Are Marketing Clouds Pie in the Sky?

2011 and 2012 saw major software vendors rushing to offer digital marketeers a one-stop solution for creating, publishing, analysing, managing content and measuring the performance of their social media properties.



To name a few, Salesforce.com bought Buddy Media after acquiring Radian6. Adobe has also been busy inflating their marketing cloud, as has Oracle with their recent acquisition of Eloqua.
Other vendors have also been busy. IBM purchased Coremetrics, HootSuite upped their games with Webtrends analytics and a Social Media Command Centre. Many other niche vendors have also emerged.

It’s no wonder the big guns are getting in on the act given that analysts such as Gartner are predicting that CMOs will be responsible for more expenditure on IT than CIOs in the next five years.

What is a Marketing Cloud?

Well, there is no one definition and the term itself is a misnomer. Of course cloud software services are well established, but what if the cloud marketing systems themselves?

The label ‘Marketing Cloud’ suggests a range of integrated systems that handle all things marketing. Well that may be the end game of the cloud system providers, but they are not there yet. It’s a cloud too high given all the different tools digital marketeers use. Tools spanning website design, SEO, SEM, attribution measurement, insight analysis, data mining, big data, CRM, SFA, eCommerce, collaboration, content creation and dynamic publication, social media management, email automation and so on.

The reality is that most Marketing Cloud offerings today consist of disparate software applications, some of which are due to be integrated, used for managing social media operations. Specifically:

1. Tools to help automate the process creating, publishing and managing social media content across multiple social network platforms.
2. Systems to automate the process of publishing and monitoring the performance of social media campaigns and display ads (if you want to waste your money on social media display ads).
3. Tools to monitor, analyse and report on market/consumer sentiment, engagement, reach and influence.
Some vendors such as Oracle are including in their Marketing Cloud systems that have evolved from mail and website lead nurturing (known as Marketing Automation).

Why do you need a Marketing Cloud?

The initiated will have discovered the power of social media. However they will also have found out that harnessing this power is very resource intensive and demands a deep understanding of integrated digital marketing. Yep, social media requires highly experienced digital marketeers who have done a deep dive into social media.

I think that most brands have learnt the painful realities of recruiting ‘Twitinterns’ to be the vocal voice-piece of their organisation or expecting their marketing agencies to have a full grasp of all the many facets of social media.

Given that social media needs specialists and dedicated resources, any new methods to help manage social media operations, reduce overheads whilst performing highly effective strategies are going to be welcomed – enter the Marketing Cloud.

But be warned! Many of these technologies are powerful and require an initial investment of time and again, resources, to get any value from them. Hopefully, all driven by a great social media strategy that is fully aligned to and integrated with the overall marketing, communications, customer services, CRM, goals and strategies.

Selecting your Social Media Marketing Cloud Provider

Social media operations should never be conducted in isolation. Its real power will come when the technologies enables marketeers, customer services directors, insight directors and the like, to automatically correlate unstructured social data with transactional data. I am sure I don’t have to explain why!

Therefore, pick a Cloud provider who can, or is definitely planning to seamlessly integrate their Marketing Cloud systems with the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Lead Nurturing and online community building systems. Otherwise you could be heading down a blind alley.

For further tips, check out my previous blog ‘Navigating the world of social media monitoring tools’.

Navigating the world of social media monitoring tools

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!   

This may be an old business saying, but is has never been more pertinent when it comes to social media. 

It is possible to track and trace in real-time any digital communication if it’s in the public domain.  Social media has of course created an explosion of trackable online and public dialogue.

Herein lays an amazing opportunity to gain an endless amount of market and consumer insight and intelligence. But herein also lays considerable new challenges for marketers.

The technology is not the issue

In response to the anticipated market opportunity for monitoring and analysing what consumers are saying on social media there has is a  plethora of software tools developed that can perform these tasks.

A colleague dedicated over a year to the creation of a taxonomy and guide summing up the main features, functions and benefits of a remarkable 250 different tools. This report is available from  http://ideya.eu.com/reports.html.

But despite the guidance given by the report, the process of selecting the right tools is still a bewildering exercise particularly as and they range in price from free to over £150,000 per annum. So where do you start

Start with deciding what you want to measure

Unless you want to get totally confused by the masses amount of data you can collect, start by deciding what it is you need to measure. 

These measurements should be based on your goals for using social media. Remember, social media is best used in conjunction with your other marcoms activities and not used in isolation. Therefore, refer back to your original marcoms goals and then work out how social media can most effectively achieve these goals by augmenting your other marketing and customer services programs. 

Resist being carried away by obvious metrics such as numbers of Facebook or Twitter fans or followers. These stats are good for the ego but have only on vague correlation to tangible goals that social media is great as realising. Goals such as increasing average order value, improving customer life time value, reaching more of your total addressable market, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing churn rate.

Having decided on what you can achieve with social media then decide what metrics you need to measure the ROI.

The next step is to start the process of selecting the most cost effective tools that can produce the data you need in easily produced and digestible management dashboard reports. But there are other considerations.

Data integration is vital

The unstructured data gleaned from social media will offer up great insight but will considerably more valuable if can be integrated with and correlated to your other data sets. Transactional data, web data and purchased research data that should be held in your CRM systems.

Knowing who is saying what on social media, their propensity to buy, sentiment, advocacy and social capital or influence is invaluable for building ongoing engagement. But you also need to match that data with consumers buying patterns and market segment classifications. This is what data scientists have started to term as ‘Big Data’. This collection of data enables marketers to know how to better engage with consumers through personalised interactive content. 

Therefore, organisations that use CRM comprehensively need a social media monitoring system that integrates SocialCRM data with their CRM databases.  

Software vendors offer integrated tools

A few technology vendors are starting to build this capability into their software. Notably Salesforce.com, a leader in CRM systems, has made a flurry of acquisitions to provide an integrated social system. 

Salesforce.com is tooling up to provide a complete social enterprise platform offering tools that will allow you to listen, gain insight, engage,  publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs http://www.salesforce.com/uk/solutions/.

They have acquired Radian6 a leading social monitoring tool, Chatter an online employee collaboration system and Buddy Media. Buddy Media is used for social media content distribution and moderation, user engagement and measuring the reach of your content and the buzz it generates across the Blogosphere.

Many other social media monitoring technology providers integrate operation capacity of CRM systems with their tools and services.  Ideya's report has identified around 62 SMM tools providers that currently offer their own CRM or allow integration with other CRM technologies.

Accessible and affordable

The good news is that systems such as those provided by Salesforce.com and many others are provisioned as ‘software as a service’ (Saas). These services mean no IT hardware investment, systems implementation effort and problematic deployment issues and not least, no capital investment.

Start simply

Just get started by trying out a monitoring tool to get a feel of what it can do and use the above tips to plan your way forward.  

For those of you need to dig deeper into social media metrics I can’t recommend  enough reading Social Media Metrics by Jim Sterne. In the meantime consider the following 11 tips.

11 points to work through

• Be clear about what you are intending to achieve by adopting social media and decide what you want to use a tool for.  For example, market insight and prediction, competitive monitoring, customer satisfaction and sentiment analysis,  market reach and influence,  building social capital, campaign measurement, influencer, conversation and community marketing.

• 2Set measurable social media goals against your core business objectives and prioritise them.
• 3Decide what the metrics you are going to use to measure your success.
• 4Don’t just measure numbers of Fans or Followers.
• 5Be clear about the main sources of data you want to monitor e.g. social networks, blogs, microblogs, social bookmarks, video and photosharing sites, news, duscussion boards and reviews, smartphones and geographic coverage.
• 6Do you need to merge social media data with CRM data? Make a list of the benefits this can bring to your marcoms programs because this is a bigish investment.
• 7Decide if you need your social media content distribution system to measure the reach and buzz generated by your content.
• 8Decide what management reports you need for different functions of your organisation – customers services, PR and marketing will need different dashboards.
• 9.    Be clear about what you can realistically do with the data to improve your marcoms initiatives.
• Make sure you have the people with the skills and time to use the insight reports to improve your marcoms.
• Seek advice from specialists in this field such as the author of this blog and start simple.

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Paul Fennemore

http://www.viapoint.co.uk

paul.fennemore@viapoint.co.uk