by Karlene Lukovitz, Yesterday, 3:55 PM

Just 9% of 200 global marketers surveyed by the CMO Council report that their companies have a highly evolved, integrated marketing model with a clear, proven evolution path.

Instead, more than a third (36%) report that tactical or “point” solutions are “randomly embraced” and not well integrated, and 44% see their digital strategies as still being at an exploration level.

“Clearly, there are lots of pins without the right pincushion to ensure digital marketing initiatives have the right underlying strategy, architecture and technology infrastructure to meet management expectations,” sums up the Council’s executive director, Donovan Neale-May. Corporate management is by and large supportive of digital marketing. Forty-two percent of marketers reported that they have strong interest and active support at the line-of-business (LOB) level, 20% said they have a mandate and a budget to execute, and 18% said that this is an agenda item they have to address with their CEOs, CIOs and CFOs. However, 23% said that management is still trying to understand where digital marketing fits within their overall businesses.

Nearly two-thirds (63%) said that management’s interest in migrating to digital marketing is driven by its potential for increasing marketing performance and ROI through more efficient digital-media channels and better customer engagement. Half (49%) said management is also responding to customers’ growing preference for digital consumption and live, on-demand interaction with brands and companies.

Respondents reported that the digital marketing processes/functions that have the most appeal to management and LOB executives include:

*Customer data integration, analytics and personalization of market interactions (62%)

*Lead acquisition, conversion and customer upselling/cross-selling (60%)

*Web site performance improvement and richer engagement (61%)

*Behavior-based insight gathering for more effective segmentation and messaging (41%)

*Search marketing and online advertising (39%)

Little Collaboration with IT

One hindrance to integration: Just 26% of marketers are developing interdisciplinary task forces to lead the integration assessment process.

Furthermore, just 32% have teamed with internal IT to lead initiatives and specify needs and requirements. Instead, 59% report relying primarily on their own marketing teams to assess which digital marketing platforms, solutions and channels will provide the most value and business gain, and 51% source best-practices studies and analyst reports.

Fully 77% said they rely primarily on their marketing teams to evaluate and specify marketing technologies, followed by vendors/solution providers (46%), and their own IT departments (42%). And just 24% turn to IT to assist in making a business case for digital marketing investment.

Among those that identify themselves as being “high-performance, data-driven digital marketers,” however, 26% are developing a combined internal task force to create roadmaps and evaluate solutions, and many are including the customer in the process (customers’ engagement-channel preferences).

“Because there is no real barrier between the marketing and IT teams, we’ve modeled an architecture that fits our organizational size and makes it easier to deal with the complexities we face,” Markus Kramer, global marketing director for Aston Martin, comments in the report.

At SiriusXM Radio, Inc., director of database marketing and analytics Isaac Turk reports that business, finance, strategic analytics and IT teams collaborate on a business case based on estimates and benchmarks across cost-per-acquisition through ROI for a given campaign or program. Then, “if an area proves to be effective, management is willing to increase spending in that area until the marginal economics dictate otherwise.”

Most Effective Point Solutions

When it comes to tactical or point solutions, 67% of marketers report finding email marketing most effective, followed by Web site performance and interface solutions (52%) and paid and organic search (45%).

Top digital marketing challenges and difficulties include lack of budget and internal resources (50%), integrating internal and external customer data (43%), and deciding which marketing applications have the most value (29%).

The survey (one-third of respondents were from companies with revenues over $1 billion, and 22 were at the CMO or SVP-marketing level) was part of a six-month research program sponsored by digital marketing solutions consultancy Acceleration. The research results are summarized in a report, “Integrate to Accelerate Digital Marketing Value.” A summary can be downloaded free with registration; the full report is $199.

This article is adapted from “The Emergence of the Extra-Rational Manager” http://bit.ly/KRzHnt , by David Kiron, which appeared in the 5/31/12 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. All rights reserved.

By David Kiron | Executive Editor of MIT Sloan Management Review’s Innovation Hubs

Big Data is often associated with big numbers, but less often with a big picture. The basic question — How can increasing the quantity, velocity and variety of captured data really impact how people manage? — can go unanswered.

In the MIT Sloan Executive Education course Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Alex Pentland offer that big picture view of the economic, societal and managerial transformations that they see on the horizon.

At a recent session of the course, Brynjolfsson and Pentland argued that just as revolutions in science are preceded by revolutions in measurement, so, too, are revolutions in business preceded by revolutions in measurement. And indeed, big data today is enabling a measurement revolution within the business context.

(For the article in it’s entirety, please see http://bit.ly/KRzHnt)

MAY 29, 2012 | E Marketer Digital Intelligence

Mobile advertising is a springboard into mobile content offerings

The full report, “Mobile Business Professionals: Seeking Efficiency with Smartphones and Tablets,” also answers these key questions:

• How are business professionals using mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones for work?
• What should B2B marketers consider when optimizing their mobile experience to cater to busy business professionals?

This report is available to eMarketer corporate subscription clients only. Total Access clients, log in and view the report now.

Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009076

May 29, 2012 By Herman Mehling | Enterprise Apps Today

A recent Nucleus Research study shows that, in contrast to most enterprise software deployments, which yield an initially strong ROI that diminishes over time, companies gain a greater ROI as they broaden and deepen their use of analytics.

If you’ve had your doubts about the benefits of business analytics (business intelligence, product management and predictive analytics), a recent study from Nucleus Research might go a long way toward dispelling them. The research, titled “The Stages of an Analytic Enterprise,” shows enterprises attain an average ROI of 188 percent in the initial automation phase and an average of 1,209 percent in the later predictive phase.

Nucleus Research based its findings upon 58 case studies of companies in diverse industries leveraging analytics tools used over five years, said Hyoun Park, principal analyst at Nucleus Research.

Park said the research covered the gamut of small, midsize and large deployments of analytics software, and included companies using products from business intelligence giants like IBM, Oracle and SAS, as well as companies using products from second-tier vendors and startups.

“The more companies broaden and deepen their use of analytics, such as BI, PM and predictive analytics, the greater ROI they see — that’s the main take-away from our research,” he said.

This trend in analytics ROI stands in sharp contrast to that of most enterprise software, which typically shows an initial strong ROI that diminishes over time, Park noted.

Four Stages of Business Analytics

Nucleus identifies four stages of analytics deployment:

Automated Analytics. Enterprises at this stage use analytics primarily to automate report building. The report found these companies achieved benefits that include increased productivity for data analyzers and reduced workloads for IT departments. Data management capabilities at this stage typically include the construction of data warehouses and data cubes.

Tactical Analytics. Organizations at this stage have multiple analytics deployments and have begun using analytics to improve decision-making, rather than just increase productivity.

Tactical users expand their data management capabilities to include data migration, data integration and better data quality control, explained Park.

Nucleus found companies at this stage achieved an average ROI of 389 percent. Drivers of higher returns include the addition of new end-user groups and the addition of extra capabilities to existing deployments.

Strategic Analytics. Enterprises that use analytics strategically deploy technologies across most of their organization and use analytics to align daily operations with the goals of senior management, said Park.

Strategic analytics organizations typically use advanced data governance tools and practices. Generally, they also use metadata to ensure data is interpreted uniformly across their organizations.

Organizations at this level achieve higher returns on their investments in analytics — averaging 968 percent — because they use analytics pervasively. Typically, these organizations embed analytics capabilities into non-analytic processes and deploy enhancements such as competency centers and governance.

Predictive Analytics. Predictive analytics deployments achieve higher returns by tapping into what is commonly referred to as “Big Data,” data sources that are large, contain a broad variety of data sets and change rapidly.

Such deployments reach beyond the traditional limits of internal enterprise data to the Web, customers, vendors and partners. With an average ROI of 1,209 percent, organizations at this level achieve higher returns via projects such as Web-based customer sentiment tracking and demand forecasting. Another driver of higher returns is the use of non-proprietary data sources.

The Analytic Enterprise

In its analysis, Nucleus identified a special type of organization, the Analytic Enterprise, an organization that improves its competitiveness and operating results by continuously broadening and improving its use of analytics.

As organizations become more analytic, they go through a significant evolution, said Park. Employees’ work practices change as they increasingly embrace analytics as a way to make better decisions and incorporate more data into their analyses.

Decision-making improves as analytics is embedded into more processes and enables employees to base their conclusions on data rather than intuition, Park added.

Data management also changes as organizations acquire the capabilities to build assets such as data cubes and access a growing variety and volume of structured and unstructured data sources.

Big Returns from Big Data

In a separate report, “The Big Returns From Big Data,” Nucleus found organizations can earn an incremental ROI of 241 percent by using Big Data capabilities to examine large and complex data sets.

One major driver of high returns on Big Data is the ability to improve business processes and decisions by increasing the types of data that can be analyzed. The ability to monitor customer sentiment and other factors that impact a company — by scouring large external data sources such as social media sites – is another major driver.

Herman Mehling has been writing about technology for more than 25 years. He was an editor and reporter at Computer Reseller News and an executive at a number of PR agencies in the San Francisco area. Mehling has edited three books, including “How To Select A Vendor For Web Development” (written by Salim Lakhani). In addition to Enterprise Apps Today, he contributes regularly to DevX.com and Enterprise Networking Planet.

Source: http://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/business-intelligence/the-more-pervasive-business-analytics-roi-big-data.html