Theory in Practice at Sitecore

This blog has moved - consider this an invitation

2010-07-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

The same practical discussion about new, old but good, and otherwise worthy of attention Theories about Marketing with a Practical business bent is still happening...but at a new location. You are invited to join the discussion at:
http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Marketing-Blogs/Theory-In-Practice.aspx

A Digital Palace full of Sitecore Solutions Seekers at Dreamcore Europe

2010-05-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

Dreamcore, Sitecore's Developer and Partner conference is held on a worldwide basis. 2010 is the inaugural year, and the first event in Boston was over-the-top exciting and successful- but now moves to a Digital Palace promising new heights.

Having two Dreamcore' events one month apart across the Atlantic from each other (or should I say on opposite sides of that crazy Volcano),is totally hectic. It's the overlay of major events on top of a hair-on-fire global expansion pace that makes you look somewhere for another gear to shift into.

But there is a bright side advantage. We get to incorporate new ideas and feedback from the first right away into the second Dreamcore Europe event, happening this week in Copenhagen.

We've added an interesting customer presentation, featuring the very popular English soccer club Manchester City and their partner Aqueduct, providing the story behind fostering the fan passion and fueling the on-field success.

The popular Technical track review of three challenging implementations takes on some wonderful local color. The UK's Conservative Party, just recently elected into power features an exciting online success story with their Sitecore website with True Clarity. Then Austrian Airplines and Sitecore partner ecomplexx describe their site deployed for an amazing 56 countries and 22 languages. Partner Eduserve will dish out a number of tips on optimizing SEO with Google while still managing rapidfire changes in your Sitecore architecture.

Then building a bridge across the Atlantic, Partners Pentia and HedgeHog Development are co-presenting on Team Development and best practices- melding their many strong experiences from both Europe and North America.

Sitecore had numerous presenters who drew rave reviews and they are back, such as wild John West, who smoked the stage with his 10 (actually many more) things you didn't know you could do with Sitecore. He has inspired Sitecore bloggers as far away as Australia who are raising the bar to 25 or 50 hidden tips now, a true sign of talent and passion on the web for Sitecore solutions.

There is more content oriented towards business cases for the Online Marketing Suite, along with several talented solution architects with fresh insights into data retrieval techniques, ways to add customized features with Sitecore and more. See the full online agenda here.

With an at-capacity crowd coming from 11 countries around the world, and a Sitecore Community which values transparency and sharing and a passion for innovation, the classical Palace we are meeting in will be rocking amd morphed into a Digital Palace of Web Art and Science!

Putting more sales into your website sales enablement

2010-05-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a real live scenario of 'sales enablement' that I heard from our Sitecore North American VP of Client and partner engagement, Jason Crea. Makes a marketer smile.

Our sales professionals at Sitecore are very skillful at listening. One of the hot requests they have picked up on from their prospects - the marketers, execs and IT pros they work with is this- "show me ways I can learn more about my visitors so I can service them better. Take my anonymous visitors and give them a persona, and even better, if they fill out a form and provide me their info, breathe that information and their interests into my CRM. And use that CRM info to control their web experience."

So the sales team figured it out and responded- "No problem- we'll show you in real time, with your own data!"

It turns out Sitecore's public website uses the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite to help us understand visitor preferences. Working with Sitecore's Web Forms for Marketers, form data is imported into the CRM. In fact, the visitor's entire experience info is collected, associated and imported real time.

Our sales team demos this by using GoToMeeting to show the prospects several things. First, the prospects visits the site , views and downloads a few thing, and then fill out a form. The sales team then logs into the CRM, turns on GoToMeeting, and shows the prospect how they 'ding!' just showed up in their CRM view, along with their website history, as soon as they filled in the form. In fact other prior visits may also show up if the same cookie was still active. That is empowerment!

Then, often there is a technical developer on the conference, who may have signed up on our developer website, called SDN (Sitecore Developer Network). This site has a whole treasure chest of technical insite and materials, and anyone can sign up and get partial access- but not all the jewels. But, on that same GoToMeeting the sales team shows how, by looking up the developer in the CRM from their initial registration, they can click on a few check boxes and gives them full access to all resources. Literally the developer refreshes their screen and a whole new experience opens up with new resources and assets- all controlled by the salesperson from the company CRM.

Real time alerts in response to website visits are another aspect that lights up the sales team. They get an inbound email message, no matter where they are, and clicking a few links they see what content their prospect was looking at. Often the sales team will then reach out directly with related and supplemental info. Prospects are happy to get the 'just in time and on target' info, and they are absolutely amazed at the visibility the team has- and what a compelling demo this makes.

I wish I could say Marketing thought of these demo scenarios, but we didn't. Our web marketing team did have a bit to do with putting the integrations in place, which is relatively easy with Sitecore technology, but Sales gets the kudos and credit for connecting the dots on how to share and extend a vision for their prospect customers.

And Sales also just showed how to put more sales into 'sales enablement'- from your website!

Dreamcore North America "Coming of Age" Mind Meld

2010-04-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

There comes a time when a growing and thriving organization does more outreach to it's customers and Partners. It is a time when a level of momentum has built up. A time when there is a broad range of happy customers who want to share mutual commitment down the road. Customers who are depending upon your company to solve increasingly sophisticated business challenges. Individuals immersing their careers in your approach. And Partners who are building substantial aspects of their business model around your product.

Well folks, that time arrived here in North America for Sitecore today. Sitecore launched its Dreamcore Developer and Partner Conference- and it is a more than sold out event I'm pleased to report! There are presenters from multiple roles within Sitecore, ranging from the CEO to product architects, developers, marketing and field support and sales. And attendees range from hard core Sitecore, C#, XSLT and Visual Studio geeks, Business Users and website managers, to Informations architects, and Business Developement types at partners.

Best of all-it is a real conversation. Lots of tweets following the dreamcore hashtag, and lively sessions with interactive strategic and roundtable Panels including President of Sitecore USA Bjarne Hansen,VP of Partner and Client engagement Jason Crea, and CEO Michael Seifert.

You can sense some the excitement and see Dreamcore with live video coverage from the event's first day.

There is much more coming this evening and tomorrow, but a new milestone has been reached in Sitecore's history in North America. And no doubt, the conversation will continue to more exciting heights together.

Sitecore's Dreamcore more powerful than a hot Volcano!

2010-04-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

The anticipating and excitement is building about Dreamcore, the Sitecore Developer and Partner Conference. The North American event, which is sold out and on extended capacity, is in downtown Boston next Thursday and Friday. The month following it will travel to Copenhagen for the European Community.

Dreamcore is loaded with web best practices and insight for the growing talented partner base that implements Sitecore solutions. Also in attendance are certified Developers from the End user community, so key to ongoing success. All of our technical presenters and the entire community is tweeting and blogging and amped up about it.... in fact so much excitement built up in Iceland that a volvano literally blew its stack!

Actually, this volcano really is a bit of a troublemaker. We have a number of presenter coming from around the world, some of whom are now making plans to travel around the crazy and disruptive volcanic ash that has spewn out of Iceland. This particle laden cloud is blowing all over Northern Europe. In particular our Danish colleagues are facing airport closures - but their optimism is strong! I mean after all, didn't they sail to North America from Scandinavia in wooden boats a along time ago, and that was before mobile GPS devices!

It's bizare, but our Dreamcore image, seen above, looks alot like this crazy volcano in a sunset:

Anyway, as much as it looks like it, we didn't plan our image to look like a Volvanic Sunset, but we are planning on a spectacular event nonetheless, the volvano notwithstanding. Hope to see you all there and stay tuned as we tweet and blog about it!

Increasing Online Campaign Effectiveness Video

2010-02-11T13:33:00.000-08:00

Here is a video we did recently to describe a number of ways to use Sitecore to help marketers easily measure and improve online campaign effectiveness from Google Adwords, banners, email campaigns, and more. Enjoy!

WCM market size and jobs- real enough for Mom

2010-02-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

I read an article about "10 Careers that didn't exist 10 years ago" and what struck me was that of these 10, four of them are right in the heart of our business, web content management (WCM). They include 1- Blogger, 2- Community Managers or Content Managers, 3- Social Media Strategists and 4- User Experience analysts.

It is a natural reaction to be excited that there is growth, interest, and demand associated with ones industry and technology. It is confirmation that, "Yes Mom, this is a real business". A bit of feeling you have arrived.

Then the irony struck me. Aren't tools such as web content management systems with social media features, in part supposed to empower writers, subject matter experts, and other expressives without extra people involved? So what is the extra help for? Is this a trick?

Well, let's see what they do. Bloggers research and write posts to communicate objectives, ideas, and positions- whether promoting for a company, organization or oneself. With the informal tone, the ability to turn on a dime, and create two way conversations, bloggers can get a lot more accomplished and interactions happening when it used to be just a broadcast.

Community and Content Managers do the same on a broader scale. They motivate and referee as well as instigate and create.

Social Media strategists- they are they ones who play chess knowing four steps ahead where they want to land and what others might do. Except the playground is twitter, facebook, blog sites, and the latest mobile mash up.

And the fourth, User Experience analysts, well they help clean up the mess normal people make when they try to become artists on the web. A great user experience is hard to describe, but you sure know it when you have a really good or bad one. It is kind of like cruising downhill on your mountain bike with your tunes blasting versus over the handlebars then into the ditch wondering how your wheel got reshaped into a mobius strip.

When we think about how much broader an audience we can now reach online, how much selectively we can messages and hear back from our audience, how much easier we can research and find crucial information, then these new roles make a lot of sense. And it becomes clear that they are more than just direct substitutes for industries where there is displacement (e.g. traditional media and advertising) but part of a larger industry.

My colleague Darren Guarnaccia has some real insight into this, and in his travels with leading analysts, sees Web Content Management as a one $Billion dollar industry, and growing to 7 times that size when you add in Email, Web and Marketing Analytics, Marketing Automation, Social media software, eCommerce etc. We need a lot of guides, mechanics, creatives and advisors as we make our way into completely new ways to interact together, and of course the leading companies are going to make this all work together as part of the expected website experience.

So yes, Mom, these are real jobs that do make a net new difference in our world!

2010 Predictions for Web Content Management and Sitecore

2010-01-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

2010 = 2000
(but an easier and richer user experience)

In this new decade, which is kicked off by 2010, I’m predicting whatever it was we were predicting in 2000, or maybe even 1990, to be REALLY BIG this year.
Why?

I think it was Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, founder of their famed Media Lab, who said something to the effect …. What is surprising isn't our fast rate of technical innovation, instead it is the slow rate people are able to adopt it.
I am reminded of 1982, when I joined a start up in Silicon Valley, upon the recommendation of my MBA thesis advisor and the Dean of the Business School. I was a bright eyed and bushy tailed eagerbeaver, ready to sell the world on our two hot products- Email and Computer Conferencing. The efficiencies, the possibilities for instant global collaboration, a global paradigm shift!

In fact , all true! Only, we were off by a decade for email and maybe two decades for Conferencing (chat/webex/twitter/blogs). The reactions back then as we discussed email in organizations were almost comical today.

EagerBeaver: “VP Silliman, how would you like to be able to send a memo to all of your employees, and potentially many of your suppliers or customers just by typing it once on this (clunky) computer terminal and pushing the return button?”
VP Silliman : “Why would I do that when I can just Xerox the memo and drop them in the mail for just 20 cents each? Then I don’t have to buy all that complicated computer equipment and your software thingamajig!” ….Darn!

You think that was tough, imagine our computer conferencing product. Multiple computer terminals, all logged into a central server (Dec PDP 10 mainframe), able to simultaneously type and see each other’s messages simultaneously, like Facebook without the pictures.People looked at us like we were blue and had tails, and this was a long time before Avatar!

We did manage to convince one company that this was like having telex machines sending each other simultaneous faxes globally, with everyone seeing eachother’s faxes. Bechtel Construction, who had huge construction projects around the globe ‘got it’, and managed far flung global project far better than before…but they were innovators, really pre- early adopters. It took everyone else at least another decade.

So what will people be able to adopt in 2010 in the Web Content Management space?
Well, according to Interwoven’s Press releases from 2000 (the then market leader, now a much quieter subdivision of Autonomy) the big stories were:
-Major eCommerce solutions, both through integration partnerships and their own product
-Integrated Analytics and visitor and content tagging technology via acquisition, “to create a compelling and relevant Web experience”
- “ A framework for the Wireless Web, providing intelligent content management for wireless”.

The amazing irony about these top topics from 2000 is that these remain very big topics today, and with eCommerce established but still complex, analytics established but typically not well integrated into the actual web experience, and wireless /mobile here but not yet a compelling experience yet.

Sitecore has new capabilities, products and partnerships in all of these areas, and the major differences now versus 10 years ago is the complexity and cost of implementation is much lower. And the features now make the experience much richer. In a recent poll of over 100 of our Sitecore customers (we’ll be announcing that soon so I can’t leak much), over 70 % said they chose Sitecore because of the features built in and close second was its ease of use.

So I predict for 2010, now that Sitecore has the usability and complexity at a level engaging and suitable for widespread adoption, that eCommerce, Integrated Analytics and Wireless for the web will be big successes for us. We’re finally making the technology that fits our human comfort zones!

Sitecore in 2009- Website Marketing and Partners worked the best

2009-12-23T17:00:00.000-08:00

A lesson learned from this year is that authenticity really matters, and companies are starved for the real story on what works and what doesn't regarding marketing inititiatives. Here's the background on our delivering the straight story to a number of our colleagues.

Our CIO, Kim Elsass, had an opportunity to present this fall to a group of Marketing and IT executives in Copenhagen, where he works at our Corporate Headquarters. They had asked him to look back over the past 2-3 years at Sitecore Marketing, and described what has worked and what hasn't, lessons learned, and what we are now doing differently.

Since I'm responsible for our global Marketing budget/ demand gen initiatives it made sense for me to put this together for him. But as I'm in our North American headquarters here in the San Francisco area, and Kim is a terrific presenter, we worked as a team- I wrote and he talked.

It was the perfect opportunity to pull together our ROI info for this extended period, and was illuminating and a bit gratifying to see the positive results that have occurred in the past 2 1/2 years. But in no way was I prepared for Kim's email the morning after he spoke. Here is what he said:

"Hi Paul,

I am so pleased to say that the presentation I made yesterday (Your PRESENTATION) was a fantastic success. I’ve never encountered so many people (C-level from sales, management, and marketing) so excited from my appearance. :-) I actually never managed to finish the presentation, as there were so many questions and comments underway. After the show, I was “attacked” by 8-10 managers with additional questions and some asked me if I could do the presentation for their managers in their own environment. Awesome – I’ll share the profits from the lecturing tour with you. :-) Already, I owe a bottle of Amarone from last night.

It’s a Sitecore presentation that I really can align myself with, it being light years from a traditional product presentation, but was about how to intelligently create measurable RESULTS.... "

You just love getting those emails, don't you? When I followed up with Kim he was even more effusive than his email, and was tickled that he continued to get requests for his presentation.

Kim walked the attendees through various challenges we had, solutions we tried and the results. Like the graphic at the top, he identified the initiatives and their varying ROIs, as best as we can measure it.

The summary is that the biggest winners in terms of Lead Gen ROI were our Website and our Partners. We got more revenue per cost expended through leads delivered from http://www.sitecore.net/ and our global Partners than any of the other means we tried. And believe me, we tried a lot.

Given the Economic Hurricane in 2009, in retrospect it isn't all that surprising that a candid presentation about our real world experiences and marketing ROI comparisons made for an attentive audience. Even more importantly, using your website to reach your audience is clearly a winner, and supporting your channel partners through thick and thin pays off. Frankly a lot of our competition has cannibalized their channel by taking business away to prop themselves up in these tougher times, but our ROI metrics tell us that our Partners provide great value.

Our approach is to invest even more in the initiatives that are providing the best returns, so here is to taking on more business possibilities through our websites and to many returns with our global Partners in 2010.

Sitecore is watching Google- turning the tables.

2009-11-06T17:42:00.001-08:00

Google is everywhere , right? With so many free convenient services, and all they want to do is watch ....over your shoulder and maybe offer ads...Your searches, Gmail, Google Docs, Wave, your mobile, Chrome browser and more.

Well, who is watching Google? Well in our case at Sitecore, our Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is- and it just saved us some money and time!

We use Google ads, Bing and Yahoo Ads, and a lot of display ads as well. We have these campaigns feed into our OMS, because beyond the click performance we have visibility into visitor goals success on our website and context of the visitors' experience. We also integrate our email campaigns, PR campaigns, really anything online that ends up on our website.

A few days ago Ted, our Online marketing Ad specialist, noticed that suddenly our conversions were way down on our Google Ads. The OMS showed that it wasn't consistent across all our many campaigns, specifically the traffic from our Google Adwords wasn't engaged with our website at all, they were bouncing right away without accomplishing any goals.

Google was showing lotsa clicks, the meter was running but the wheels weren't turning on our website!

Ted then went into our AdWords campaigns and noticed some strange things about our ads and account.

Suddenly we were selling iPhone accessories! Instead of offering only our software, we had iPhone Ads popping up everywhere and linking back to our site. No wonder our OMS pointed out our conversions were lousy- other than the fact that our Web CMS allows your website to look great from an iPhone, we have no interesting iPhone accessory info on our site! So these visitors bounced.

Turns out we were hacked, or else Google accidentally merged our account with another company's AdWords account, with a name that is very close to our Sitecore name- literally the same with two letters transposed. Suddenly our ad total budget tripled, we had a new group of ads appear, and campaigns got scrambled.

Ted quickly got in touch with Google via their chat system and escalated the problem. We had to suspend our campaign, change our credit card info, and update our passwords. Of course all the crazy charges were refunded, although we lost the productivity from 3 days of online Google Ads.

The good news is by having our OMS system watching Google's system we caught this quickly, and kept the expense from being even higher. That was not our original intent, frankly. We use the OMS to integrate our multi-channel campaign results, since we do so much more than just AdWords. But, as it turned out, the OMS helped protect us as well as see the fuller online picture than presented by Google!

Sitecore wins Web Idol competition at J Boye Conference

2009-11-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

The annual J Boye Conference held in Denmark focused on web content management, web strategy and user experience. One highlight was an interactive, crowd pleasing "Web Idol" bake off demo fest with multiple web CMS vendors showing their best 7 minute interactive demo.

For the second year in a row Sitecore won it all, with an engaging and light-hearted demo of user interaction on a Sitecore website. Lars Petersen of Sitecore, with his two alternate 'personas' rocked the house with a true life personalization-driven web form and landing page for a fun-filled beer party.

Check it out here on YouTube.

If Sitecore can do this is 7 minutes , imagine what a few weeks of work will result in!

The opening keynote was deliver by psychologist BJ Fogg, of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology lab. Fogg is an expert in online persuation and in understanding how technology is used to influence peoples behavior. It is significant that a well known researcher and innovator like Fogg was featured at this conference. Clearly it speaks to how important it is for web CMS systems to have persuasive abilities, adapt to their visitor's needs, and encourage and influence behavior.

Context is King, or at least a Prince

2009-10-06T08:19:00.001-07:00

We've heard content is King.
OK, I buy that, but can we have 2 Kings? While Content is a critical focus for making visitors' experiences rewarding, is there an equivalent for us as marketers or business people trying to understand visitor behavior and ultimately influence it? You know, when we have to dig deeper into understanding who came, what they did, and why...basically resorting to using the "A" word, that "Analytics" thing for websites. For me that 'King' is 'context'.

What is context?
What would you think if you heard "Jackie is really fired up!" Is she angry, with smoke coming out of her ears, storming down the hallway? Or is she super motivated, excited about a new idea and eager to tell people? You need more information to make the call, right?

Segway to your website (don't we always somehow end up there?) Avinash Kaushik, the very well-known Analytics blogger and writer, describes web analytics as thought of as having three parts:

Clickstream data analysis to infer intent. The classical approach from log files. The "where" analysis

Outcomes Analysis. Conversion rates. Revenue. Specific goals. The "so what" aspect.

Experience Analytics. This is the "why". Did they leave a page satisfied? Or did they abandon a form and bounce? If so, what was missing that would have made the difference?
This is the hardest part, and new focus of attention in analytics.

The "Why" question and associated analysis, once you have the other two in order, is ultimately the most important for ongoing improvement. Because if you can answer the "Why", then you have the power to improve improve 1. and 2. Without it, we're just guessing.

Context is really having all three working for you. Context is knowing the referring site they came from, the forms they filled out on your site, the items they searched for and if they found them, the videos or white papers they chose, and even the other visits they made over time. That covers the "where" and the outcomes or "so what".

The toughest is the 'why', which helps you dig really deep. There are several ways to get this.
Feedback in a poll or an 'open' field in a form is a great way to get context in a visitor's own words. A comment to a blog post is another way to see what sparks interest, and how they respond. That voice gives you what the clickpaths miss.

Perhaps the most meaningful way to quantitatively understand a preference is to test, either A/B split testing or multivariate. This used to be characterized by 'easy to say, hard to do'. This certainly was my team's experience in using Google Analytics and Google optimizer to run multivariate tests as a third party to our website CMS. Now with Sitecore's OMS, which combines A/B or Multivariate testing built into the CMS, it is so much more approachable for our team. Our content editors can also set up tests, without programming and hassles.

So now the full context is possible with the same people in Marketing who are helping deliver our content. So while content is King, in order to keep making it useful I think Context at the least deserves to be a Prince or Princess!

The Pitch that curved around the earth

2009-10-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

Don't you appreciate things done well? I got a pitch a while back that was perfect, and it happened to also pull in the sales leaders at Sitecore from around the world at the same time. We all thought it looked like an ideal answer, and like a magnetic star pulling our little metal vessels in multiple countries, we got sucked into a consistent orbit.

The product being pitched was actually a GeoIP lookup service that lets you know who is on your website. The sales guy from the GeoIP service did a great job of simulating who our desired prospects would be, and made a nice report of them enbedded in the emails he sent out. And he wrote about the value of knowing what organizations were on your website, what they were interested in, and learning about it -presto! instantly!- directly to you and all the sales team regardless of location on the globe.

I had over 6 emails from our sales leaders - let's see, North America, Denmark , Australia, the U.K, Netherlands and more- all demanding that we get something like this! ...Why aren't my own ideas met with this enthusiam? :-)

Anyway, our product development guys and gals had actually already been thinking about this, and our enthusiasm fastracked this aspect into the first part of our Online Marketing Suite (OMS). But beyond identifying who is on the website and what pages they went to, our full Suite tells where they came from, what they searched for, what they need, and whether they had a successful experience on our website.

The OMS is great for all our web stakeholders. And now we are addicted. And our sales team? You should see the Hall of Fame pitches they are throwing with this- all around the world!

Improving Google Ad campaign effectiveness with Context

2009-09-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

As the marketer responsible for lead generation in our B to B organization, I work closely with our Sales VPs to keep the dynamic sales team happy with enough quality leads (easy right?). This past year we launched numerous initiatives that generated an impressive growth in the number of leads for our team , more than doubling. But, I really struggled with understanding the effectiveness of our Google Online Ads in North America.

Now, Google does a great job of making you feel good about your spend, no matter how poorly you are doing! It seemed like all I really needed to do was to increase my budget for better results.

Well, in all fairness, sure it is true there are some simple things that really help your Google Quality score. For example, make sure your keyword phrases match your Ad text, and that they both match your landing page text. If you make sure you keep that relevance and matching very high between all three, your Quality score will go up with Google. You can see that displayed in the Ad Dashboard, and the higher the quality and closer to 10, the better. And, the higher the Quality the less Google charges you for the same Ad click.

But, what about the challenge of understanding more about your campaign effectiveness? Which campaigns are resulting in more leads, subscribers, people contacting your sales team, visiting your stores or ending up with something in their check-out cart?

You are spending dollars every day, and in today's online world, we should know what is working and what isn't. It's easy to get lost in 'reletive effectiveness' of Ads, but what really matters is Ads that deliver ROI, in however you measure that for your organization.

Google does supply their Analytics package where you can set up Goals and align them (somewhat clumsily) with your Ads. So it is possible, with enough time, to align your Goals in Google Analytics with your Ad properties.

But what I couldn't learn from the Google Analytics was more context on who was visiting, where else on the site they went, and what organization they came from.

I also wanted to be able to tie together repeat visits from the same vistor, becasue often the conversions where later on in sebsequent visits. I didn't want to miss understanding which valuable first campaign they came in on.

We installed Sitecore's own Online Marketing Suite (OMS) this Spring, and we gained a number of valuable insights into our campaigns previoously missing.

For example, we found that certain online properties where we are advertising were really more valuable than we thought, and others a disaster in real ROI. One publication had a lower click through rate, yet we could see their visitors spent much more time on the site, were from organizations of great interest to our sales teams, downloaded more content and eventually would register to get our premium content. I couldn't get this intel before.

With the OMS, global cookies are retained so visits weeks or months apart are automatically tied together. That let us understand campaigns that were really working, and delivering visitors who returned later on to learn more and join.
We eliminated the costly campaigns that just had a lot of clicks but not the right target audience and actions.

What the OMS delivers me is context. Visitor context. And that makes a huge difference. We realigned our Ad dollars and felt the pleasure of seeing our campaign ROI rise appreciably.

Found- the Missing Middle Class of leads

2009-09-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

I recently penned a piece about discovering visitors that quite frankly I had been missing on our own website. Yes, sad as it is to admit, visitors who were interesting in learning and doing more with my company were being (unwittingly) ignored. But isn't that a typical marketers life? Learning what an idiot you've been yesterday and getting better every day? Seems to me that if you can try to find your mistakes before the competition and everyone else does, you are OK! Of course throwing in a few good new ideas now and again sure helps.

Anyway, I was trying to decide how to describe these 'missed leads' and decided to call them the Missing Middle Class. Of course the reference here is to what we often see, that there is a concern that we're getting more super rich people and more poor people and fewer inbetween. Now this isn't an economics blog, nor a political blog, just a business marketing blog emphasing all things online. So why choose the Missing Middle Class? Well, because they are really important. They form the backbone of every successful economic system in history (nor an historical blog...), and in fact every emerging and exciting economy (including China and India) all are trying to build this very group, viewing it as critical to success.

And they are critical for your website. So to learn more about how I view these leads and how we then successfully identified and reached out to them, you may want to check out my article in Online Strategies Magazine.