DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING ROADSHOW, DCU

Thursday, 27th March 2013 By Michaela Simpson 08:54am

Good morning! I'm at the Data-Driven Marketing Roadshow in DCU. It is a full day conference where speakers from top data and digital marketing companies including my favourites, Hubspot and Marketo, will be sharing their insights on what exactly "Data-driven marketing" is and how we can learn to use it more efficiently to improve our marketing. The thought of big data can strike terror in many people, myself included. However, being mid-way through a module of Data Analytics and Visualisation, completing an introduction to the data analytics programme "R" and studying for my SPSS exam, I feel very optimistic that anyone who is willing to take their fingers out of their ears at the mention of data is capable of developing at least a half decent understanding of it and begin to utilise it to make better informed marketing decisions. I'm armed with my laptop, my tablet and smartphone so I hope to have en0ugh juice to make a good stab at live blogging from the DDM Roadshow today. First up are Attivo, AgilOne and Datahug to discuss Best Practices: Utilizing data insights to drive customer engagement. Full days programme available from the DDM Alliance website.

10:45am Attivio - Peter Philipp, General Manager EMEA Did you know there is a difference between Big Data and Big Content? Big content is a trickier beast to tame than big data. For instance, when a wrestling fan describes something as "SICK" online, we understand this as a very good thing. Whereas the restaurant reviewer using the same term is probably not so enthused. Initially, analysing content was carried out by human beings who

understood context. However, this is not a scaleable activity and therefore, to really gather the maximum value from big content, machine learning is required. Another interesting insight was the volume of data businesses can gather from a very simple, data rich source which they have sole access to. E-Mail. There is a wealth of information packed into business e-mail archives. Companies have the potential to pull competitor mentions, sentiment and key phrases and analyse it. The example used this morning, was of an airline e-mail analysis which highlighted a key phrase "upgraded seats" indicating customers want more access to upgraded seat. Now the airline is in a position to pinpoint an action they can take to improve customer sentiment. E-mail is something which is often taken for granted in digital marketing and I love how Attivio highlighted the gold dust that can be lying in there for businesses.

11:20am Q&A. Dr. Theo Lynn with Peter from Attivio and Ray Smith from Datahug

Q&A with Dr Theo Lynn, Attivio and DataHug

Data privacy is a sensitive issue. But it is well regulated in Europe by comparison to the U.S. This is not a bad thing for data companies, keeping standards high. Data for business is not just about stuffing more and more information into a programme. It's about connecting the inputs with the outputs. Make your activity smart. Irish companies are becoming more adept at using data tools. There is a realisation that embracing data can save time and save money. Once customers have integrated data technology in the business, they are generally wholly self-sufficient from there. You do not have to be a data scientist to use the insights from the data to make informed business decisions.

11:35am Hubspot - Kieran Flanagan, Marketing Director, EMEA

Buyer Personas by Hubspot Kieran is a great speaker - his talk is packed with really useful information which is in fact, a real challenge for a live blogger! I'll just have to summarise the main points I took from it. Inbound marketing is about attracting the right type of people to your website and delighting customers to turn them into your best sales team. It's the art of persona driven marketing across your entire funnel. Purchase decisions as always, start with a need that hasnt changed. But the way we buy has changed. 65% of Europeans start the purchase cycle online. We search Google. Google refines its search over time as it gets to know what problem you are trying to solve. This leads to an exciting situation for marketers today - 60% of the sales cycle is complete before they talk to a salesperson. Or in other words, marketing owns a lot more of the funnel than it used to. Kieran went on to outline how to be successful with inbound marketing, from the first step of creating buyer personas, to researching your customer, to creating a content machine and importantly, knowing what action you want people to take once they have read your content.

12:15pm Coffee. Phew!

1:00pm DataSift Insight from the Noise Toby Potter, Sales Director EMEA This is what social data looks like.

Figure 1 Social data - not easy to work with

Social data is out there. What business needs to do is convert this kind of text into rich, relevant, integrated, and timely data. I'm sure most of you have gone on a public rant on Twitter or Facebook about an experience (good or bad...but probably bad). Again, from a human perspective, it is easy to interpret the sentiment in your rant and decide on the best course of action to address it. But again, we have a scaleability problem. We want to be able to analyse millions of tweets. Data technology exists to do this work for us. Machine learning comes into it again. Machines can actually learn from how you analyse data and learn to do it itself. For instance, you might allocate social posts to difference bins e.g. comments, praise, query, criticism, rubbish etc. Well, machines can learn how to imitate that categorisation behaviour and continue the work from there and scale massively.

2:30pm Propelad - John Larkin, VP Marketing

Figure 2 Sun Tsu Lessons for marketers

After a very quick lunch, we're back with John Larkin from Propelad on using data to gain a competitive advantage and I'm getting all philosophical. But first things first. Poker. John made a brilliant comparison between poker and marketing which is going to stick with me in my career. John is a big poker player on a professional level. And poker is about data. Data is knowledge and knowledge leads to advantage. An advantage makes money. John used this in his poker career. Once you get to a certain level, there isn't much to separate players in terms of ability. But John found a way to differentiate himself from his opponents. He began to collect data and knowledge on his opponents and with this knowledge data, he made a big success of his poker career. It reminds me of what Sun Tzu said in "The Art of War", "Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time." The same can be said for marketing. There is tonnes of data, content, knowledge and information available and what is going to separate you or I as a marketer from your competitors is how you use all of the data available to you.

2:40pm Live blogging is now getting real. The laptop battery is on its way out. I'll do my best to soldier on via other devices. Thanks for following!

3:15pm Marketo - Robert Gavin, Director of Alliances EMEA I'm on the phone now so please excuse the shorter updates... If we were in any doubt as to the rise of big data and the reason marketers should be looking to take advantage of it, Robert from Marketo reminded us; "97% of the world's data has been created in the last 2 years." And it's only getting bigger. Incredible.

3:45pm Oracle - Daniela Becker-Russell, Sales Leader for Cloud CRM Cranking up the stat from earlier up a notch, we hear that not just 60% but 60-95% of the buying process is complete before contact is made with the business. Marketing just claimed an even bigger chunk of the sales funnel. Creating buyer personas again, is highlighted as key to carrying out marketing which is customer obsessed. While a lot has changed in marketing, the aim has. Peter Drucker said before most of us were born, "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself." Today, in order to know your customer to the max, we can't avoid the fact that we need help from technology. To this end, it is predicted that by 2017 the CMO will be spending more on IT than the CIO.

5:00pm Panel: Marketing Automation, Daniela Becker-Russell (Oracle), Robert Gavin (Marketo), & Jan Teerlinck (Selligent)

The first question for the panel is a very common one for marketing professionals. How can we justify our spending on marketing software to the board? Jan has a nice tactic for this and sees the business as having 2 options; spend money on the staff to assess the marketing data or spend money on the marketing automation software to do it.

5:20pm The panel finishes by giving one piece of advice for marketing people to take on board for their future careers. Daniela advises the audience to become great at networking, whether that's human to human or online. The interesting point Daniela makes is that you should fill your network with people who challenge you, people who about you, as these are the people who will help you progress to the next level. I know this is an area I'd like to improve personally. Jan says marketers should have a real passion for the industry and a basic curiosity to know it all. This brings me back to John Larkin's talk earlier and the idea that in this industry, knowledge is your competitive advantage. You should arm yourself with all the knowledge you can so that you have a good overview of the whole industry and contribute to avoiding the dreaded marketing disciplines silos. Robert extends that a bit further by saying that, yes, a broad overview is good to have, but when you have that it is also important to focus on your "thing". There are so many specialist areas in digital marketing and it is not possible to be a master of all of these. Choose your "thing" and focus on this to become a master. Great, relevant, concise advice which this developing digital marketer really appreciated.

6:00pm Drinks

Live blogging reward Well that's it. Last attendees standing here were treated to a drink. Thanks to everyone who followed along with the live blogging here and on Twitter. It's been a long day but really fun to connect and engage with everybody. There was an amazing array of experts throughout the day and for someone who is not a natural data analyst, it was great to be immersed in it for a day. It is experiences like these which work towards demystifying data and presenting it as something which can be accessible to everyone in some form. Night all! Michaela.