1. Marketing Operations: Pit Crew or Service Station?
2. A Bigger Mehaphone Does Not Equal Better Marketing
3. More Data Does Not Equal Better Insights
4. Four Steps to Ensuring Your Strategy Acheives Results
5. Staking Your Category Claim
6. The Art of Controllership
7. Data Chains Facilitate Marketing Performance Management
8. Anybody Can Be a Marketer…What Do YOU Think
9. Planning Isn’t Free: What Marketers Can Learn From HGTV
10. Connect Customer Experience, Convenience, and Differentiation to Business Results
11. Managing Marketing Content Across the Customer Lifecycle
12. Three Attributes to Extend Your CMO Longevity
13. Does Your Marketing Dashboard Pass These Three Tests?
14. Think Like the Competition
15. Measuring Sponsorship Effectiveness
16. Performance Management for Marketers
17. How to Improve Performance Measurement in Four Steps
18. Four Parameters for Selecting Marketing Metrics that Matter
19. Follow 3 Steps to Identify Your Campaign Goals and Measure Their Outcomes
20. Leveraging Marketing Operations to Facilitate Agility and Marketing as a Center of Excellence
21. How to Create an Actionable Marketing Dashboard (and Why You Need One)
22. Big Data Promises Marketers Big Insights
23. Three Keys to Accelerating Marketing Measurement and A Fact-Based Culture
24. There’s More to Pipeline Metrics Than Leads 
25. Delivering On the Promise of Marketing Automation
26. The Price of Chasing the Next Shiny Toy
27. Analytics and Marketing Operations: A One-Two Punch for Growth
28. HGTV Makeovers and the Making of a Marketing Plan
29. Analytics and Marketing Operations: A One-Two Punch for Growth
30. Planning Isn’t Free: What Marketers Can Learn From HGTV
31. Improve Market Strategy By Thinking “Outside In”
32. Measuring the Pay-off for Customer Loyalty
33. Lay Of The Land: Creating Ecosystem Maps
34. Grow the Bottom Line with Voice of the Customer Research
35. The Price of Chasing the Next Shiny Toy
36. Marketing’s Missing Link
37. Moving from Pretty to Customer-Centric Marketing
38. Grow the Bottom Line with Voice of the Customer Research
39. Anybody Can Be A Marketer
40. Listen to the Voice of the Customer and Reap the Rewards
41. Sentiment Analysis as a Measure of Social Media Engagement
42. Improve Performance and Revenue with Marketing Automation
43. 3 Key Ways To Measure Social Marketing ROI
44. How Vulnerable Are You To Customer Defection
45. KPIs Provide Insight to Influence Success and Strategy
46. How Vulnerable Are Your Customers
47. The Nine Most Common Data Mining Techniques Used in Predictive Analytics
48. Using Touch Point Effectiveness Analysis to Improve the Customer Experience
49. Bridging the Gap: Improving Your Go-to-Market Success
50. Marketing: Beware of “Outkicking The Coverage” (updated revision)
51. Embracing Cross-Channel Analytics to Create a Competitive Advantage
52. Bridging the Gap: Three Steps to More Actionable Customer Data
53. Gaining Insight into Marketing Results ñ The Value of a Marketing Dashboard
54. For Whom the Bell Tolls
55. Leveraging Actionable Customer Data for Revenue Growth
56. Advisory Boards: Innovation Means Knowing What Your Customers Want
57. Benchmarking to Improve Marketing Performance
58. Branding Sets Mavericks Apart From the Herd
59. Bridging the Gap: Does Your Marketing Team Have the Right Stuff?
60. Bridging the Gap: Four Processes to Fine Tune Your Marketing Organization’s Performance
61. CABs and TABs: A Market Research Vehicle Ideal for Every CEO
62. Customer-Centric Planning Cleared for Takeoff at Southwest Airlines Cargo
63. Embracing Sustainability to Boost Sales and Increase Loyalty
64. Factors That Make A Difference
65. Four Processes to Fine Tune your Marketing Organization’s Performance
66. How Marketing Can Go Beyond the ‘Make It Pretty’ Syndrome
67. How Marketing Can Lead the Charge in Business Innovation
68. Loyalty Begins With the Right Customers: Pinpoint Your Marketing Efforts Through Smart Segmentation
69. Managing Touch Point Value: 10 Steps to Improve Customer Engagement
70. Marketing Optimization for Maximum ROI
71. Marketing’s Pivotal Role in Innovation
72. Personal Branding, Your Key to Corporate Stardom
73. Putting the Capital “B” Back in the Brand
74. Product Portfolio Management: Marketing’s Contribution for Improving New Product Success and Organizational Performance
75. Recovering the Lost Art of Product Marketing
76. Six Bull Riding Lessons for Businesses
77. Using Marketing Intelligence to Steer Product Direction from the Abyss
78. Using Scenarios to Create Buyer Segments
79. Put an End to Flying Blind: A Ten-Step Process for Creating a Go-To-Market Tactical Plan

Measuring Sponsorship Effectiveness Marketing
For many companies, sponsorships are an important component of their marketing programs primarily used to increase brand exposure. What primary metrics did they use to evaluate the value of this investment? Most companies believe the value of sponsorships is brand exposure and therefore tend to use it for recall and impressions as the two primary metrics for measuring sponsorships. These may not be the best options. Metrics that tie sponsorships more closely to sales and brand equity might be better alternatives. How might we do this? They key is affecting customer behavior. Read this article and learn how to measure your sponsorship effectiveness.

Performance Management for Marketers
With the increased pressure on business leaders to be more personally accountable for the performance and conduct of their organizations, the emphasis on performance management has trickled down and across the organization, which of course includes marketing. A sound marketing performance management process is essential for enabling marketing professionals to demonstrate and communicate marketing’s impact on along with the contribution to the organization. This article explores three performance management terms often used interchangeably – marketing effectiveness, marketing accountability and marketing measurement – and the role these three complementary ideas serve in the performance management process.

How to Improve Performance Measurement in Four Steps
We often hear lament from marketing organizations that they are inundated with data and that there is no limit to what they can measure. We fully appreciate the need to figure out what metrics makes the most sense. With so many metrics options, it can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing on metrics that are easy to capture. In actuality, what is easy to measure may not necessarily help demonstrate Marketing’s value, foster better decisions or enable course corrections. Applying precious and limited resources on measuring the wrong things is wasteful – it is both inefficient and ineffective. For most organizations eating the marketing accountability elephant is a daunting task.  This article offers four bite-sized chunks for tackling marketing performance management and measurement initiative.

Four Parameters for Selecting Marketing Metrics that Matter
A sound marketing performance management process is essential for enabling marketing professionals to demonstrate and communicate marketing’s impact on and contribution to the organization. The whole point of performance management, marketing accountability and marketing measurement is to help Marketing optimize performance and achieve meaningful business results. Applying precious and limited resources to measuring the wrong things is wasteful – it is both inefficient and ineffective. This article discusses selecting marketing metrics that measure what matters and identifies four parameters that will help ascertain whether the metrics you’ve selected pass mustard.

Follow 3 Steps to Identify Your Campaign Goals and Measure Their Outcomes
Just as a pilot performs a preflight check list before taking off, there are three pre-launch flight steps as every marketer should check as part of developing and executing any marketing campaigns.  This article outlines three steps to consider before launching any program to help improve your marketing accountability

Leveraging Marketing Operations to Facilitate Agility and Marketing as a Center of Excellence
Agile marketing organizations are able to adapt their marketing efforts, quickly and successfully, in response to changing customer behavior, market conditions and business direction to the benefit of improved market share or customer value.  One of the reasons these organizations struggle with MPM and agility is that they don’t have the infrastructure.  A key part of the infrastructure is related to tackling marketing operations, that is, the resources, processes and data the marketing organization needs to create and deliver value to the customers. This article explores the role of and charter for Marketing Operations in terms of facilitating agility and transforming Marketing into a Center of Excellence.

How to Create an Actionable Marketing Dashboard (and Why You Need One)
Truly accountable marketing professionals periodically report on their performance and contribution.  The progress or status report of projects, such as updates to the website, an upcoming event, the status of new collateral or a direct marketing campaign or the reports regarding number of website visitors, open/clicks, followers and friends, number of marketing qualified leads are no longer enough.  These do not address the questions the C-Suite is most concerned about, namely what is working, what course adjustments if any are required, and whether the investments the company funnels into marketing are properly allocated. Marketers need a dashboard.  This article provides the five key steps for creating an actionable marketing dashboard that enables you to diagnose the health and value of marketing and facilitate strategic decisions and course adjustments.

Big Data Promises Marketers Big Insights
The amount of data being generated is expanding at rapid logarithmic rates. Every day, customers and consumers are creating quintillion bytes of data due to the growing number of customer contact channels. As marketers we need to learn how to leverage and optimize this flood of data and incorporate it into customer models we can use to take advantage of market opportunities, deliver an exceptional customer experience, and give customers the right products when, where, and at the price they want.  This article explains Big Data, why it is important, and suggests six steps for using it.

Three Keys to Accelerating Marketing Measurement and A Fact-Based Culture
The 2011 IBM Global CMO Study found that 63 percent of CMOs believe ROI on marketing spend will be the most important measure of their success by 2015. However, only 44 percent feel fully prepared to be held accountable for marketing ROI. The ability to realize this objective requires creating fact-driven cultures.  For many marketing organizations this will require a significant cultural shift and change in the personnel roster. This article offers three practical steps for accelerating your progress. Whether this shift is the beginning of a transformation or just the next stage of your journey we’d like to offer these three tips for leveraging data, analysis, and measurement skills to improve marketing accountability accelerating your progress.

There’s More to Pipeline Metrics Than Leads
Imagine you have two new customer acquisition programs in play:  Program Excalibur produces 100 qualified leads and Program Camelot produces 50 qualified leads.  At first glance, it might appear that based on volume, or the quantity of qualified leads, that Excalibur is the better program.  What other metrics should organizations use to evaluate opportunities generated by Marketing?  This article explores six additional pipeline metrics every organization should consider.

Delivering On the Promise of Marketing Automation
Two continuing trends are forcing organizations to approach sales and marketing differently.  Because today’s customers sit in the driver seat in terms of the discovery and buying stages and have an increased number of channels as entry points, there is greater confusion and complexity when it comes to identifying and managing qualified opportunities and there is a shift in the pipeline bottleneck- it is further upstream.  Second, organizations are trying to take a more scientific data-centric approach to marketing, especially when it comes to segmentation, customer engagement, lead nurturing and lead scoring.  As a result of these two trends, many firms are investing in marketing automation platforms (MAPs) to address integrating Sales and Marketing alignment and integration and the new buyer behaviors.  This article offers recommendations on selecting and evaluating MAPs, planning for adoption, and pitfalls to avoid.

The Price of Chasing the Next Shiny Toy
Why is it marketers become so quickly enamored with the next shiny toy? And at what price? What do I mean by the next shiny toy? Chasing after the next new thing potentially presents us as being tactically opportunistic. If we want to be accepted as members of the strategic team, then we have to exercise strategic discipline. This means we need to be concerned with making decisions that affect the direction of the organization and not just add a new toy in the box.There are five things to consider before taking the plunge that will help you appear more strategic in your deployment of a shiny new toy.

Analytics and Marketing Operations: A One-Two Punch For Growth
The world is just too dynamic and the pace of change is just too fast for marketers to rely on intuition and experience. With customer expectations increasing, the competitive landscape growing, and the proliferation of new technologies and channels, marketers need analytics.  This article identifies the five growth opportunity analytics help marketers evaluate, key steps associated with marketing analytics, and a method for evaluating analytics projects.  The article closes with how marketing operations enables an organization to scale analytics initiatives.

HGTV Makeovers And The Making Of A Marketing Plan
HGTV makes home makeovers look fast and easy.  In just few days and with a sledgehammer and a thousand dollars you can tackle and complete a major home makeover.   Many marketers approach their marketing plan in the same fashion – a few days and a few dollars and “voila” a new marketing plan! Well the truth and myths of real time television apply to the creation of a marketing plan.  This article identifies three lessons we can learn from HGTV when it comes to creating a marketing plan.

Analytics and Marketing Operations: A One-Two Punch for Growth
The world is just too dynamic and the pace of change is just too fast for marketers to rely on intuition and experience. With customer expectations increasing, the competitive landscape growing, and the proliferation of new technologies and channels, marketers need analytics.  This article identifies the five growth opportunity analytics help marketers evaluate, key steps associated with marketing analytics, and a method for evaluating analytics projects.  The article closes with how marketing operations enables an organization to scale analytics initiatives.

Planning Isn’t Free:  What Marketers Can Learn from HGTV
HGTV makes home makeovers look fast and easy.  In just few days and with a sledgehammer and a thousand dollars you can tackle and complete a major home makeover.   Many marketers approach their marketing plan in the same fashion – a few days and a few dollars and “voila” a new marketing plan! Well the truth and myths of real time television apply to the creation of a marketing plan.  This article identifies three lessons we can learn from HGTV when it comes to creating a marketing plan.

Improve Market Strategy By Thinking “Outside In”
As you begin thinking about planning and marketing strategies for 2012, jot down some of the marketing strategies you want to implement.  Now, ask yourself this question:  Are these strategies based on ‘inside-out’ thinking or ‘outside-in’ thinking?  Inside-out thinking begins with more traditional questions such as:  What are we good at?  What are our capabilities?  What are our products?  Outside-in thinking looks at everything the company does through the eyes of the customer with an emphasis on creating and keeping customers by delivering exceptional customer value.

Measuring the Pay-off for Customer Loyalty
Many of the organizations we work with deploy some type of customer measures, such as customer satisfaction, customer advocacy, and/or use the net promoter score or something similar. These are good metrics but what they don’t do is tell us what business outcome they expect their investment in customer loyalty to impact.  Clarity around the needle you expect customer loyalty to move is essential.  Movement of the business needle or outcome will affect whether the investment in loyalty is paying off. This article outlines five steps to help ensure the connection between customer loyalty investments and a specific business outcome.

Lay of the Land: Creating Ecosystems
For many organizations growth comes from entering a new market. Today most organizations recognize that venturing unprepared into unchartered territory is fraught with risk. When it comes to entering new markets, it helps to have a map. This map is known as an ecosystem map. What exactly is an ecosystem? This article defines what an ecosystem is and offers five steps to creating and using ecosystem maps for getting the lay of the land in a new market, assessing the opportunity, and identifying the best points of entry.

Grow the Bottom Line with Voice of the Customer Research
VoC is a market research technique designed to help a company better understand customers’ wants and needs and prioritize those concerns to positively affect the customer experience. The premise of VoC is that if you collect and analyze customer data, you can transform an organization into a truly customer-centric operation by taking actions based on your findings. In this article, you’ll learn how to effectively use Voice of Customer (VoC) research to affect your bottom line and questions to consider when beginning your VoC program.

The Price of Chasing the Next Shiny Toy
Why is it marketers become so quickly enamored with the next shiny toy? And at what cost? What do I mean by “the next shiny toy”? For many marketers, the first new shiny toy came in the mid-’90s with the creation of websites. And even though email (initially known as electronic mail) started its humble beginnings in1969, it wasn’t until the ’90s that it became a pervasive marketing channel. In this article, you will discover the five things to consider before taking on the next new marketing channel and how chasing the next shiny toy can portray marketers in a negative light.

Marketing’s Missing Link
“As I work with marketing organizations around the world, a common gap stands out: the lack of marketing strategy. Perhaps it’s because the difficult economic climate has forced marketers into a more tactical mode, with leaner teams trying to execute more with less.” In this article, you will discover the generic business strategies, the different types of marketing stratgies and steps for development and evaluation.

Moving from Pretty to Customer-Centric Marketing
The marketing professionals within the customer organizations we work with often tell us they have been relegated merely to tactical implementers who make things pretty. We often hear them say they are perceived as the team that makes the Web site pretty, the presentations prettier, the trade show booth attractive, the online demo cooler, the new product brochure snappier, and so on. Perhaps you’re sensing a theme here? Marketing is more than the “make it pretty” department. In this article, we will focus on how leveraging the creative aspects of marketing will enable us to fufill the role of any business to attract while keeping and growing the value of customers.

Grow the Bottom Line with Voice of the Customer Research
Only 57% of large North American firms have a formalized Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, according to a 2010 study by the Temkin Group. The premise of VoC is that if you collect and analyze customer data, you can transform an organization into a truly customer-centric operation by taking action based on your findings. In this article, you will learn how to effectively use Voice of Customer (VoC) research to affect your bottom line and questions to consider when beginning your VoC program.

Anybody Can Be A Marketer
Seth Godin, and lesser known folks, suggest that anyone can be a marketer. And you know it appears to be true. We have biology, art history, anthropology, and various other degreed folk practicing marketing. Maybe that’s why the marketing profession isnít as well thought of as we would like by the C-Suite. In this article, you will discover how anyone can be a marketer.

Listen to the Voice of the Customer and Reap the Rewards
Would you like incremental purchases from existing customers? Would a lower churn rate help your bottom line? Would referrals from existing customers help reduce the cost of sale for your company? Do you conduct Voice of the Customer (VoC) research? In this article, you will discover what VoC is, what the basics of VoC are, and why it is important to your organization.

Sentiment Analysis as a Measure of Social Media Engagement
As products become more commoditized and companies try to outperform their competitors, a better customer experience is becoming an increasingly important way to differentiate. Customer engagement plays a large role in the overall customer experience. This article will explore how to measure customer engagement, how it will strengthen relationships and where it plays a key role in social media.

Improve Performance and Revenue with Marketing Automation
As the CEO, marketing automation is an important tool for helping you improve and measure how your organization interacts with your prospects and customers. Why? Because while your marketing and sales teams are probably proficient at connecting at the beginning and end of the conversation, the real challenge is managing the middle of the conversation. This article will explore the reasons why marketing automation is an essential factor to your marketing strategy and how it will benefit your company.

3 Key Ways To Measure Social Marketing ROI
Are you investing more in social marketing this year? If so, you are among the many marketers making this same decision. EMarketer estimates that four out of five U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees will be marketing on social media this year, and U.S. ad spending on social networks is expected to reach over $3 billion.In this article, you will uncover the ways to measure ROI of your investment and how to measure the value of social marketing.

How Vulnerable Are You To Customer Defection
Through the idea of customer relationship management, it is about deciding which customers or segments to target, and then developing customer acquisition, retention, and growth plans that will attract and keep your best customers. CRM is really about making your customers the heart of your business. Our job as marketers is to acquire, grow, and retain profitable customer relationships to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Through this article, you will learn how to measure customer relationships, the vulnerability index and how the index will give your company an advantage.

KPIs Provide Insight to Influence Success and Strategy
An integral part of effective marketing-measurement initiatives is establishing key performance indicators (KPIs). This article will allow you to determine what to look for in a KPI, give you four steps to finding the right KPIs, and more.

How Vulnerable Are Your Customers
A goal for any CEO for a company, you want to create growth in the value of your customers. By doing so, you will have to create customer loyalty by measuring their Vulnerability index. A vulnerability index serves as a way to measure loyalty in the face of competitive pull. This articles explores the steps to conducting a vulnerability index to not only help retain loyal customeres but in the long run, but also help your company withstand competitive pressure.

The Nine Most Common Data Mining Techniques Used in Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics enable you to develop mathematical models to help better understand the variables driving success. Predictive analytics, pattern recognition and classification problems are not new. Long used in the financial services and insurance industries, predictive analytics is about using statistics, data mining and game theory to analyze current and historical facts in order to make predictions about future events. This article explores the nine most common data mining techniques marketers can use to recognize patterns in customer preferences and buying behavior. By understanding and using these types of approaches and employing predictive analytics you can go beyond the traditional slicing and dicing of your data so you can be smarter and more agile when it comes to marketing.

Using Touch Point Effectiveness Analysis to Improve the Customer Experience
We have found that companies truly focused on improving customer engagement do at least two things: they identify all the key touch points a customer has with their company, measure their effectiveness and use them to create a map of the customer experience. This article provides key steps to create your touch point inventory and evaluate the effectiveness and impact of your touch points.

Bridging the Gap: Improving Your Go-to-Market Success
Go-to-market success depends on a well thought-out and flawlessly executed plan. It’s surprising – actually alarming – how many organizations attempt this strategic endeavor without such a plan in place, and end up flying blind into new territory. This updated article outlines a ten-step process to successfully enter a new market.

Marketing: Beware of “Outkicking The Coverage” (updated)
Business like football is a team sport. Players must work together to execute well-orchestrated plays in order to succeed. It’s intuitive that weak players can create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by opposing teams. There is a number of football metaphors used in business and one often forgotten involves outkicking your coverage which exemplifies when an overly strong player can be harmful to team performance. With so many organizations in the thick of next year planning this article explore ways to make sure marketing doesn’t get too far ahead of the sales, service, and/or product development and management teams in the organization.

Embracing Cross-Channel Analytics to Create a Competitive Advantage
If you are using multiple channels and you want to understand both what’s really working and enrich your customers’ experiences with your organization, then you’ll have to step into the world of cross-channel analytics.

Bridging the Gap: Three Steps to More Actionable Customer Data
With limited marketing resources, it has become imperative to allocate your marketing dollars, people, and time toward your most profitable channels and customers. Delving deeper into what matters to your customers is the key to growing revenue. Focusing on the profitable sources of revenue takes data-mining tools, customer research, marketing automation software, and the ability to perform customer analytics. Before you can perform customer analytics, you need to address your data. This article outlines three steps toward enabling you to leverage customer data.

Gaining Insight into Marketing Results ñ The Value of a Marketing Dashboard
If you are interested in being able to quantify how effective your marketing is, the impact marketing is having on customer acquisition and customer retention, and whether marketing is increasing the share of wallet for your customers, it may be time to ask marketing to develop a marketing dashboard. This article outlines the five initial steps any organization can use to begin to develop their marketing dashboard.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
The CMO role- which initially tended to emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research-continued to evolve over the past fifteen years as a result of the emergence of new media, the growing number of sales and service touch points, more complex distribution models, and the fragmentation of customer segments. This article outlines six survival tips and four ingredients for thriving as a CMO.

Leveraging Actionable Customer Data for Revenue Growth
As the CEO, you probably have already chartered your marketing team to collect relevant customer-related information. But does your marketing organization have the ability to analyze this information in a way that provides your sales organization and leadership team with valuable insights into customer behavior? This article explains the value of customer analytics and outlines three steps needed to leverage your customer data.

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