We hope you enjoy our blog posts - they demonstrate the way we think and work.
Where to Start When Tackling a Marketing Automation Project
What do I talk about when I talk about marketing automation? Marketing automation for Dummies. It's a truth universally acknowledged that, upon being asked about their objectives, a client will invariably answer "more revenues". Let’s not despair: it’s in the darkest hour that we are given the opportunity to rise and shine. THE GENERAL PICTURE I mentioned objectives because they are the starting point of any marketing automation project – in general, they should be the ‘why’ of most marketing campaigns (wouldn’t that be nice?). Defining and getting an agreement on them should be your main priority because everything depends on how you define success. But there’s something before that: an initial framework, a gestalt you can rely upon to build your whole automation…...
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THE GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION IN 2021
Even though it’s now been with us for three years (or five if you think about when we first knew the detail of it), I thought now would be a good time to provide a GDPR overview. Do you remember when we thought Y2K, the Millennium Bug, would cause planes to fall from the sky, power stations to meltdown, and computers to stop working? We were all convinced that when midnight passed on New Year’s Eve 1999, it would be Armageddon. How many of you thought the same as we got closer to 25th May 2018? How many of you...
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Software Procurement Process – the Winners Way
Those of us working in the sports industry know that rights owners often must operate with very lean teams – this is certainly true of national governing bodies, some international federations, clubs that sit lower down in their respective leagues, and any organisation in a niche sport. This often results in people doing more than one job or taking on tasks outside their traditional domain and, particularly when it comes to IT, you won’t find many rights owners that have Gartner’s recommended ratio of 5% of full-time employees as a percentage of total employees. This often leads to an absence...
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CRM trends that will be big for the sports industry in 2021
If you read my recent post about the history of CRM, you’ll know that I don’t like using the term CRM. This is because the acronym's meaning has evolved significantly since the mid-1990’s when it was first introduced as contact management software, to now, when we can use it to refer to the widest definition of digital transformation. But I’m not going to let that stop me writing a post about #sportsbiz CRM trends in 2021 – I’m just going to look at the different areas that, to me, represent the different ways we apply CRM today. More, more, and...
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Creating your Customer Personas – the right way and the wrong way
In case you missed it, the talented Tom Fishburne, under the brand name @marketoonist, released this as his “cartoon of the week”. It’s supported by a great article that introduces an approach to customer personas, “jobs-to-be-done”, credited to Clayton Christensen, a US academic and management consultant who unfortunately passed away earlier this year. This post isn’t about the principle of jobs-to-be-done – to be honest, I’d never even heard of it until last summer when I interviewed the brilliant Charlie Sung Shin for the second edition of my book - it’s about the different ways to create customer persons. (I’ll...
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History of CRM
If you’ve ever tried to track the history of CRM it’s not exactly a clear path – the vast number of definitions of the term is the issue because while we know the acronym stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, what that actually means has morphed over time. For example, Salesforce suggest that if you want to define CRM as a transaction between a seller and a buyer then you can go back 20,000 years to the first recorded example of a trade. Apparently volcanic glass that was great for making knives was traded between islands that had this valuable natural...
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How can Data-Driven Marketing Change the Way you Communicate?
In this short post we’ll look at why you need to use data change the way you communicate, how you use data and technology to achieve this, and three steps you need to take. When we refer to data-driven marketing we mean using data to “get the right message to the right person at the right time” or as Don Peppers, the globally recognised authority on marketing and business competition, succinctly stated “treating different customers differently”. This means securing, maintaining, analysing, and using your customer data, then actively segmenting it to enable better targeting and engagement with your customers. This need to ensure our marketing is customer-centric has...
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What does a Single Customer View mean?
I don’t mind admitting that when I first entered the world of data at the end of 2011, I didn’t quite understand the difference between a data warehouse and a single customer view (“SCV”), often using the references interchangeably. Fast forward nine years and not only do I know the difference between these two, I can also talk about data lakes, client data platforms (CDPs) and data management platforms (DMPs) – but let’s face it, if I couldn’t do that, you’d be wondering how I’ve been spending my last nine years, right? So what I’ve attempted to do below is...
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Use your Database to Improve your Digital Advertising ROI
It’s really easy when you’re busy at work, to forget about how you can improve the outcome of your task if you had access to something that’s sitting on someone else’s desk. We often work in silos, with our heads down, and do the things we’ve always done in the way we’ve always done them. This is a common and natural outcome specifically for businesses that were created BD as opposed to AD (that’s before data and after data. Some people might think it should be before digital and after digital, but for me, you don’t do digital without data.)...
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YES you can use an opt-out instead of an opt-in!
Those of you who know me, will also know that I’ve been on a bit of a crusade to dispel the many GDPR myths that are out there (you should email your database to ask them to opt-in, you have to ask for a third party opt-in to send your sponsor messages, you must get profiling consent to email in segments….the list goes on…..). But the reason for my soap box moment right now is not to contradict a message but to deliver one. As loudly as I possibly can. For some reason – and I don’t know what it...
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