Extracting marketing value from data

As businesses strive to become more data-driven, the challenge lies not amassing data for
data's sale, but in getting the right data.

According to research from Harvard Business Review, data records are so prone to critical errors that less than three percent of data meets basic quality standards. Accuracy matters, and banking on the wrong data can translate into serious business losses. In 2016 IBM estimated that losses due to poor data quality cost the US economy $3.1 trillion annually

Gary Read, CEO of Import.io, a web data integration solution provider, spoke about how his business gathers data from publicly available websites and puts it into a common format to enable organizations to gain insights that can inform their marketing strategy.  What Import.io does is take care of the data so that businesses can focus on the insights.

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Tapping Data for Marketing Insights

LinkedIn Hops On the Story Bandwagon with Student Voices

Story Time at LinkedIn

LinkedIn has rolled out its own stories feature. Here's how college students are using it

ARIELLA BROWN

 DECEMBER 27, 2018

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We all have our own stories to tell, and some of us choose to share them with the world on social media in video format. That’s why a person’s “story” on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook refers to a video post.  Now LinkedIn is going to try to be a platform of stories, too, rolling it out first for American college students.

 As TechCrunch recently reported, LinkedIn will allow student to post short videos on their Campus Playlist. They can then be viewed there for one week, though they will remain accessible for as long as the student wishes under the the individual profile’s “Recent Activity.”

If you’re a regular LinkedIn user you might have noticed that it now encourages people who post to add in hashtags, generating several suggestions you can just click. It also does this for Student Stories, according to the TechCrunch report, which is why there will likely be more instances of the hashtag #OnCampus appearing on the videos linked to the school’s Campus Playlist.

To get deeper into this story, I reached out to students on LinkedIn. Cammy Okmin, a student at California Polytechnic who holds the title of LinkedIn Campus Video Editor, graciously answered my questions via email.

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Story Time at LinkedIn

Planning for 2019: B2B Marketing

CIOs at successful B2B companies are planning for a 2019 marketing stack roadmap with a focus on #CustomerTech. That means not just collecting data but using it to address the business needs of their customers to achieve an unprecedented lift in KPIs defined around understanding customer behavior.

Next year is set to be one for businesses to fully optimize their customer data quality and insights by setting up the right technology platform for marketing to business customers. As you plan your 2019 budgets, the essential thing to think about is the customer aspect of #CustomerTech. Approaching tech from that perspective results in better customer data and analytics -- the prerequisites for account based marketing (ABM).

Thanks to the rise of digital transformation, marketing models have evolved. The same demand for personalization that has arisen in the B2C realm now applies to the world of B2B marketing.

Read more in Gearing up for B2B marketing in 2019

Biggest Cyber Monday Ever

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This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest ever. Impressive as they are, the numbers for sales only tell one part of the story. The other is which brands invested in ads in kicking off the holiday shopping season and how customers responded and reached out to them.

Crunching through the numbers, Adobe Analytics reported that this year’s Cyber Monday Sales broke US sales records, thitting  $7.9  billion, an amount that represent 19.3 percent YOY growth and which exceeded the predicted spend of  $7.79 billionthat would have translated into 17.6 percent YOY growth  for the day.

Those represent just online sales, but some of the same people also spent money in stores over the Thanksgiving weekend. According to the National Retail Foundation(NRF)  over 89 million gave business to both online and physical retail outlets, which represents an increase of close to 40 percent over last year.

Investing in the technology that enables multichannel shopping had a real payoff, according to the NRF. “The multichannel shopper outspent the single-channel shopper by up to $93 on average.”

So what role did marketing play in the billions of dollars of spending? Working with DialogTech, 4C Insights put out a report that presented the data on ads, social lift, and phone calls. What they found was that the top 10 advertisers were made up not just of retailers but also financial services, automotive and other industries. The impact of their TV ads appears in the increase in social media engagement that immediately followed their ads...

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Why Cyber Monday 2018 Was Biggest Ever

Related posts: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/11/time-to-say-tis-season.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

AI: Inception to Present

pic from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Kanangra_winter_wonderland.jpg

Takeaway: AI has a surprisingly long history, marked by periods of optimism and support followed by disenchantment. Now that we're at a new high point, we appear poised for the inevitable third round of AI winter. But perhaps this round will be different.

Today we have all kinds of “smart” devices, many of which can even be activated by voice alone and offer intelligent responses to our queries. This kind of cutting-edge technology may make us consider AI to be a product of the 21st century. But it actually has much earlier roots, going all the way back to the middle of the 20th century.

AI Roots

It may be said that Alan Turing’s ideas for computational thinking lay the foundation for AI. John McCarthy, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, gives credit to Turing for presenting the concept in a 1947 lecture. Certainly, it is something Turing thought about, for his written work includes a 1950 essay that explores the question, “Can machines think?” This is what gave rise to the famous Turing test. (To learn more, check out Thinking Machines: The Artificial Intelligence Debate.)

Even earlier though, in 1945, Vannevar Bush set out a vision of futuristic technology in an Atlantic Magazine article entitled “As We May Think.” Among the wonders he predicted was a machine able to rapidly process data to bring up people with specific characteristics or find images requested.

Emergence

Thorough as they were in their explanations, none of these visionary thinkers employed the term “artificial intelligence.” That only emerged in 1955 to represent the new field of research that was to be explored. It appeared in the title of “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” The conference itself took place in the summer of 1956.

As they were poised at the beginning of the decade of optimism, researchers expressed confidence in the future and thought it would take just a generation for AI to become a reality. There was great support for AI in the U.S. during the 1960s. With the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. didn’t want to fall behind the Russians on the technology front. MIT benefited, receiving a $2.2 million grant from DARPA to explore machine-aided cognition in 1963.

Progress continued with funding for a range of AI programs, including, MIT’s SHRDLU, David Marr’s theories of machine vision, Marvin Minsky’s frame theory, the Prolog language, and the development of expert systems. That level of support for AI came to an end by the mid-1970s, though.

And now winter is coming

Read more to learn about AI winters and whether we may be entering into the third one now in A Brief History of AI

Time to say "'Tis the season?"

pic from https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7002/6507951677_df700b0401_b.jpg

The song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" may have been running through people's heads yesterday due to the snow. But for marketers, the picture of Christmas starts to form a lot earlier -- too early for some, in fact. But there is some method to the madness of holiday marketing for those who pay attention to their customers. 

Here we are in November, and holiday marketing is in full swing already. In fact, some holiday marketing has been in place already since early October, much to the chagrin of those of us who think they should at least let us get through Halloween before decking things out in red and green. 
Read more in  
‘Tis the season for what exactly?

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

Measuring the Metrics that Matter

Click-through rate (CTR) has long dominated as a core marketing metrics because it is so easily tracked. With video, new metrics, like engagement rates and completion rates (VCR), are also taken into account.

However, these metrics don’t necessarily prove the campaign is working toward the marketing goal if it isn’t defined properly.

Anthony Coleman, senior director, search and social, Digital Remedy, believes that easily-accessible metrics are not as useful as some people think. CTR only tells you how someone interacts with an ad, and can reflect some level of awareness, but not what actions the person takes in response, Coleman said. Another drawback of CTR is that it is easily manipulated to inflate numbers for more impressive results.  

“When you’re trying to run an active campaign and get new users in the door...a metric that is so easily shifted is not a good metric,” Coleman said.

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Beyond Click-Through Rates: Metrics That Matter

Live Event Marketing for Journalism

Even in our high-tech, hyper-connected world, people crave the type of human connection that only comes through live events. According to EventMarketer's  2018 Event & Experiential Marketing Industry Forecast & Best Practices Study, 84 percent of marketers surveyed consider events integral to their marketing operations.

Among the brands tapping into the power of live events are the local journalism outlets under the USA Today Network umbrella.  

“We’ve focused on a couple of key areas, that are passion areas for local markets and audiences,“ Andy Yost, the company’s CMO said. “They offer an opportunity connect in a meaningful and consistent way, and show that their unique portfolio of local brands can provide value beyond great journalism.”

People are not one-size-fits-all. USA Today Network crafted different types of branded events that range in price and attendance, depending on the type of event.  >

“All events are designed to show the extension of the powerful network we’ve built and to expand connection with our audiences,” Yost said.

Read more in How USA Today Reaps the Benefits Of Live Events