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I recently came across this great post by Jonathan Block on the Sirius Decisions blog. He hits the nail on the head with his comments on maintaining the quality of marketing databases. Here’s what he says:

• Dirty databases abound despite significant efforts by demand creation executives.
• Most companies focus on trying to clean the entire database at once rather than fix the intelligence that matches the right contact with the right offering
• Database quality is a point in time and all data cleansing projects have an end date.
• The data is cleanest right before the next round of contacts are uploaded into the database.
• Distributed data systems are difficult to maintain and synchronize.

Very simply it’s about the process not the state of the system. No matter how many times you clean your database and bring it to a clean state, unless you create a clean process you will always find yourselves in the quagmire of unclean data. Here are some of his recommendations:

• Create a unified customer database. This helps to avoid integration and synchronization issues, lost responses, incorrectly routed leads, marketing redundancy amongst other issues and drives up the ROI for this activity.
• Couple that with a robust data quality strategy that facilitates segmenting and targeting. Implement best practices around what data points are acceptable (or enough) for your sales and marketing teams to do their jobs.
• In addition to data quality marketing operations personnel should co-own data maintenance along with field marketing and sales. A sales partner is necessary to ensure compliance from the sales side in both the marketing automation and CRM systems.
• Target “ideal” prospects based on macro criteria such as industry or sub-industry growth and maturity, behavior patterns, demographics and regulations. (This could be part of your buyer personas, more on that in a future post.) Putting this into practice helps prioritize contact discovery, account intelligence and maintenance efforts.

So if you implement good practices into your system processes you can avoid a majority of the data issues most organizations face. I will try to touch on some of these best practices such as minimizing collection points, moving records with incomplete data to a discard or holding pile, etc. in a future post.

Last week I was at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, California. Staring at the pylons of this architectural wonder I marveled how the span supported around 2 million car crossings per month!

There were 3 basic processes being supported here — vehicles traveling northbound, vehicles traveling southbound and the trolls collecting a toll. (I’m going to leave out the jumpers because I didn’t see any!) I could not help but think how this was a perfect analogy for Markitechture.

I’d like to think of Markitechture as this giant bridge supported by mighty pillars of technology with a span that helps support 3 fundamental requirements for marketing today:

1. Connecting people to people
2. Connecting people to information
3. Connecting information to information.

Process management is key to both businesses and people (the vehicles) achieving their respective goals. And these goals can be anything from conducting commerce to social networking. So if process management is the span of Markitechture, the four main supporting pillars would be: databases, applications, communications, and content. More on each of these pillars and process management in a future post. Time to go build. Bye for now!

Some of my friends have asked me what I plan to write about in my blog and others have cautioned me that my blog topic is very broad. Blogging is about finding a niche topic and writing about it. Technology driven marketing is a very broad topic and nowadays technology drives everything. True, true, true and true!

My answer to them at this time is that I’m trying to find my voice. Anyone who’s done a lot of writing will tell you that it takes a while to hone in on that kernel that you will love to write about and you can make your own. You can choose to write about something you love, or you can choose to write about something you are good at. And usually the two meet somewhere in the middle and blend to make your unique flavor.

I’m starting with a very broad topic because I love the macro level concept of technology and marketing coming together and I really cannot see marketing execution without some involvement of technology. Specifically, today internet technology has become the backbone of marketing. Perhaps in the near future I could focus on how mobile technology supports all of marketing if that comes to pass.

Beyond that I have several areas in marketing that I love or consider myself an expert like lead generation and analytics and I’m slowly coming up to speed with new media and social media marketing. Will I get more granular talking about interface design and architecture of web assets and how those help drive conversion? Most definitely. I will be focusing on all of these in my blog posts and along the way I will discover my voice.

Your writing voice is like a business model. Most startups go through a shifting business model till they find one that works and eventually sticks with their end users. At various stages of the business the model has to be adjusted according to market conditions, growing pains, etc. The same goes for writing or blogging. All you can do is keep at it till you find what works for yourself and sticks with your readers and adjust over time. And, it truly is as enjoyable as the thrill of the hunt!

I hope you all continue to keep me company on this journey of discovery.

The other day my four-month old son Vivek was wearing this cute outfit with 3 little figures running down the front. They were of a dog, a rabbit and a bear. Each of them had their choice meal at hand with a line underneath that respectively read: I like Bone, I like Carrot, and I like Fish. Now I’m really a dog person but when it comes to Vivek, I’m papa bear. So I decided that I like fish.

What struck me about that image was its reflection of the state of how consumers think of themselves today. Every person has their unique likes and preferences. I like webcasts but my friend Matt prefers to view PodCasts, I love my crackberry but my friend Kumar swears by his iPhone and so on! In fact people’s likes (and dislikes) are so specific, the latest research* is showing that marketers can double their leads by converting the same assets into multiple media types to feed this unique appetite. (* TechTarget ROI Summit 2008)

Us marketers have also adjusted accordingly by slicing and dicing our end user segments every which way and incorporating persuasion architecture and persona marketing to “convert” each of our archetypes. (The very simplest form of conversion meaning getting them to their destination of choice.) Along the way we can track implicit and explicit data points about these end users’ preferences that help us target them accordingly.

However, at the end of the day the effectiveness of our targeting is extremely dependent on the accuracy of these collected data points and our ability to get our end users to opt-in. Google Adwords and other search-based contextual advertising engines can at best target end users at the point of search. I would get relevant ads for “marketing automation platforms” only when I search for that or similar terms. Would it be useful for Google to know my likes and dislikes even before I start searching?

Perhaps but that’s not what a “generic” search engine is built to do. Imagine that 70% of my searches are related to marketing, would it not be more effective to serve up some semi-relevant contextual ads or show me my favorite searches before the fact? Of course this is a bogus scenario and Google does not require a login where they could tie my searches to my account. All I am doing is demonstrating that the effectiveness of search based contextual ad-serving is limited to the point of search or at best to relevancy and relevancy can still be pretty subjective.

I would like to interject here that Yahoo! did a smart thing by acquiring Del.icio.us. Daily I’m letting Yahoo! know explicitly the kinds of content I have an appetite for, i.e. whether I like bone or carrot or fish. I don’t use Yahoo! search or portal enough to notice that data being used effectively to target me. But at some level I.

Enter FaceBook, an opt-in community where members can explicitly highlight their likes, preferences and demographic information. And on top of that it is a monster of a viral marketing machine. I specifically wrote in my profile that I like the band Counting Crows, and I consistently see an ad for their new album when I login to my account. The relevancy of the targeting goes way beyond the point of search. Tomorrow if I update my musical tastes, I’ll no doubt get a sticky ad related to my explicit taste. And this is just from the end user’s perspective.

From the advertiser’s perspective, through the FaceBook engine they can in most cases with 100% accuracy ensure that they touch not only the relevant choice but also the most relevant demographic. That is the double whammy power of the FB engine. Amazon could be considered very similar in that it knows many of the kinds of the bones, carrots and fish that I am fond of and very effectively serves up that meal when I am on their site. However the viral aspect is mostly absent and honestly, I don’t mind. I actually prefer it that way.

Perhaps in the ecology of the web each of these engines have their own place in the food chain. I use Google to learn from scratch, FaceBook to learn and share with others and Amazon to buy anything I want. But at the end of the day the most efficient system is the one that knows what I like: Bone, Carrot or Fish and that’s where I see FaceBook as the most innovative marketing technology since Google AdWords.

It’s a wonder that Marketing did not start in the sciences! I would think that marketing is the epitome of cause and effect. You communicate a message, a benefit, a product’s function at large and your company would see a rise in inquiries, a bump in opportunities and hopefully a sizable blip in sales!

I guess back in the day it was not easy to measure the effect and tie it to specific causes, but as long as the results were directional one could accept with a level of confidence that the marketing worked. Today we have some many tools available to measure each marketing channel that one can easily take out the guess work from marketing. Additionally with the capability of making rapid changes on the internet Marketers can actually experiment with their programs to see which one gives the best desired effect.

A small example. Take something as simple as an email’s subject line. Randomly split your email list into two and send your message to your contacts with slightly different subject lines. This would test out a single variable, i.e. your email subject line. Want to test more? Send your two email messages out at different times of the day or on different days of the week. Additionally you can drive the respondents to different landing page variants.

In a very short span of time you can test out multiple variables and get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, i.e. figure out what causes the best outcome. The tools available to track all these results are so commonplace that over a series of 5-6 email tests you could have a very good idea of what part of your artwork is popular - which subject line works best, what time of day (or day of the week) is ideal for sending out emails and what landing page variant converts more responders to customers or leads.

With technology or the science of marketing we can take the guess work out of our campaigns. The other underlying phenomenon taking place is the wisdom of crowds. Instead of using a single person’s expertise or experience to determine our best practices, we take the responses from hundreds or thousands of respondents to improve our marketing. This is one of the powers behind social media marketing and it is used in various ways. More on this in future posts. Happy building!