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 hasn’t 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.