Listening to the Voice of the Customer

Fabio Lazzarini

Marketing Manager – CRIBIS D&B

About Us

• Expert System is the leading provider of semantic software that discovers, classifies and interprets text information. The Cogito semantic suite enables:

• Extraction, discovery and understanding of the connections in your strategic information sets – the thousands of files, e-mails, articles, reports, web pages you have access to every day.

• Automatically understand the meaning of any text written in the language we use to communicate (natural language).

Cogito improves business decisions in real time for the majority of corporate functions.

• CRIBIS D&B is a highly specialized company with advanced business information skills. It was set up with the aim of providing both the Italian market and D&B's global

clients with the highest standards of quality in terms of business coverage, depth and accuracy of information, technological capacity and flexibility to respond quickly to market demands, as well as in the provision of decisional systems and scoring models.

Our Journey

September 2010 • Project kick-off

August 2011 • 450 users • 2,700 keywords monitored

2010 Scenario

“Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager” Source: Harvard Business Review, October 2010

2010 Scenario “Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager”

How is your marketing budget allocated?

2010 Scenario “Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager”

Which delivers the best ROI: Online activities, Branding or Online Advertising?

2010 Scenario “Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager”

How much will your marketing expenditures vary compared to last year?

2010 Scenario “Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager”

How important are digital and social media?

2010 Scenario “Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager”

B2B Marketing is Different?

A buying process based

on value

Long term relationships

The audience is knowledgeable

and engaged Intense use

of information

Web and Social Media Drive Business

• Direct mail’s share of the B2B marketing budget has almost halved in

two years. The channels that have benefitted from this shortfall are

social media and trade shows.

• The rise in spend on digital marketing channels and decline in spend on

traditional marketing channels has tapered off over the past six months.

Source: Ther B2B Barometer – Report 4, March 2011

Web and Social Media Drive Business

• 93% of B2B buyers use search to

begin the buying process.

• 80% of IT decision makers say

word of mouth is their most

important source when making

buying decisions.

Source: Social Media for Business Marketers, Marketo

Listening to the Voice of the Market

Communities

Forums

Social Media

Web Sites

Blogs

"Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room”

• The information about our companies, about what our customers want, about what our customers say about us, lies outside our firewalls.

• What customers are saying about you on blogs, discussion forums, Twitter and Facebook and analyst reviews is what provides a complete picture.

First, Listen!

Then, Talk

Conversation

Listening to the Voice of the Market

• The web opens up a world of possibilities of being informed, about a product or a service, to our customers.

• In reality, all buyers (both in B2C and in B2B) tend to rely only on a few “voices” they know and trust.

• These small squares are replacing our sales representatives, consultants, shopkeepers, travel agents, etc.

Customers Self-Select their Squares O

ur

Ch

all

en

ge

Having a presence in the squares where our customers talk

Trying to drive the customers to our web site

How to Play in a New Context

Listen Talk Act Pull

Marketing

It’s not possible to listen the voice of the market without semantic technology…

Semantic technology has

the ability to integrate

structured and

unstructured data and

make better use of all the

information corporations

have available to them.

It’s not possible to listen the voice of the market without semantic technology…

… but listening is only

the enabler of the

decisional process.

Semantic technology has

the ability to integrate

structured and

unstructured data and

make better use of all the

information corporations

have available to them.

… but listening is only the enabler of the decisional process

We want to create

actionable information,

not only searchable

information.

Listen Analyse Decide Monitor

Listening to the Voice of the Market

• We don’t need only to search and

filter the web to find the information

we need…

• …we need to see the shape of

the information and monitor

how it moves in time.

What does it mean?