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The Evolution of Channel Marketing: Strategies to Win – A Recap
Channel Marketing has been grappling many challenges within the last few years. As a member of Business Marketing Association Minnesota, I moderated a panel discussion this week with four marketing executives from well-known corporations. My job was to facilitate a conversation about this evolution in channel marketing. The panel discussed their channel challenges and the steps they have taken to overcome them. Here are the highlights: Chris Hawver – Director of Channel Marketing, Seagate Technology When it comes to the channel, I haven’t seen a whole lot that’s really new. For example, most people when asked how they do their channel marketing will say they do trade shows, golf events, and dinners with their partners. When asked about lead generation, they have the same answer. In my experience, channel partners don’t have the resources or the skill sets to do successful demand generation. Because of this, vendors will push out campaigns, webinars and direct mail “in a box”. One way I believe you can achieve success in channel marketing is for vendors to stop pushing these campaigns out to their partners. Instead, they should pull the partners in by generating leads and supporting the sales process. Knowing your segments, […]
The Imitation Game: Solving Big Data Problems in the 1940’s
This past weekend, I watched a movie called The Imitation Game. If you haven’t seen a trailer, you can watch it below. There were millions of combinations to check to decrypt the messages making the task almost impossible. In the movie, Alan Turing, a math genius, created a machine that could check each of the permutations until it found the correct one for that day, allowing the British to decrypt the Nazi messages. This intelligence allowed them to position Britain and their allies to win the war. Yep, you guessed it – the machine, which was actually called a Bombe, was a very early version of the computer. Why am I writing about this? Great question. Essentially, the group at Bletchley Park was dealing with a big data problem – even though their idea of “big data” is a fraction of what we process today. There was a continuous stream of messages to decode and they had to decode them using the encryption key found by the Turing machine. Hence, lots of data. When Turing first started his machine, it ran and ran, checking each of the permutations faster than any human or team of humans could. Unfortunately, there were too […]
Top 5 Data Driven Marketing Predictions for 2015
As I reflect on 2014 and the experiences that SmartBase has had, there are many trends that we, as a group have seen. I think it’s important to share personal insights to improve the strength of the marketing community as a whole, so I wanted to pass along the knowledge that we’ve gained over the last year. Here are our top 5 data driven marketing trends that we see continuing or evolving into 2015. #5: Data Security Will be C-Suite’s Top Priority – The number of ways organizations collect data is increasing. Whether it’s online, in the consumers’ wallets, on their smart phones or even at the corporate level, the increased number of entry points is also increasing the ways that data breaches can occur. Where top notch security has been required of healthcare organizations by compliance laws like HIPAA for years, more industries will seek a higher level of security to protect their customers and their companies. Also, notice that I say C-Suite, not CIO or CEO. Data security is everyone’s problem in 2015. #4: Consumers are not giving up driver’s seat of the Health Care industry – [Part 1 & 2] Part 1: Consumers are gaining control over their health […]
The Challenge of Choosing: Qualitative Research Reveals Senior Attitudes about Medicare
December is full of deadlines. Companies have to tie up business for year end, employees have to choose or augment healthcare plans and the man in the red suit has to finish his nice and naughty list. The holiday season adds more stress to these important end of year decisions. By December 7th, seniors, age 65+, had to make changes to their Medicare plans for the 2015 year. People new to the senior cohort just finished sorting through the Medicare plans for the first time. How did they do? This is the type of information gathered from focus groups, in depth interviews and other qualitative research methods. [ Not sure which research methods fit your needs? Download our Qualitative vs. Quantitative Guide to learn more! ] When conducting qualitative research, seniors might be asked questions like “How do you like your health insurance plan?” One trend I’ve seen is that a typical answer is along the lines of “I don’t know”. For most seniors, that answer won’t change until they’ve used the plan they’ve selected. This could be months down the road. So why don’t seniors know if they chose the right plan for them? What’s missing? Likely it is […]
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Tying Marketing to Revenue: The Titan of Marketing Challenges
Silos. Vacuums. Disparate systems. Whatever you want to call them, they are tall pillars that create a barrier to quantifying the Marketing ROI for any company. Without the destruction of these silos and integration of systems and structuring of data, Omni-Channel Marketing will be impossible. I’ve worked in organizations where the data comes in from the marketing efforts – email sends, social media interactions, website analytics, etc. – and there is zero way of tying it to the revenue stream. The best we could do was examine the product or service in the marketing campaign and compare it to the revenue that came in within that time frame from that product or service. This loose way of proving the worth of marketing is how most organizations work – and it is A LOT of work without the right tools. Looking at separate systems, digging through names and trying to manually tie revenue and marketing together. It’s a mess and one of the biggest marketing challenges organizations face. Does this ring true for you? Great. Dump that old way of doing things. Let’s talk more about Omni-Channel. The very idea of bringing all of the data from internal and external sources […]
Avoid Becoming the Next Headline: A Look at Network Security’s Biggest Hole
Target, Home Depot, Jimmy John’s, Best Buy, Dairy Queen. All of these companies have been hit by security breaches in the last year. These huge profitable companies have teams of people who are overseeing the data and technology in the company and there are still holes in data security. IBM conducted a study based on the organizations that they monitor that showed there is a 12% increase in security events year over year. So, the question is… Who will be next on the list? How much private information will be stolen? How will it impact the organization and the clients? But most importantly, you need to be asking “How can I avoid being the next headline?” There are many layers and levels to security, depending on the compliance standards that need to be met. One major hole I see in companies is absence of full traceability of their data. Tracing the Data Think about the way data flows in your organization today. From the corporate network to your laptop, from your smartphone to the cloud and back. Data breach statistics show the movement of data is rapidly accelerating – and it’s no wonder! Enterprise is enabling this free flowing transfer […]
TED@IBM – How Big Data is Improving Healthcare
This statistic blew me away: A single patient in one day can generate 100 million data points. Think of the number of patients in a given hospital. If you have 300 patients in a hospital at a given time, that is 30 TRILLION data points per day. What is happening to all of that data? I would guess 90% of it isn’t used or even looked at. Could that data be better used to provide better care in real-time? That was the topic of IBM’s Inhi Cho Suh at the TED@IBM conference last week. In her example of how big data can be used to transform healthcare, she talks about intensive care units. The many systems and machines running at one time surround the patient with white noise and interruptive alarms. She explains that alarms were once necessary for the doctors to provide care, but today, 90% of alerts and alarms are inactionable. So, how can hospitals better use the data they’re collecting? How can doctors provide better care without spending hours and hours collecting and analyzing data from all of the different monitoring systems? Suh explains that with power stream computing, this data analysis in real-time is possible and […]
Top 5 takeaways from the Digital Marketing University
Last week I attended the SilverPOP’s Digital Marketing University in Minneapolis – the turnout was great! This was a special event for us because SmartBase CEO, Kris Lynch, was presenting “Delivering the Right Experience across Channels”, in which she detailed how marketers can move through the Collection and Analysis stages to reach the Engagement design stage. All of the speakers contributed a piece of the omni-channel marketing puzzle, giving us a clear picture of how to achieve engaging marketing that our customers have been waiting for. Here are my top 5 takeaways from DMU 2014: 1. Good Marketing is Like a Conversation. Marketing used to be a one way street. Organizations had a message and they sent that message to the clients and basically told them what, how and when to buy. The age of the internet in every pocket has given consumers the keys to the buyer’s journey and they’ve left organizations in the dust. In order to remain relevant, marketing must open themselves up to a two-way dialogue between their customers and the company, on every platform that the customer has available to them. The technology and tools to do this well and measure the impact are here. 2. […]
How to Succeed in the Age of the Empowered Healthcare Consumer
Did you know that 72% of internet users have looked online for healthcare information in the last year? If you search Google for “Symptom Checker”, you’ll come across websites like WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and 100 other websites that offer free healthcare information to consumers. The healthcare model has flipped significantly, putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of their own healthcare journey. They are getting information where they want it, how they want it and when they want it. The doctor has become an advisor or a guide on this journey instead of the primary source of healthcare information. With all of the readily available info, how can healthcare keep consumers engaged? The change in roles throughout the healthcare industry has pushed hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and clinics to drastically alter the way they are marketing to the masses. Because the industry is no longer controlling this flow of information, it’s more important than ever to understand the needs and behaviors of the consumer. Instead of pharmaceutical companies speaking the healthcare language, they have had to create clear, simple and compassionate messaging to appeal to the everyday person. Another challenge for healthcare was to find ways to reach out to people will […]