of value to the audience and reinforces your message as a company.
Jeff talked about taking content out of other marketing campaigns. So for a conference, make sure you are really developing content for the personas of the people who will attend the conference. Of course, make sure the event will have attendees you are targeting!
Jeff described the different types of marketing personas for content marketing, and went into detail about how to manage content marketing using agile marketing. He is writing a book on the topic, we hope to have him back when he is published!
The next agile marketing event is on August 26th and will be on the topic of Digital Transformation.
Tonight I attended the 3rd Boston Marketing Technology (martech) meet-up group in Cambridge at Microsoft's NERD center, in the common room. I think about 75+ people attended the event. Rick Kollmeyer, Founder of Boston MarTech invited me to give a lightening presentation on agile marketing. I covered the basics; overview of the concept, the link to agile dev, scrum methodology and how to start as a newbie. There were three other speakers, who were:
I was really interested in David's presentation, I think its because I just started a new marketing job at OnSource in Braintree (10-15 minute commute!) and I'm working on customer personas right now. His software enable you to create personas per se, though some people have used it for that, instead you create story personas, worth a look.
Doug's presentation touched on his background with MassHigh Tech, an old technology weekly business tech journal here in Massachusetts. I found it to be invaluable when I first moved to Boston. It closed in 2010. Doug has gone and come back from the BBJ several times, and is now Executive Editor. They are doing some cool things there, from the sound of their 52% jump in traffic in 3 years to 1.5 million uniques. Anyway, Doug talked about what consumers and business customers are doing now with digital. Good for marketers to think about!
Jeff had some cool software, but most interesting was his report about a study on the state of customer journeys in 2013. A must read for any New Marketer.
The crowd was great, lots of marketers, and a few roving sales people. The next Boston MarTech event will feature 3 speakers who will discuss their marketing stacks, very cool, I think I'll be attending. I'm planning on inviting Rick as a future speaker to the Boston Agile Marketing Group.
Gary DeAsi from Smartbear Software did a great job with his presentation on content and customer experiences at the Boston Agile Marketing Meet-up last week. After his session, he was peppered with questions from the audience; lots and lots of questions about his agile marketing experiences.
In the last 10 minutes of his presentation he talked about how he implmentented agile marketing at Smartbear Software. It makes sense that the audience was really interested in the agile marketing aspects of the presentation, afterall this was the agile marketing meet up. Though even I was surprised by how many. Though I think his talk centered on describing what content Smartbear produced and what results were generated as a result of managing marketing using agile, the talk really told a compelling story about the practice. I think my recommendation to future speakers is not to just to focus on the mechanics of agile marketing, which Gary included in his presentation, but also give some of the highlights about results.
In addition, Gary is one of the key managers at Smartbear who are advocates for agile marketing, and he described how the process and management of agile marketing has changed over time. With multiple teams its no longer possible to have multiple daily meetings for many sprints. Instead a hybrid approach is used. Gary's passion for recognizing problems with managing using agile and rooting out solutions really came across in his talk, and the audience responded. These are great points for other speakers.
Lessons Learned
Check out the next Boston Agile Marketing Meet-up with Jeff Jilian on July 28th.
In the last San Francisco Agile Marketing Meetup Mark gave a presentation, “Extreme testing: Massive conversion rate improvements without going bankrupt” . Mark gave an example of testing different prices $19.95, $14.95, and $9.95, and showed that there’s a significant decrease in conversion rates as you raise the price. But, in order to choose the most profitable price you need to look at cohorts, cancellation rates and the lifetime value of each test cell. So although the $9.95 price point brought in less revenue in the first month, it turned out to have the highest Lifetime Value.
Mark Harnett studied Systems Design Engineering at Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, then he moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago, and first landed roles in Quality Assurance, then he became a product manager, and evolved into running marketing. One of the first companies Mark worked at Metareward applied very rigorous statistics to every marketing effort, there was no ego in any marketing decisions, and all about doing tests.
Mark eventually moved to IMVU, a lean start up, and saw a very rigorous agile process being applied. Mark was an early proponent of agile marketing techniques. Out of the experience at IMVU Mark came up with the idea of extreme tests, learn and move on quickly, and only do a test if you can make a significant jump, if you are going to run a test it’s better to run an extreme test because it takes the same effort and time as an incremental test. Mark said, “Expect failure, occasionally it works, but you may have to go through a lot of tests to get one that works. With extreme testing because of the cost of testing, it’s better to go to extreme testing, similar failure rates, but occasionally you have great improvement rate.”
Mark talked about one of the extreme tests he ran at IMVU. “We were testing, people buying virtual credits, virtual clothes, and those credits are bought with real dollars. When we gave occasional discounts, there was a 50% jump in revenue, so you had to be careful about how much liquidity into the market. The extreme test he devised was to try a 50% off sale. We had to mitigate the risks of the test and only run the test for one day. I got buy in. We did 300% improvement in our daily revenue, revenue was in the low 10’s of thousands, and because of the test we were in the 100’s of thousands of dollars. Those sales should be run at sparse intervals, that’s an example of an extreme test.”
Mark made the tie in to agile and extreme testing and how agile is another aspect of continuous improvement, a way of working that teaches you faster, you make sure the failures are small. In terms of extreme testing, you need to pick an exercise that you can go through, but you need to apply to your own situation, think how you can apply what would make extreme situation, and if the test goes wrong make sure it’s manageable.
Mark described why he believes the concept of extreme testing resonates and brings value to marketers, “The other thing I like about the extreme testing moniker, it’s okay to fail, come up with risk mitigation. Test, in a limited risk way. That’s the whole concept behind agile. At the meet up in San Francisco I challenged the audience to come up with their own extreme testing, a handful of people came up with their own tests. Big tests, not incremental. Pushing them outside of their comfort zone.”
This is going to be an ongoing post about the growth in terms related the New Marketing. I think I can say marketing is changing sufficiently that it is new. I recall in 2003-4-5 people were using the term New PR, because the media industry was changing so much, blogging was the lead, then social media and networks. I think marketers are in a state of such change today because of digital disruption, and savvy marketers have recognized that change. It's useful to catalog all of the terms related to the topic.
CDO - Chief Digital Officer or Chief Data Officer
Chief Marketing Technologist or Marketing Technologist
Customer Experience or CX
Customer Journey Mapping and as part of this customer personas
Growth Hacker
New Marketing
Agile Marketing
Full Stack Marketer
That's a start, let me know if I'm missing anything.
In the last few months I’ve been reading more about digital transformation; the process of transforming a company’s business models in reaction to digital disruption. I’ve come to view the industry chatter about marketing technologists, marketing technology, chief digital officers and even agile marketing all aspects of the same stimulus--digital disruption, and the resolution being the appearance of new roles such as chief digital officer’s and marketing technologists. To continue to explore the ongoing topic of digital disruption and its effects on marketing and the enterprise, I interviewed Dave Mathison, the Founder of the CDO Club (www.cdoclub.com) on the topic of chief digital officers.
John: What is a Chief Digital Officer?
Dave: The generic definition is that chief digital officer’s are transformation agents, usually AT an incumbent organization, for definition sake, to differentiate them from a CIO or a CMO. The role of the CIO can be split into two, generally The Chief Data Officer, who is responsible for all data. CDO’s will never own the brand, the CMO owns the brand from end to end, and they own the omni-channel experience. The CDO can be responsible for social, that’s very rare. Perry Hewitt at Harvard is one example, but she has a particular background having been a marketer at Crimson Hexagon, a social media intelligence platform. Perry’s larger role covers digital innovation. Most CDO’s are building business, to do social media. Rather the focus is on innovation.
John: What's the role of the CDO?
Dave: Chief digital officer's were first hired in music and publishing about ten years ago, in that time we’ve gone from one person to a 1,000, the most successful CDO’s report directly to CEO. Overlapping responsibilities between a Marketing Technologist, and CDO. The CDO is not in the marketing function, rather they work across silos, and CDO’s provide a service to the entire organization.
CDO’s of the year, one is Adam Brotman at Starbucks, his Chief Digital Officer role, is a transformative role. While Faisal Masud the Chief Digital Officer at Staples, has 700 people reporting to him, innovation labs in 3 parts of the country, and basically doing everything to disrupt themselves. CDO’s need to have P&L responsibilities to be effective.
John: What models have you seen with digital transformation?
Dave: A company needs to be able to divide the responsibilities. If two people are already arguing, the CIO & CMO, it makes no sense to introduce a third person (the CDO) as then it’s likely you'll have three people arguing. The real goal is to have harmony across the c suite.
John: How do you get harmony in the c-suite?
Dave: Look at the examples of companies that do have harmony. The job description is important to bring in the right person/people, and operationally it’s important that there is a clear definition of roles and responsibilities. You need to make sure your business goals are aligned properly, so that the CMO, CDO, and CIO are working in harmony instead of competing for resources and headcount. A good example is Adam Brotman, CDO at Starbucks, working together with (then) CIO Stephen Gillette. They constructed a major overhaul to their point of sale system, with the CIO’s support. This overhaul allowed Starbucks to do a deal with Square. The press portrayed this as two entrepreneurs getting a deal done over a latte. In reality it was years of hard work and millions of dollars in commitments. The Square deal (and others like it) could not have been done until they re-built the infrastructure, and required the C-suite to work in harmony.
30% of companies doing digital transformation, 30% of them were more successful with a CDO!
John: How does the Chief Digital Officer help the CMO with digital marketing?
David: Mayur Gupta, Global Head, Marketing Technology & Innovation, Kimberly-Clark focuses on marketing innovation, people who have more of a marketing and digital background, the majority of CDOs are out of the digital natives, coming out of innovation.
John: Do you think there's a set of processes companies need to adopt in marketing to be successful in today's era of digital disruption?
Dave: Overall that’s why companies are hiring people, Chief Data Officers and data scientists. The growth is incredible. Broader role not just what marketing needs, in the majority of cases, going across silo’s, in marketing.
At the board level, they need to help create the job description. CDOs have to work across silos, it makes CDO’s even more impactful. If not, they will be battling it out, but there are big drivers, companies that are successful are seeing cooperation across the c-suite.
John: What's the future of chief digital officer's?
Dave: One of the things we are tracking is CDO’s who have become CEO’s and board members; companies that have had CDO’s for the longest, most successful have gone on to become CEO’s. Charlie Redmayne, who is CEO of Harper Collins UK and was Harper Collins’ former Chief Digital Officer.