Marketing Automation: a bluffer's guide

This year we at the University ran/are still running our first Marketing Automation (MA)  project.

The primary responsibility for the design and delivery of this project rested with me, which is cool as I like doing new stuff and learning new things.

Now marketing automation has become the buzzword du jour, but what is it really?

In its most basic terms it is this:

"In the ideal world you would make direct contact with your prospective customers with quality content/information/offers at precisely the right time."

Now given that prospects come into your database at all different times, wanting different info about different products, with differing levels of urgency. Doing this manually is downright impossible.

Marketing Automation at least give you a chance at doing this.

So, how did we implement it for us?

Firstly we needed to convince stakeholders to come along with us. That means explaining the concept, describing the realities that in order to grow we need to do different things and then using the powerful word 'pilot program'. Pilot programs are great, they seem less-risky even if they aren't and you are still betting the farm on them! But hey whatever helps get you over the line!

OK so we got internal stakeholder buy in, what next?

Resourcing. We didn't have the appropriate software or experienced expertise in-house nor the funding to purchase it, so we went with an external agency to consult with. In hindsight, I would definitely recommend bringing the expertise in internally if possible. Tertiary education is quite complex and you don't get that depth of content knowledge unless you live and breath it each day.

OK so we engaged an agency now what?

Audience identification. With over 200 product lines we couldn't afford to run an AM stream for each we eventually boiled it down to:

1. Canberra and regional NSW school leavers - a nice broad catchment, with set deadlines to act for uni and a degree of similarity.
2. People wishing to study education
3. People wishing to study nursing and midwifery
4. People wishing to study law and justice
5. Non-school leavers
6. International prospects in key territories

Having identified the targets we then mapped the various 'touchpoints' the number of times we would contact these people, where they were hard points (eg application deadlines, Open Day) or moving points (one day after signing up to our database please send them..., when they reach 100 points please do ...).

OK so onto the next step...

Lead Generation. No point having an ongoing discussion with nobody is there? We need to generate leads right? 

So we developed white papers - How to Ace Your Exams for instance for school leavers, that we advertised on Google and Facebook, people clicked, went to a landing page and in exchange for their personal details where able to download.

This is the education one...

http://info.canberra.edu.au/education/

The Year 12 one worked by far the best, it was the broadest audience and the whitepaper was the one that had the most timely value. Mind you with 5 weeks to go as of late November, the campaign has already met its target overall. Non School leavers was the hardest one to develop content for as this market was the most diverse. In future I recommend good quality persona research on this audience in order to develop better content. 

Alongside this was the next step - content creation. We invested heavily in this making videos about life on campus, videos about why regional students should move to Canberra, infographics about Canberra for International, writing up profiles of students doing exciting work as part of their studies etc, along with other more call to action type EDM's eg Open Day, Application deadlines etc.

I would argue we did OK with content, some if it was really high quality and engaging whereas others tended along the lines of more old school 'push marketing' just using snazzy software to deliver it.

We did learn however that much more successful was our new personalized ebrochures. http://canberra.easybrochurebuilder.com/?_ga=1.130089359.1083457024.1442287867 - we were originally going to treat this as a separate project but it was so successful that we rolled these leads into our MA project. 

Moving along we also schedule telephone call outs with our customer enquiries centre for key deadline periods.

At present the results are positive but we won't know for sure until March next year. 

Observations:

1. You really need internal staff and software to do the best job
2. You need to be well ahead of the game in terms of content preparation as if you fall behind it can be like chasing a roller coaster to catch up and quality can suffer as result.
3. Keep the value exchange for lead generation broad. The more niche you go the lower the returns for effort. Year 12's, Brochure downloads etc were a lot more successful than other types. Even better would be to frame the audiences used for MA around certain broad personas or archetypes and chase after those. So utilize research first.
4. Systems integration is important - we had a lot of challenges getting four separate systems to talk together. Things that can work with existing systems such as website CMS's, existing CRM"s etc are much better.

HOW IT WORKS FOR THE ARTS - Now I know many of my readers are still from the arts world - how can this work for you? Well one piece of marketing automation I always thought would work for arts ticket sales is trigger points. Imagine a ticketing system that knew your genre preferences and your buying patterns and so you could automatically trigger a direct EDM at that precise time - "Dear Ricky - we know you love Paul Kelly, just to let you know he arrives here in six weeks, we've taken the liberty of reserving a seat for you, to take advantage please click here...". 

Of how about the fact that the average attendee of the performing arts only attends each 18 months, imaging sending people a free $20 gift voucher at 18 months to get them into the habit of attending again. Most vouchers never get used but those that do convert will have been saved from slipping into non-attendee land.

There's so many ways this technology can be used.

Anyway that's my bluffer';s guide to my first experience delivering an MA project. If you have worked on one I'd love to here any comments and experiences you may have.

Market Research: some thoughts

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind. (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it) With that in mind (ha! geddit?) it makes me question what's really going on with a lot of market research especially in terms of when we wish to test marketing based concepts such as creative, new websites etc.

If most people have no idea why they are doing something surely the last thing we should do is ask them!

But it's not all bad,here's a list of market research that I think is incredibly useful:

1. Product research based on actual behavioral data. For instance it is entirely possible to determine the size of say the labor market for physiotherapists in this country thanks to census data. Once you have this, you can look at other published data around how many universities offer physiotherapist degrees and make an assessment as to whether your University should start up a degree like this.
2. Digital Research based on real life testing. Back in the old days of direct mail smart operators used to AB test their messages and offers, send out two different offers to a small cohort and then implement the best one for the full list. Digital marketing is like this BUT FOR EVERYTHING! Seriously you can roll out small changes to your website, monitor success and keep or chuck depending on result, you can do this daily if you want.
   
   The University of Canberra has an enquiry form, it used to convert at 4%, one change (the removal of the side menu bar) and it now sometimes converts at 40%! This was a small change, that cost nothing to implement and we were able to make the change base don people's actions.

Zaltman says you should always compare what people say with what the DO, and he's right. People SAY they watch Insight on SBS last night but they actually watched Gogglebox.

Now given that this is an Arts marketing blog, ticketed arts companies have access to one of the best forms of market research, the various nuances of people ticketing behavior, speed with which they buy different genres, cross-genre purchasing patterns, do people buy on star power or on company reputation, all of these things are empirically provable without needing to conduct market research.

Generally subjective market research is conducted for the wrong reasons, you have managers that lack knowledge or confidence in the insights they and their team have of the market, you exist in a culture of blame where mistakes are punished and so you seek to minimize or deflect that blame with research to support your decisions, or it could be that your organisation simply cannot afford for X initiative to be a costly failure. Or its a mandated KPI for board reports (urgh the WORST!)

I would say that none of these reasons is a good reason to conduct subjective market research, and by subjective I mean "which feature is more important to you", "Which designs is more attractive to you" type research. I WOULD say that in circumstances where empirical data is contradictory then research is a good way to seek to understand that contradiction.

At the leading edge of this form of research is brainwave responses. Some research says that when people see their favourite brands the same receptors go off in their brains that are triggered when they see family and friends. This sort of research, stuff that seeks to understand the subconscious has value for marketers as it becomes more established.

As always when thinking about market research I remember Henry Ford when asked about it... he said "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!"

He's right, research is great but nothing without vision, insight and leadership.

POST SCRIPT
I actually found some notes I made on this topic and whilst I covered most of it above some extra thoughts include; 

1. Be careful of those in the research and data industry - many have a self-interest in talking up the value of data and research, but without providing tools to give genuine insight.
2. Qualitative research around marketing and digital is good for reaffirming common sense where simply re-stating the common sense view is not enough to sway the decision.
3. research can be valuable as a circuit breaker when two views are dominant and their is a stale mate re the best way forward.
4. Trialing on your live market - note all the tech giants do this FB, Google etc they often roll out a feature to select users before rolling it out to all.
5. Maybe rather than invest in research perhaps invest in leadership and empower your leaders to to take 'leading' ideas to the market. Basically back your judgement.
6. One benefit of research is the process of conducting research itself, the process of defining the problem so it can be breifed into a research firm, teh process of getting everyone in the room to see a research presentation, these things are of value in and of itself.