Tag Management by Joe-Stanhope

Joe Stanhope from Forrester Research:  On Tag Management

Last week as we worked on Google AdWords and Analytics in class, we talked about 'auto-tagging' our results which brought up the subject of tags...what are tags?  Tags, simply put, are code 'snippets' that allow third party tracking, analysis and reporting.  Google Analytics and other web analytics programs such as Adobe Omniture.  Auto-tagging in AdWords allows you to tell which ad was clicked to get to your destination URL, even if you have more than one ad pointing to the URL.  As you can imagine, the whole process of attribution and analytics can be confusing.  

Enter tag mangement to help with these issues.   At the DAA (Digital Analytics Association) Symposium in Chicago last December, +Joe Stanhope of Forrester Research talked about tag management and tag management systems.   Before efficient tag management systems, it might have taken the organization eight weeks to change a tag relating to a particular marketing campaign and the campaign could easily be over by that time.

Tag management systems are more efficient in that users can often control their own data. Because technologies make tag management faster and more efficient  data can be analyzed more quickly and changes implemented (based on the resulting data) to optimize campaigns.  

There can be 35 to 50 tags on an e-commerce marketing page and it can take a long time to wait for internal IT or an outside web developer to make these changes. Joe said 90% of companies don't want to wait for these systems.

Companies can also benefit from these systems by auditing their pages and getting ride of tags that are not being used.  Joe mentioned that BrightTag is one tag management firm and Google has recently made their Google Tag Manager free and available to users.   According to Joe, tag management has a bright future and can be beneficial to organizations.  Enjoy this video in which Joe further describes the organizational benefits of tag management.  Joe has been a long-time member of our advisory board and a good friend to our program.  Keep up the good work keeping us informed.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Internet Marketing Impacts B2B

One of the most important and misunderstood areas of interactive marketing is the broad area of business-to-business Internet Marketing.  For example, Oracle estimates B2B ecommerce revenue is about one and a half times as large as business-to-consumer (B2C) revenue.  Yet the submissions to the journal I edit, The Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing are primarily studies involving business-to-consumer (B2C) issues.  It appears from what is being published in other journals that the situation is the same.  Practitioner sources are of ten the same, emphasizing B2C examples.

The B2B sales area is positioned to be transformed by Internet marketing in at least the following four areas, all of which would be candidates for further examination by both practitioners and academics:

      1) The search process.  Business customers, like most customers, are relying heavily on the internet when   making purchase decisions.  Business customers conduct searches, visit industry social media sites and blogs (increasingly on mobile applications), talk to their colleagues and have a lot of information at their fingertips when the salesperson arrives at the door.  I have tried to illustrate what is happening in the graphic above, which shows all the places the B2B customer can collect information before the salesperson arrives.  In fact, I have seen estimates that the salesperson might now be only involved in two percent of the sales process.  Certainly it is time to explore how we might redefine the B2B search process and to consider extending the concept of the buying center to beyond the limits of the firm.

      2) The role of the salesperson.  This trend toward collecting more and more information before the salesperson arrives diminishes the critical role of the salesperson as the provider of information but potentially increases his/her role as consultative advisor and service provider.  However, lead nurturing systems such as those provided by Marketo now make automated decisions and hand the lead off to the salesperson at the exact right moment to close the sale http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/11/08/death-of-the-salesman-marketo-is-automating-sales-relationships-and-growing-like-crazy/

The relative effectiveness of these automated and their impact on salesforce size and structure are issues that need to be discussed in industry.

3) The role of content marketing.  The role of content marketing is another under-researched area of business-to-business internet marketing.  B2B marketers tend to rely on presentation and downloading of content for nurturing relationships.  The suggestion is that effectively placed content on a web site can lead the prospect through the sales process, educating and answering questions along the way.  However, many questions need to be answered about content marketing, including what types of content are most effective in each stage of the customer lifecycle.  For example, the relative effectiveness of webinars versus whitepapers and which content is most effective in what context.

4) The role of social media.  Business-to-business marketers are successfully using social media but the role of these new media is also largely unexplored in academic research.  We know intuitively and from practitioner studies that Linkedin and Twitter are more likely to be useful in B2B contexts than Facebook but we need to understand why and in what context each type of social media marketing tool should be used.  What companies like IBM are doing with internal social networks could also be productive areas of study and replication.

I want to close by noting again that there are also a lot of opportunities for growth and research in the area of B2B internet and interactive Marketing and ecommerce beyond what we have time to mention here. 

Reference:

Oracle White Paper (2012), 2012 B2B E-Commerce Survey:  Results and Trends.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

"The Latest Wave" Internet Conference a Success

Approximately 130 marketing professionals participated in "The Latest Wave" in Internet Marketing at NIU's Naperville Center on April 19. Included in the group were about thirty students from the Interactive Marketing Program, most of whom will be graduating in several weeks with our certificate in Interactive Marketing or another specialization that prepares them for a career in search, data analytics, social, etc. Check out our interactive marketing program and see how you can benefit by hiring students and interns.

The Opening Plenary Session featured keynote speaker Ron Jacobs, President, Jacobs & Clevenger and Co-Author of Successful Direct Marketing Methods. Ron shared his insights on measurement and the merging of digital and Interacitve. Ron claimed that marketers are drowning in data and that in fact:

• 1 in 3 marketers make decisions without critical information
• 1 in 2 marketers don't  have the information they need to perform their job
• Knowledge workers spend 19 hours each week searching for information

Ron went on to talk about the benefits and weaknesses of Key Performance indicators and how to measure some of the newer media channels such as social and mobile.

The conference had a special track on social media and a general track with a B2B emphasis and topics such as search, analytics and mobile. We featured speakers from Dell, CDW, Walgreens and other leading Interactive Marketing practitioners. The conference web site is here for more information on The Latest Wave in Internet Marketing 2012.  Check out what happened by monitoring the Twitter feed at #niuinetconf.  There are some good comments and questions on that feed.

Over lunch, there were networking tables set up on various topics and facilitated by our board members. The picture above shows our students taking advantage of the networking opportunity provided by topics such as how to make the transition from school to work during the first year or how to successfully navigate through agency life.

Also over lunch, attendees could choose from a variety of hands-on workshops demonstrating the basics in Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and HTML. The best part is that these sessions were taught mostly by our current students, Jenny Yam, Tyler Miller and David Delaplane. Everyone seemed to get something out of the event and it was a successful day. I am sorry for those who could not attend.