Ah yes, math. As a creative, my old nemesis and I have made up and become friends.

In this day and age, analytics is helping us understand our target audience like never before. Because we can measure—well, just about everything, we are able to see what is working, and what is not. Analytics is an essential part of ongoing improvement for everything we do at Godfrey. As an art director, I have to pay close attention to the feedback we receive (which often includes numbers and percentages) to understand what I need to change and improve on.

So, if you haven't embraced analytics, now is the time to introduce yourself and become the best of friends, because your new friend will help guide you to your end goal.

In addition, art directors and creative folks must have an understanding of search because the visual world is changing fast, in relationship to
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Chances are your audience won’t be waiting patiently for you to return as the economy flips its frown upside-down. As marketers, we are challenged to reach our audiences where they want us to reach them, not where we think they’ll be. Listening and researching are imperative in order to offer a successful and relevant campaign.

Here are a few tips to consider:

Think like your audience. Could it be that they are no longer flipping page by page through your industry trade publications but rather reading an online version? Or do they prefer
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I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the television drama series on AMC that depicts the advertising business in the 1960s. I've seen every episode. In fact, I even have my favorites saved on the home DVR. Therefore, it should likely come as no surprise that I'm including it as the introduction to my latest post.

Mass communications was the name of the game fifty years ago.
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I’ve been in the B2B marcom business for 3 decades, always working for or with technically oriented companies. Often times I felt I was the lone voice of marketing and marketing communications.

Very early in my career, I heard retailer John Wanamaker’s famous quip -- “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know what half.” If I recall correctly it came from the mouth of a division VP/GM who was a chemist by training. He was a non-believer in the power of marcom.

For me and other members of my generation of marcom professionals the constant mention of this quote and similar ones put us on a mission. I wanted to be able to answer the questions: How much is invested? How much is wasted? I wanted to know what was working and what wasn’t. I wanted to show that the work we do contributes to the success of business.
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New technologies. Media fragmentation. The changing marketing landscape. B-to-B marketing professionals are dealing with them – in many cases struggling with them – as day-to-day realities of the way we “do” marketing today.

One of the consequences of the new marketing landscape is that, as you necessarily devote ourselves to learning new technologies and media channels, you can lose focus on the big picture. It takes time and attention to learn how to properly execute a search engine optimization program, and keep it going continuously. It takes time and attention to implement and constantly tweak a search engine marketing program for continuous improvement. And to know, understand and leverage the continuing stream of new media opportunities and techniques available to B-to-B marketers.

There are endless details and procedures involved in optimizing press materials
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The economy is creeping towards a recession. The DOE’s 13 SEER mandate has helped level the playing field, household buying habits have changed dramatically since the popularity of the internet, and media options have drastically fragmented. With all of this going on, how can a low to mid level HVAC contractor compete against the big guys? While there is no perfect answer to this question, there are some suggestions to help you spend your precious marketing dollars wisely.

Start by looking to your manufacturer and distributor advertising programs. There are literally thousands of dollars available to dealers who agree to use branded and sometimes pre-packaged advertising programs. In fact some manufacturers offer up to 4 times a dealer’s advertising investment!

Next, think about timing and placement of your advertising. What are you really getting out of your investment? Case in point: if you put all of your dollars into yellow pages advertising then you
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Everyone has their individual reasons as to why they measure their marketing efforts. The way I see it, we all fall into four categories: Justification of Budgets, Evaluation of Tools and Tactics, Insight into Customer Behavior, and Predicting and Projecting Results. Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we need to satisfy the most basic reason before we can move up to the more complex reason, and no matter how high you have progressed, the levels below are still extremely important. I like to call it the Hierarchy of Analytical Needs.

Here is a quick look at each of the levels.

Justification of Budgets
The lowest level of Hierarchy of Analytical Needs can best be explained with the following scenario: The CFO of your company walks into your office to discuss the need for budget cuts.
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In the lead article in the December 10 issue of B2B magazine, Kate Maddox outlined “the top 10 marketing trends for 2008, based on interviews with marketers, ad agencies, media executives, analysts and other industry experts.” Read article.

The top 10 are green marketing, globalization, the shift to online, customer in control, embracing web 2.0, improving operations, targeted and personal events, integrating media platforms, going mobile and blended search.

The marketers interviewed include top tier marketers such as Boeing, Caterpillar, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Siemens and UPS. But what about the rest of us? (Okay, we’re an agency but we came from and still serve primarily non-top-tier B-to-B marketers. You know – the real world.)

We think the top 10 list is on target.
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With all the talk of an impending recession, marketers will have to be better than ever at proving the return on investment they can provide. As sales start to decline, marketing budgets are always among the first to be cut.

With the increase of digital marketing, tracking ROI is becoming increasingly easier. Yet a study completed recently by the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) and reported by a recent article on BtoB Online found a vast majority of small businesses do not track ROI on lead generation programs. That brings me to the question—How do these marketers know if their programs are working? Without solid metrics to help justify the worth of your programs, your programs and future ones like them may be hard to validate. As budgets contract, these metrics may be your saving grace.

As marketers continue planning for 2008, marketing analytics should be a solid part of their program.
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Marketers and consumers are pretty familiar with the term “Buyer’s Remorse.”  You know how it goes…You’re in the store and see the perfect kitchen utensil. It promises to cut prep time in half! You must have it. After making the purchase, you rush home to give it a try. It ends up not doing exactly what you thought it would and a feeling of disappointment overwhelms you. This experience happens to all of us more times than we would like to admit and in some situations it causes a negative feeling towards the company or person who convinced you to make the purchase.

Very similar situations happen online all the time. I like to call it Clicker’s Remorse. Just imagine spending hours on Google, publication sites, and online directories looking for a solution to a problem. Finally, you find it! An attention grabbing banner ad promises to give the answer you are looking for.
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