Marketing Operations

Storytelling with Numbers

by
Campaign Desk, Marketing Musings, Marketing Operations

Sometimes when I tell people I work in data and analytics, I can actually see them stop listening. While I rapture on about how exciting it is to enable tracking of views, to the clicks and downloads of our client’s product or event pages, their eyes glaze over and their shoulders begin to droop. I get it. I really do. Data often seems big and foreign and too complicated to warrant our attention. It isn’t something most people feel a connection to.

It’s for this reason that I’ve been so interested in the emergence of a fresh type of data: personal analytics. Scientist Stephen Wolfram recently posted a blog that details the extensive records of his life he’s kept since 1989. The data is rich and tells a much deeper story than one might expect of a coordinate or bar graph. In these graphs, you see his life: his habit of staying up until 3:00A.M., the trip he took to Europe in the summer of 2009, and the break he takes for dinner with his family each evening.

Dan Meyer has collected similar data, compiled yearly into his “Annual Report” and animated into a video clip that I highly recommend watching (see below). His report, which at first glance is not much more than a collection of lists of the beer he drinks and friends he texts, shares a quality with Wolfram’s data—although narrow in scope, they are expansive in terms of insight. There is much to gather and derive from the information presented, even if at face value it seems mundane or trivial.

Continue reading →

Weekly Roundup: 4/13/12

by
Content Strategy, Marketing Operations

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Infographics Discussion—As part of the weekly #MMchat Twitter chat, Projectline and many others participated in a discussion about infographics. This is the transcript of the session. If infographics are something you have an interest in, this transcript is worth your time. Project scope, data validation, timeline, and lots of other aspects were covered.

Show Me the Content Strategy—This post talks about the preliminary conversations that need to happen before embarking on a content strategy project. First things first, it’s imperative to define terms and align expectations around substance, structure, workflow, and governance. Read on to find out more.

Continue reading →

Social Media and Vigor of Expression

by
Customer Evidence, Marketing Operations, Social Media

I’m a professional writer. After a career spent putting ideas and experiences into words, I have come to believe in what Mark Twain called, “compactness, simplicity, and vigor of expression.” Twain might not seem entirely relevant in an age of social media, but you have to admit—that is an excellent formula for a good tweet.

Economy, clarity, accuracy, and immediacy are always high marketing virtues, no matter how many characters you get. Well-made customer evidence should clearly illustrate an organization’s experience with a product or solution and make it relevant to decision makers at other organizations. Like any good story, an effective case study or impact article should be about people that readers can relate to.

In shorter social media formats, the value of economy is obvious, but without a little vigor of expression, compact can turn out to be just short. Benefit metrics and customer quotes give case studies impact, and they can be easily repurposed into shorter formats to good effect. But good stories are usually more than the sum of their highlights, and on its own, a metric or a quote has a lot of work to do. When an IT manager at Acme Energy says, “I reduced my PC costs by $1 million,” it does have a certain je ne sais quoi, but it’s not the whole story. It begs the reader to ask, “How does Acme Energy compare to my business? How do that manager’s challenges relate to mine? It worked for her, but will it fit my needs?” Specific, concrete details about real business experiences provide genuine credibility and applicability to the quotes we use and the success metrics we cite, and credibility and applicability are exactly what makes good customer evidence so powerful in the first place.

Continue reading →

Getting a feedback loop started: 5 ways to get marketing and sales teams on the same page for better content

by
Marketing Musings, Marketing Operations

Recently, we’ve been helping a client assess sales materials to figure out how they can improve relevance and quality. In talking to the product marketers and sales people, we discovered a few gaps.

Often, sales people modify materials to fit their prospects, presentation lengths, or personal styles—not to mention adjusting according to what works well and what falls flat. For marketing teams to capture what the sales people are learning and improve the materials over time, you need to build in a feedback loop.

Because everyone—not just customers, but sales people and marketers too—is getting used to interacting more directly through online networking and social media, our expectations have changed; we expect to be able to speak back, rate, and comment on things, whether they’re products, experiences, or even sales assets.

How might a product marketer enable that feedback and create the tools to capture it?

  • Assign a contact person or owner for each piece of material. Even if it’s not the perfect person, or several people should be involved, having someone “own” the material will prevent “not-my-job” and help ensure that there’s some accountability.
  • Create a central repository for the materials (many organizations already have something like this), but allow for commenting or rating of each asset. Think of how easy it is for people to “like,” “upvote,” or “downvote” something on Facebook, Reddit, or Digg – aim to create a frictionless way of communicating effectiveness.
  • Have the sales team nominate their most effective colleagues in the field, then ask those people to share the collateral that works for them. Ideally, they could also provide trainings or even example presentations, so that both product marketers and sales colleagues could see the sales assets in action.
  • Bring together some of those field champions to review content as it becomes available, using their experience to provide some initial improvements so the content can perform better right off the bat.
  • As a product marketer, don’t get too attached to your material. If you feel personally invested in the materials instead of the materials’ success, your pride can stand in the way of getting the best content for your audience. Your job is to shepherd the content to its best result, not to guard its wording.

Most of all, keep in mind that any solution needs to save time, not create more steps and tasks. Be respectful of your colleagues’ time—anything that costs them sales time won’t be sustainable beyond a few weeks.