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Jameson International Graduate Programme Dublin Role (Immediate Start)

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Jameson International Graduate Programm

Simmonscourt House, Simmonscourt Rd

The Jameson International Graduate Programme offers candidates the opportunity to work as a Jameson International Brand Ambassador in an international market. As a Jameson Brand Ambassador, you will kick start your career and hone your commercial instincts on a global stage, working for the world’s bestselling Irish whiskey brand abroad. For many it will be the first step on a lifelong journey within Pernod Ricard.

Following 4-weeks of training in our head office in Dublin, you will travel to a foreign market and work across a wide range of marketing activities such as brand activation, event planning, promotions, education, mentoring and sales & marketing. You’ll work with your foreign based Jameson team and off your own initiative, and be on first name terms with bartenders, distributors and event organisers.

Apply today!

There are five key areas to the role of Brand Ambassador:

  1. Brand Education
  2. Brand Activation
  3. Building Relationships with trade, consumers and key influencers
  4. PR/Event Support
  5. Supporting local Jameson Brand & Sales Team

Each market has its own challenges but you can expect the following to be on your ‘to do’ list:

  • Convert 25-35 year olds to the Jameson way of life through trial, market research and local media channels.
  • Help plan, strategize and initiate marketing opportunities to make Jameson a lifestyle choice for urban trendsetters the world over
  • Being a social media mogul, blogging and posting updates about your progress
  • Conduct tasting sessions with targeted consumer groups & influence the big players in the market, from the main distributors to barmen & loyal brand advocates
  • Support your local brand team in all their market activations
  • Research what the competitors are up to
  • Immerse yourself into the culture and be our ear to the ground.

With 90 Brand Ambassadors in 46 international markets from Spain to Belgium, China to Japan, our graduates live exciting, varied lives. Just check out a ‘Day in the Life’ of Jamie Rath, UCD graduate who spent his first 12-month rotation on our 3-year programme in Bangalore. His second rotation took him to the US, the biggest market for Jameson globally. Jamie is part of a team of 12 Brand Ambassadors based in the US. Here is a glimpse into Jamie’s #JamesonGradLife in Boston

To prove you have what it takes to be a Jameson Brand Ambassador you’ll also tick these boxes:

  • You have a full clean driver’s licence
  • You’re a creative and highly enthusiastic self-starter
  • You have strong business acumen
  • You’re independent, self-motivated and can work off your own initiative
  • You’re fluent in Russian
  • You have a strong desire and passion for brand marketing and sales
  • You’re outgoing, confident and an excellent communicator
  • You’re willing and able to adapt to new countries, cultures and situations
  • You have a positive, can do attitude
  • You’re a hard worker
  • You embody the Jameson personality traits of wit, charm and charisma
  • You’re driven to succeed

Last year 69% of our graduates moved to permanent post programme roles within Irish Distillers or the wider Pernod Ricard network globally. Some moved into marketing roles, others into sales roles, while others continued their journey as whiskey experts. Take a look at Hannah’s Jameson Career Journey below

The Perks:

From a competitive salary to top-class training & development, there are lots of perks on the Jameson International Graduate Programme. Take a look for yourself!

What We Offer?

The Jameson International Graduate Programme offers an initial 13-month contract; including one-month training in Irish Distillers Head Office, Ballsbridge, Dublin. For those who perform strongly over this period there is an option for a second and a third 12-month contract. You will receive a competitive graduate salary, a company phone and laptop as well as flights to and from your assigned market

The Jameson International Graduate Programme is unique; therefore, we look for exceptional candidates. Applications close at 1pm on Wednesday 17th so apply today!

Who Are Irish Distillers and Why Work for Us?

Irish Distillers is part of Pernod Ricard and oversee the production, marketing and distribution of a number of Pernod Ricard brands including Jameson.

As brand guardians for Jameson, the world’s bestselling Irish whiskey, we look after every stage of the process from our distilleries in Cork and Dublin to our marketing and strategic head office in Ballsbridge and our distribution network worldwide.

Over 500 enthusiastic, passionate and hardworking people make up Irish Distillers. We’re an eclectic bunch with many different talents from many different backgrounds and one unifying passion; our dedication to the brands of Pernod Ricard.

Why Work for Us?

Irish Distillers is an equal opportunities employer where all careers have the potential to reach to the very top of the Pernod Ricard Group. We pride ourselves on our exceptional career progression with many of our 500+ staff having started out on the Jameson Graduate Programme.

Click HERE to apply for this role.

 

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What creatives make of Gillette’s dividing ad on toxic masculinity

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By John McCarthy

For better or worse, Gillette has sparked a debate about the next generation of masculinity in light of the Me Too scandals with the launch of a US campaign called ‘we believe: the best men can be’. Its message, urging men to be better, divided viewers.

The 115-year-old Boston-based brand’s latest work, directed by Kim Gehrig of This Girl Can fame, found life on social media and crossed the Atlantic, in no part thanks to TV presenter Piers Morgan’s tweet complaining about Gillette’s foray into feminism.

The ad from Grey New York has sparked boycotts and plaudits by asking men to assess their impact on society. The work took umbrage with the expression ‘boys will be boys’ and challenged men to be their best in light of the #MeToo controversies. It also marked the 30th anniversary of Gillette’s ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ strapline which debuted during the 1983 Super Bowl.

On launch, Gary Coombe, president of P&G Global Grooming, said: “By holding each other accountable, eliminating excuses for bad behaviour, and supporting a new generation working toward their personal ‘best,’ we can help create positive change that will matter for years to come.”

Combe believed the brand has a legitimate right to speak on the subject as the “world’s largest marketer to men”. The razor and grooming brand also said it is donating $1m annually to for the next three years to US non-profits who also follow its values. This includes the Boys and Girls clubs of America.

Here’s how the ad industry felt about the ad, much like the public, the commentators are divided.

Sairah Ashman, global chief executive at Wolff Olins

Gillette has ruffled feathers with its newest ad, and the move was a risk for the brand. It’s calling out customers who associate with the version of masculinity it presents, and probably offending others who don’t identify with it.

Many question the company’s right to do this, given it isn’t typically associated with feminism or anti-bullying. Still, this mainstream buy-in to a contemporary understanding of male identity represents a significant step forward in our culture. If Gillette is willing to lose customers over its views (which it might, given that dislikes on YouTube far outweigh likes), that’s got to be applauded. Gillette is facing serious competition from the likes of Dollar Shave Club, aligning with a popular – if controversial – cause makes sense from a business perspective. Another point to consider is the economic power of women.

In the States alone, more than half of the population is female. Women are responsible for more than $39tn, meaning they control 30% of the world’s wealth and the majority of its shopping trollies. What happens in a world where women starting judging men on their blade choices – could it make a difference at the tills? In Amazon’s world, and with the rising power of direct to consumer brands, Gillette has taken a punt that the interest from those who wish to align with the anti-toxicity message will outweigh boycotting.

The need to differentiate is clear, while the success of Nike shows that social causes can drive sales. Gillette has pledged to actively challenge male stereotypes in the future by investing in relevant causes. I hope they put their money where their mouth is

Dan Cullen-Shute, chief executive and co-founder of Creature (who recently deconstructed the British Army’s snowflake ad)

Jesus fucking Christ. I mean. Where do I start with that? I’ve got to be honest, haven’t I? I think this is rubbish. I hate it. Overblown tripe, dripping with self-importance. In years to come, when professors are giving lectures on ‘Why Brand Purpose Died’, this is Fonzie on a motorcycle waving at a shark. Most people think Gillette’s endline just means that their razors are really good, and yet now, here they are, ready to save the world.

See, I admire the ambition. And I’m on their side. I want my son to grow up not to be an arsehole. I like, as a general rule, anything that provokes an exaggerated spit-take from the bulging-vein political-correctness-gone-mad brigade. My enemies’ enemies are my friends and all that. But sometimes – just sometimes – my enemies’ enemies get a bit carried away, and make a bit of a tit of themselves. My main problem, I think, with my professional head firmly on, is that I don’t really see what right – beyond an apparently widely misunderstood endline – Gillette has to be in this conversation. When Lynx pivoted, it made sense: it had built a brand on objectifying women, so they had something to push against.

Gillette has built a brand on mirror-men with unnaturally smooth faces rubbing their chins. There’s not a gap between that and the world of toxic-masculinity, there’s a fucking chasm: and, as wide as I’ve cast my net, I can’t find the interview where Tarana Burke talks about how she really hopes #MeToo can be used to sell loads of triple-blade razors with really macho names one day. So, yeah. Eesh. In some, small ways, good on ‘em: if you’re pissing off the right people, you must be doing something right. Unfortunately, however good their intentions, they’re also doing significantly more wrong.”

Tom Goodwin, executive vice president of Innovation at Zenith

For a long time, I think the world of advertising has lost its boldness, its thirst for risk, its desire to be part of real global conversations. Adland was once part of culture, it got people talking, it both reflected and shaped the zeitgeist.

Branding needs to be risky, we need to define ourselves by who we don’t speak to as well as who we do. Whether it’s the right time for Gillette to step in, whether it’s a cynical ploy to hijack a movement, whether brands need to interfere with incredibly important but intimate movements are all good questions for us to debate and I as yet don’t know my own views on them. Time will tell, people will talk. And that in itself is a great sign of work that is ambitious and we need that more than ever.

Adam Mack, UK chief executive of W Comms London

As a father of two young boys, I always feel like I’m walking a tightrope between toughening them up for the world that we currently live in and ensuring that they have the emotional IQ to change that world for the better. So from my perspective, the more brands that invest time, money and effort to help us all navigate this (complex conundrum) the better.

Furthermore, our work with Calm has shown us just how fragile male mental health is at the moment and anything which tackles the causes at an early age is very welcome. I see that Piers (Morgan) has weighed in already, which means two things. The issue will have the attention it deserves, but that attention will be divisive.

As with most things of complexity, the solution usually lies between two camps so it might be worth engaging the Piers camp in constructive dialogue rather than treating it with the usual yappy disdain. Finally, a few words on Gillette: I really hope it doesn’t go down the usual route of just distributing this global content willy-nilly. As good as the film is (and as good as the campaign’s intentions are), the UK is quite a nuanced market and they’d be missing a trick if they didn’t adapt it better to UK hearts and minds”.

JP Hanson, chief executive at strategic consultancy Rouser

At first glance, the campaign comes across as yet another brand taking an official stand. Yet Gillette isn’t really, because there is no contrary position. No brand in its right mind would promote sexism or bullying. Clearly, the zeitgeist has (long overdue) changed post #MeToo, as the ad also states, but that means it becomes reactive rather than proactive and ultimately somewhat condescending, particularly towards the brave women who fought further back in history.

Then again, Gillette remains perfectly happy telling women that they’re not perfect unless they remove their body hair. In the grand scheme of things though, it will likely neither help nor hurt the brand to any meaningful degree. Of course, there will be a few small-penised men threatened by an updated view of masculinity or the empowerment of women crying on internet forums, but most Gillette customers will inevitably buy the brand once every two years or so. For them, at the point of purchase, this won’t even make the mental radar. A

Sophie Lewis, chief strategy officer at VMLY&R

I am very happy that Gillette has made this piece of communication. Not because it’s any good, but because I have been waiting to see how brands will approach masculinity in the current gender-political climate and it’s a great way to learn what not to do.

And to be fair, I reckon at the brief stage it had all the right intentions. In fact, at the production stage, it was probably just about hanging together, thanks to Kim Gehrig!

But the truth is that Gillette should have raised the debate and the questions, and not tried to answer the question or fix the problem themselves. In terms of execution, it gets itself in all sorts of bother with regard to male stereotypes and definitions. What’s wrong with a man who barbecues?

The bits I like are, of course, the bits which were not shot by Kim nor written by a creative in an agency. They are the TV coverage of sexual harassment stories and Terry Crews. They are the bits showing the extent of the problem. The rest is questionable. The execution leaves something to be desired and, if you think about it, was it really necessary to shoot new examples of men treating women inappropriately, when so many exist in the world already?

But, like I say, well done for opening this can of worms, Gillette. Bring it on.

And finally, here are a few choice tweets outlining the public’s reaction to the work.

Social analytics data from Meltwater measured the effectiveness and impact of the campaign found that the work had accrued 284,452 mentions on social media. The main keywords were ‘bad behaviour, stadium, razors, women, boys, toxic masculinity, and good’. Audience gender breakdown was 70% men and 30% women, and the lead markets were the USA, UK, Canada.

 

By John McCarthy

Sourced from The Drum

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Ad blocking is still a ‘substantial threat to publisher revenue streams’

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By Lucinda Southern

Ad blocking, which caused mild hysteria in 2016, no longer grabs as many headlines but is still a substantial threat on a publisher’s bottom line, encouraging companies to diversify revenue sources and collaborate across the industry.

Multiple studies show the growth of ad blocking on desktop has steadied while the number of blocked impressions on mobile is growing, although slowly. Partly this growth is due to the number of ad impressions served on mobile growing as traffic migrates this way, but there are also new ad blocking entrants in the mobile market.

“It definitely feels to me that ad blocking took a back seat in terms of publisher priorities last year, due to the impact of GDPR, but it shouldn’t be forgotten,” said Nick Flood, managing director of digital at Dennis. “This threat certainly won’t be going away.”

What ad blocking has thrown into stark relief is the need for publishers to spread their bets. Future Publishing hit peak ad block concern in November 2017 when 54 percent of desktop impressions on its gaming sites were blocked, according to Zack Sullivan, chief revenue officer at the publisher.

“That was part of what pushed us into e-commerce — ad blocking was the stimulus for it — how to offer alternative means of monetizing audiences to fund journalism,” he said. Last year, Future said commerce revenue exceeds display ad revenue on its tech site T3.

Now, rates across Future’s portfolio have stabled to between 7 percent and 11 percent on desktop. Mobile is showing slow growth of 1 percent up to 7 percent, he added. The most effective way of getting people to interact with Future’s ad-block messages was by offering as many options as possible — such as whitelisting the site, disabling the ad blocker, becoming a member or viewing a video ad — with the messages written by the editors in the style of the site.

“The hysteria around ad blocking has subsided a little, but the problem is still there,” said Brian Kane, co-founder and COO at Sourcepoint. “The most successful strategy involves engagement of the consumer, offering choices; that’s the most respectful option.”

Gaming sites have always been ad-blocking magnets, where audiences are more savvy about technical workarounds. One company that offers publishers ad-block solutions said that it has seen mobile ad-block rates rise from 6 percent to 10 percent in a year on a gaming site, which the company didn’t want to name. By comparison, non-gaming sites see mobile ad-block rates hover at around 2 percent.

For French news publisher Le Monde, ad blocking on desktop is stable at 25 percent, but mobile, 15 percent, is growing. But rather than reduce this, the publisher is focusing on driving reader revenue instead. “[Ad blocking] used to be the main priority two years ago; now we have one word: subscriptions,” said Pierre Buffet, head of digital at the publisher. “We have a more narrow scope, and we don’t want to lose energy trying to get people to turn off an ad blocker.”

However, Buffet believes these figures to be lower than the reality since ad blockers are blocking the publisher’s tracking scripts, and it’s highlighted another problem in untraceable traffic. “My concern is more about this ‘ghost’ traffic, which is clearly on a structural upward trend.” Increasing concerns over privacy from high-profile media cases, like Cambridge Analytica, are partly to blame. Just how much traffic and revenue are lost is hard to prove; in the coming months Le Monde plans to recover this traffic through working with its web analytics partners, AT Internet, and recover between 5 and 15 percent of pageviews

Ad blocking conversations have broadened out to be part of the wider discourse around ad quality and data privacy. Publishers like Dennis have integrated ad-block messaging into their GDPR consent management platforms. More focus on industrywide problems has led to closer collaborations. “Ad-block solutions companies are making louder noises to being publisher partners, rather than creating solutions that say this will have an impact on the bottom line,” said Richard Reeves, managing director of the Association of Online Publishers.

Despite the industry’s best efforts — last week, the Coalition for Better Ads announced last week it will adopt ad standards globally, and Google Chrome’s ad filter will be expanding globally July 9 — collectively millions in annual revenue is still being lost by U.K. publishers as a result of ad blocking, according to research from the Association of Online Publishers, which counts members including Condé Nast, ESI Media, Global, the Guardian and The Telegraph.

Partly, this is because ad blocking is a blunt tool. All publishers will get punished for bad actors, and there will always be cases of bad actors: Google has only needed to filter 1 percent of the millions of sites it has reviewed, but that ripple effect is vast.

Still, Google’s size has helped move the industry forward, said Sullivan. Google recognizes why publishers are suspicious of its motivations, but publishers are hungry for more details that the company isn’t able to share yet, such as about how it will work in practice and how it will impact the wider industry.

“Everyone gets it when you have that conversation [on ad standards], brands, agencies, SSPs, DSPs,” he said. “It’s been industrywide, but Google can help implement and police it; that’s their big gift to the industry.”

By Lucinda Southern

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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As Trust Among Consumers Wavers, Authenticity is Critical

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By  Michael Fertik

Facebook might be under fire for questionable data management practices, but that doesn’t mean businesses should shy away from social media as a means of connecting with customers.

In fact, high-profile breaches of consumer trust have lead to a call for authenticity, and businesses who fail to connect on social media and through other digital methods will miss the opportunity to demonstrate authenticity and earn consumer loyalty.

Why is consumer trust at an all-time low? Well, the ongoing deluge of scandals involving misuse of consumers’ personal data has had a devastating effect. For example, Facebook’s rocky year ended with a harsh New York Times expose, revealing that the company sold out even more user data than previously thought to a whole bunch of companies — including Netflix and Spotify, who supposedly can now read your private messages.

Facebook isn’t alone in defending its data security policies — during the first half of 2018,  3.2 billion consumer files were compromised worldwide. Yet even as consumer fears around privacy invasion grow, (last year, for example, Pew Research found roughly half of Americans don’t trust the government or social media sites to protect their data) we continue to rely on social media platforms for information about what products and services to buy.

Oh, the Irony!

So, here we are. Consumers don’t trust the government or social media, but they rely on review sites and social media giants like Facebook for information to guide their purchasing decisions. Case in point: Facebook continues to add more active users, and many think the #deletefacebook movement is self-defeating — the # itself connotes the idea of social media channels aggregating data for our perusal.

It’s up to businesses to figure out how to be seen as trustworthy using an inherently untrustworthy marketing medium. In this contradictory environment, how do businesses fare well? Provide exceptional service. Hold yourself accountable. Be authentic.

What Consumers Really Want

Reputation.com’s 2018 Retail Reputation Report uncovered powerful, actionable insights into what retail customers really want — staff competence and friendliness, short wait times and product value all play significant roles in swaying customer sentiment. All of these things are reflected in online reviews and social commentary, and contribute to a business’s overall Reputation Score — the sum of all your efforts to optimize your online presence.

Our report lists the winners, with Lego at the top, along with Trader Joe’s and (you guessed it) Nordstrom. And we found that a high Reputation Score correlates with a 3.9% boost in sales.

But brands should be careful not to overlook another important factor that goes a long way in earning consumer trust — authenticity. Eighty-six percent of people say authenticity matters when deciding what brands they like and support. To win the hearts and business of your target customers, you have to convince them you are trustworthy and authentic.

Being authentic means being accountable and upholding your brand promise. It requires transparency and a dash of vulnerability. When a brand is authentic, consumers know it, appreciate it and prioritize their spending accordingly.

Think about it. What are people looking for when they have a bad experience at a store, or when a service they access online is temporarily unavailable. Usually an apology combined with a concerted effort to right the wrong — in other words, being authentic —  will quell a consumer’s anger and resentment. And, it can keep bad reviews or negative posts from spiraling out of control.

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index found that the way an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on brand loyalty than any other factor. Elite brands provided an average of 22 emotionally positive experiences for each negative experience.

When it comes down to it, we’re all human. We respond to being treated well. We reject what’s fake or dishonest, and we are drawn to authenticity. It seems so easy, yet for many brands, it’s difficult to accomplish.

Here are some simple ways to build the authenticity your audience is looking for

  • Listen and respond to your customers publicly online. Responding to a critique or complaint online is more critical than ever — 54% of consumers expect a response in less than 60 minutes. And Gartner found that not answering customers on social channels can lead to a 15% increase in the churn rate for existing customers. Make sure you have processes and the right technology in place to monitor all your social media and review sites continuously, and set up alerts to notify you when reviews come in, so you can respond right away.
  • Address complaints and take action to correct issues. The content in reviews and social commentary contains clues to a better customer experience — but you’ll never know they’re there if you don’t leverage technology to collect and analyze the text. That’s what AI-based solutions can do. They pull in content from all over the web, apply machine learning and uncover all kinds of useful information, like where your locations can improve. Having this information on-hand can help you optimize the customer experience (and also boost profits).
  • Share authentic user-generated online content, from reviews, social media and surveys. Lean on your advocates to tell your story. In the customer’s mind, they are way more credible and trustworthy than you are.
  • Own up to mistakes: If there’s one thing we’ve learned from recent reputation management failures — think United Airlines and Starbucks — it’s this: Honesty and humility earn points with consumers. Be authentic in your ability to admit you screwed up, and do better next time.

Feature Image Credit: Getty images

By  Michael Fertik

I’m the Founder and Chairman of Reputation.com. I started my business because digital privacy, Big Data and online reputation are issues that impact everyone from individuals to massive corporations. People should be the center of the Internet machine – not cogs in its wheel. More empowerment online, not less, not what we have now. Follow me @michaelfertik.

Sourced from Forbes

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Four Ways Social Impact Will Affect Businesses In 2019

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By  Patsy Doerr

Major headlines from 2018 – like the rise of the #MeToo Movement, California’s legislation to increase the number of women on boards and the Weinstein Clause – have forced leading companies and their management to evaluate their current practices and their social impact efforts in an effort to avoid drawing negative attention and set themselves up for long-term success. Over the past year, companies have had to take a hard look at their culture and values and determine whether or not those values are reflected in their day-to-day operations. They’ve done this in order to not only get ahead of potential conflict (in an environment where knee-jerk reaction has become the norm), but to put a stake in the ground and become a leader in the areas that they say they care most about. This change in behaviour and the way we do business will continue to take shape into 2019. Below are some of my predictions for what’s in store and how companies can stay ahead of the fray.

Companies Will Be Forced To Embrace Social Impact – Or Fall Behind

For many years, companies viewed investing in social impact as “icing on the cake,” instead of as a must-do for their business – but that’s all changing. While even five years ago, companies were still somewhat slow to integrate social impact into their day-to-day activities and long-term strategies, over the past few years, the rallying cry behind these issues has been growing rapidly. In 2019, it will no longer be a choice for companies to embed social impact into their business and brand strategies – it’ll be imperative. More and more studies are showing that the newest wave of potential talent heavily weigh the values and culture of a company that they may end up working for, and therefore companies will need to make this investment in order to recruit and retain the best talent available. As well, embracing social impact is key to engaging a growing number of customers and investors who care deeply about these issues. In an increasingly competitive business world, customers have countless options for almost any service or product you could imagine – and research shows that many will choose to buy from the companies whose values they most align with.

Social Pressure Will Encourage Companies To Speak Up

In 2018, we saw a number of business leaders and companies take public stands when it came to political and social issues, and in doing utilized a powerful tool for engaging customers and inspiring brand loyalty – a trend we can expect to continue. For example, at the Makers Conference in February, we saw executives from 40 companies including Mattel, Adobe and Microsoft, pledge publicly to make changes to help women progress in their workforces. We also saw marketing campaigns around social issues like Nike’s partnership with Colin Kaepernick, and companies with long-standing POVs on environmental issues, like Patagonia, lean even further into their brand values. Company founders and CEOs are increasingly being turned to as thought leaders and activists with the influence and capital means to incite true social change. Now more than ever, companies and their leaders are expected to take a stance on major political and social issues. Therefore, company voices will get louder and stronger in 2019 due to increased social pressures, an increase in the transparency of company practices demanded by consumers and the growing attention to the current geopolitical environment.

Social Impact Goals And Metrics Will Be More Transparent

The difficulty of measuring social impact and the lack of transparency around it have been two of the key criticisms that have come about in terms of the long-term importance of investing in these initiatives. Many detractors have pointed to the lack of metrics as a reason to doubt the business case of social impact and environment, social and governance. But in reality, the lack of metrics is to be expected with any new initiative that hasn’t yet had the time and opportunity to be proven out. It takes a number of steps in order to get to that point: you must determine the key measurements to track, put in place mechanisms and processes to track them, begin collecting and analysing the data, and then you will have metrics to work from. This has been an ongoing process for many companies to date and those metrics and findings are only now starting to be reported back via annual reports like Thomson Reuters’ Diversity & Inclusion Index, PwC’s Global Inclusion Index, The Dow Jones’ Sustainability Index, and other such reports. I believe that in 2019, there will be increased transparency around social impact metrics and targets both within organizations and outside of them, and sustainable development goals (like those outlined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals guidelines) will be utilized much more consistently as a framework for developing and measuring social impact initiatives.

Impact Will Increase Exponentially

As a result of the above shifts, I believe that social impact driven by business investment and leadership will increase exponentially beginning in 2019 and continue well into the future – particularly with regard to gender parity, which is one of the first areas that you’re seeing most companies who are making efforts in social impact to be investing in and setting goals for. With the rise of the #MeToo movement and increased discussion of pay equality, the need to rapidly move the needle is this area is certainly understandable, and companies should be lauded for making efforts towards levelling the playing field. As those goals are set, strategies for achieving those goals are put in place (including more formalized training and internal policies), and as results begin to come in, we’ll see companies begin to better focus on the employee lifecycle and instead of putting out fires, create more sustainable career tracks that empower and promote existing talent.

Photo Image Credit: Interest in Social Impact Continues to Grow. Photo Credit: GettyGetty

By  Patsy Doerr

Patsy Doerr is a leading expert and thought leader in the field of corporate social responsibility, diversity and inclusion and sustainability. Her greatest passion is helping large organizations build and develop initiatives that best position them for long-term success in a diverse, global environment. Patsy’s experience includes driving these efforts in social impact, talent, learning, organizational development, diversity and inclusion, and client engagement primarily, but not limited to, financial services.

Sourced from Forbes

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How the Financial Times is building brand loyalty among young readers

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By  Jessica Davies

For subscriptions publishers like the Financial Times, cultivating regular reading habits with younger generations is essential to securing future paid customers. That’s why the publisher has established a long-term program to get school kids and teachers regularly reading FT content.

The program has been designed to help students contextualize their school curriculum with relevant news articles written by FT journalists. The publisher lifts the paywall with participating schools and students and students can create their own online and mobile accounts. Those that do are sent weekly email newsletters, curated by the FT’s global education editor, Andrew Jack. These feature links to stories that are relevant to their specific fields, whether it be economics, the environment or politics.

In doing so, the hope is that 16- to 19-year-old students can more easily contextualize fact-heavy text-book information by reading relevant, real-life, contemporary examples of world and businesses news.

“Historically, the FT has been perceived as [having] an older audience already in working life or advanced education,” said Jack. “But this is important in terms of thinking about our future readers, and with the wider debate around fake news and poor quality information so readily available, we feel providing high-quality information to that next generation is very important.”

The program, which began in the U.K. in 2017, has rolled out to 2,300 schools globally. While around 75 percent of those schools are in the U.K., there are around 100 involved in the U.S. and other schools are participating in countries where English is a second language, like China. This is where the FT’s development of audio text articles has come in handy because students learning English can hear how the article sounds, added Jack.

More than a million FT pages have been accessed by students and teachers in the program over the last year and 34,000 individual accounts created, according to the publisher.

“The FT, like other publishers with older readerships, worries that the next generation will not grow into reading their types of news,” said Nic Newman, senior research associate for Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “So most of these types of initiatives are about establishing the brand and the value early on with the hope that they will continue to identify with the brand as they move into the world of work.”

To ensure students make the most of the program, the FT has cultivated relationships with the teachers. The publisher sends a weekly email newsletter to 20,000 individual teachers who have signed up. Typically, there will be five different subject fields covered in the newsletter, spanning economics, politics, global affairs and culture.

“We have built a network of teacher curators,” added Jack. “They know what is useful and what resonates; they contact me with articles they want shared.” The publisher has started adding two to three question suggestions to accompany articles sent in the newsletter as lesson-planning aids.

To appeal directly to students, the FT runs multiple-choice quizzes and three writing competitions. The quizzes test students on the biggest news stories of the year, published by the FT, across a range of subjects.

The publisher has partnered with credible institutions for the competitions, including the Bank of England, Chatham House and World Bank. The partners don’t pay, but they do offer tickets to major annual events they hold to the winners. Competition challenges have asked students to describe the future of money or to write about what their first priority would be if they were appointed United Nations secretary. The winner gets their article published on FT.com as well as the website of the partner institution.

The FT has a stable subscriptions business with 985,000 print and digital paying subscribers. But to sustain and grow that, the publisher must cultivate loyalty among younger generations, for whom the current paywall is prohibitive. “By engaging with the younger generations, introducing them to the brand from a young age, creating the habit and building up the longer-term relationship The Financial Times will look to coach the individuals through their life cycle and eventually migrate them up to being fully paid subscribers,” said Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultancy Simon-Kucher & Partners.

The FT also wants to do more to engage younger people with its video coverage in 2019, though it wouldn’t reveal details. So far it has run a short-form video competition, but wants to develop more ways to get young people viewing its video, added Jack.

“It’s vitally important for the FT to engage with new audiences at all points on the age spectrum, but particularly at the younger end,” said Jon Slade, group chief commercial officer at the FT. “We think the FT provides a really important, helpful tool to help young people navigate the world they live in, and help with their studies. And we hope in doing that we are also building the paying reader of the future.”

By  Jessica Davies

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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How to Create Amazing Remarketing Funnels: 5 Tips You Need to Know

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By Christi Olson

In my opinion, every single paid search campaign should be a remarketing campaign.

Gasp, I said it.

Should, not could.

Should, because if you have a remarketing strategy using “Target and Bid” audiences with both positive and negative audience bid modifiers you can shape your remarketing strategy to drive traffic across the decision journey.

Now, let me take a break here, because that was a mouthful – and over the remainder of the article I’m going to unpack what this means and five tips that will help you do this.

The variety of remarketing tactics available within paid search today are growing from the remarketing list in search ads (RLSA), to customer match, custom audiences, similar audiences, like audiences all the way to in-market audiences.

In order to take advantage of most remarketing tactics, you need to have tracking set up.

  • Google Ads: You either need Google Analytics or the Google remarketing tag implemented.
  • Bing Ads: You need to have Universal Event Tracking (UET) set up for your account. UET tracks conversion goals and target audiences with remarketing lists.

Once a customer has engaged with your website in one way, shape, or form, you can use a remarketing campaign to make sure that you’re messaging correctly, because the average consumer engagement is going to involve more than one touch before they actually make the purchase.

Use that space between in a strategic way to guide targeted customer segments in the right direction – all you have to do is capture the data.

The power behind remarketing is the ability to overlay audience data on top of search campaigns and the targeting capabilities that come with it.

Using “bid & target: option for audiences allows you to overlay your audience data on to your search campaigns, and adjust everything from keywords, to ad copy, to landing pages, to your bid strategy based on the user data and intent.

Why You Need to Understand Your Funnels to Create Great Remarketing Campaigns

Before I dig into the tactical steps behind creating a remarketing funnel, here’s an example that characterizes what remarketing is and how it can be used to drive a customer’s purchase cycle.

Let’s say you are an online retailer selling tickets for sporting events. I go to your website looking to purchase tickets to a Seattle Seahawks game.

I go through various pages on your website, looking at different games, availability of seats, and even add a set of tickets to my cart for a game, but before completing the transaction I pull the plug –  no sale.

Based on my time spent on your site, you can pull different bits of information and use that to continue to reach me as I continue my shopping journey across the web.

You already know I had some level of purchase intent, so the next time I’m online searching for Seahawks tickets or tickets to an upcoming event, you could go back and remarket that exact game and seats I added to your cart, using the game day details, ticket prices, seats, etc. to make a very targeted ad, specific to me.

5 Tips to Create Amazing Remarketing Campaigns & Funnels

1. Understand & Optimize the Time Constraints Related to Consumer Purchase Cycles Then Adjust Your Membership Duration Accordingly

When you create a remarketing list, you’re allowed to set a membership duration timeframe (or look back window) for how long a person’s cookie remains in your marketing list.

Many marketers leave this set at the default setting of 30 days; however, marketers who are using search for demand generation will create lists with unique look back windows based on the purchase or lead gen cycle.

Here are a few ideas to consider with setting the remarketing window:

  • For awareness and brand campaigns, I typically recommend setting a longer look back window.
  • For ecommerce and lead gen campaigns, I typically recommend setting the look back window to 10-20 percent beyond the time frame of the average purchase cycle, to include those who may take a little longer to make their purchase.
  • For campaigns related to products and services that are perishable (like travel, entertainment, tickets, etc.), you’ll still want to use purchase window tied to the expiration date.

For instance, let’s go back to the Seahawks game.

I know the date of the game (let’s say it’s on December 30) so I know that any tickets I don’t sell by 1 p.m. PT on December 30 are perishable. If today is December 1, I would set my membership duration to 29 days.

If you don’t know the specifics about your purchase cycle to understand what timeframe to set your membership duration, get insights from your analytics account.

In Google Analytics, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels, then Select Time Lag. This report shows how many conversions resulted from purchase paths by number of days in length. 

2. Create Multiple Audiences & Remarketing Lists Based on the Purchase Journey & User Behaviors/Actions

Here, it’s important to really understand the steps of your purchase journey and cycle. Based on those steps and stages, create unique audience lists.

I like to create a purchase journey map where I document:

  • What the step of the journey is.
  • How I’m tracking that specific step.
  • The list name.
  • My thought process for the different ways I am thinking about using that specific list.

For the Seahawks ticket example – I can create lists specific to the Seahawks, or their opponent, or CenturyLink Stadium, or potentially to each individual game date so long as that information is passed through the URL string.

Here are a few of the different types of remarketing lists I may create the following types of lists:

  • Visited Website
  • Visited the ticket page for Football
  • Visited the Seahawks Page
  • Visited the Select a Seat Page
  • Added Seats to Cart
  • Started Entering Billing Information
  • Completed Transaction
  • Created a new account
  • Logged into Account

Based on each of these specific on-site actions I could assign them to stages of the consumer decision journey.

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I could also start to figure out how I would change my search marketing strategy from including the keywords I would target, the ad copy messaging, the landing page, or even my bid optimization strategy, based on the action that the consumer took.

3. Adjust Your Consumer Messaging Based on the Audience List & Keywords Targeted

Once you’ve mapped out the purchase journey and what audience will align to each step you’ll need to figure out how to apply it to your search strategy.

Should you shift consumer messaging based on the keywords they’re searching and where they are at within that purchase journey?

This opportunity to shift your messaging could be one of many different things:

  • Ad copy can be customized based on products and services as the consumer goes down the purchase path. Pull in specific data such as pricing, quantity of products available, offers, etc. into your ad copy based on the audience list.
  • Use ad customizers like countdown messaging for promotions or events.
  • For abandoned carts, you could offer a discount or incentive to bring the consumer back to your store.

This is getting to the heart of how you may be planning on using the specific list.

Let’s go back to my Seahawks game day example. Because the Seahawks tickets are perishable, you may choose to use the countdown ad customizer to include how many days are remaining before game day – or counting down to the hours until the game starts.

Also, think about your ad extensions and how you can customize and leverage your ad extensions to be more specific about stage of the funnel and even where you might choose to land the visitor on the site.

4. Understand Your Landing Pages & Think About Conversion Rate Optimization

Think about where you would take someone if they’re in a different stage of the purchase journey.

How would you optimize your landing page and its content to make it more personal, more curated, and more relevant to that searcher?

In my Seahawks example, where would you choose to take a user is they came back after abandoning the cart and searched for “Seahawks tickets”?

You can set up an A/B test to two different landing pages for the same ad copy to see if you can impact conversion rate.

I would most likely run the test of sending them either to the page for the specific Seahawks game as well as the core Seahawks page.

If my site had the capability, I might also use a site link extension to call out the rough ticket price that was previously selected and take them to the “select a seat” phase of the purchase journey; and then use the additional site link extensions for the core Seahawks page or other upcoming games.

With audiences, you can test the ad copy and landing page elements to optimize to conversion rate!

5. Adjust Your Bid Strategy Based on Audience

Adjusting your bid optimization strategy for audience targeted campaigns is an often overlooked tactic.

Because you can assign audience lists at the ad group and campaign level, it means that you can adjust your bid optimization strategy, too.

Based on the past or previous engagements with the user, would you have a different ROAS/ROI or optimization target?

For instance, I’ve managed search campaigns where net new customers had a ROAS target of 125 percent versus existing customers had an optimization target of 250 percent.

Why?

Because while our existing bid models didn’t include lifetime value, we knew from our internal data that 20 percent of the new customers would become regular repeat customers, so we could be more aggressive to acquire net-new users.

Here’s the main takeaway:

If you’re trying to create an amazing remarketing funnel, it goes back to looking at your data and understanding consumer intent and behavior and then mapping that behavior and intent to your search campaigns.

From there you can customize just about everything when you are using the “Target and Bid” setting for audiences.

Without Data, We’re Just Making Guesses at a Customer’s Intentions

There’s a lot of great information available to you within your analytics account to essentially go down and create a ton of in-depth remarketing lists that can be layered on top of your search campaigns.

This gives you the necessary levers to pull for your keywords, ad copy, landing pages, and your bid optimization tools and tactics – and it should be a central part of your business’s sales strategy.

The world is your oyster, go forth and start creating ah-maz-ing remarketing campaigns.

By Christi Olson

Sourced from Search Engine Journal

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Bootstrapping Relevance: Making Web Conversions Meaningful for Long Sales Cycles

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By Derek Gleason    

Most hurricanes that reach the United States start off the coast of West Africa. Those storms join and split with other minor systems as they move across the Atlantic. Some dissipate into a mild breeze; others devastate coastal areas along the Eastern seaboard.

So what does an afternoon rainshower over Cape Verde tell you about the next Category 5 hurricane? Often, little more than a form fill tells you about the potential for a five-figure sale months down the road.

Google Analytics insights frequently end with raw counts of goal completions, leaving a yawning gap between on-site behavior and sales for companies with long sales cycles.

More challenging still, the space between marketers’ realities and solutions is equally vast: Seamless integration of marketing and sales data or a Google Analytics 360 subscription is aspirational.

This post details four steps that any organization can follow to estimate the value of on-site conversions more accurately:

  1. Identify every potential touchpoint.
  2. Organize existing data into an idealized customer journey.
  3. Integrate data into goal completions.
  4. Analyze and act on that data.

No solution is perfect, but incremental progress is possible—and worthwhile.

Why bother? Analytics incentivize behavior

The data-related challenges of long sales cycles are well known: Between a form fill and a sale, there may be dozens of touchpoints spanning weeks or months. Those interactions occur across teams (marketing, sales, customer support) and platforms (analytics, CRM, email).

The challenge of joining those datasets resigns many marketers to limited measurement: We know our data is incomplete, so we might as well just count form fills.

Yet analytics incentivize behavior, and if marketing teams can’t see past total goal completions (euphemistically, “leads”), they’ll devote resources to those efforts—even if a painfully low percentage ever become sales-qualified leads.

The limits of attribution

A common focus for companies with long sales cycles is attribution. But even data-driven attribution, robust as it may be, usually improves attribution of form fills or PDF downloads—marketing metrics that may be weak indicators of sales.

Goal completions can become stronger predictors of sales by pushing data about the relative value of each goal completion back into analytics.

Attribution’s relevance depends on the known value of the conversion.Regardless of how much data you have, you will make decisions on how to allocate marketing resources. Partial data—or even anecdotal data—can, at the bare minimum, form the basis for experimentation and a means to test your assumptions.

It starts with a survey of all known customer data.

Step 1: Identify every potential touchpoint.

“Long lead time before the sale is an opportunity to do more data collection,” offered Snowplow Analytics’ Anthony Mandelli, “which will ultimately help you in the long run.”

Compare the number of touchpoints in a year-long sales process to the purchase of novelty socks (Mandelli’s example). The latter is a single image, the former a feature-film—a complete narrative with deep insight into what influences consumer behavior.

“It’s a long sales cycle for a reason,” Mandelli continued. “Leads are conducting online and offline research.” The starting point, then, is to “get all your data together somewhere—start with the first interaction, then all the way to purchase.”

That data may include:

  • Form fills
  • PDF downloads
  • Phone calls
  • Email opens/clicks
  • Webinar signups/views
  • Demo requests
  • Free trial signups, etc.

It may also include reports from your sales team, estimates by executives, or other offline sources. At the outset, you simply want to know all the potential sources of data (regardless of whether you’re able to gather them into a Customer Data Platform that curates “a single source of truth“).

You may be missing key data or may not be able to integrate it in future steps, but knowing what exists—and what is or isn’t accessible—helps establish the immediate path forward and guides future improvements.

Step 2: Organize existing data into an idealized customer journey.

Sketching an idealized user journey—or reviewing one already created—is not about forcing users into a linear funnel but about creating a structure to help organize your data.

A customer journey map, Hull’s Ed Fry explains, “highlights the macro-conversions that many teams in the company optimize for (like a new user signing up) vs. micro-conversions that concern few other people.” Each stage in the journey, in turn, is delineated by a conversion:

In a customer journey, the step-by-step progress of a user usually includes a measurable conversion in a digital channel. (Image source)In an example Mandelli shared, a flooring company had no visibility into what happened between a potential buyer’s $10 sample purchase and a $10,000 sale. Building an idealized user journey—based on data from a real customer—helped the company organize the data they had by the steps the customer took:

  1. Web ad (Google AdWords or Bing)
  2. Visit the website
  3. Order a sample from the website
  4. Review samples
  5. Receive drip email marketing campaign
  6. Purchase flooring (through the web or on the phone

With existing data points plotted along the idealized user journey, ask yourself: “Where are the biggest gaps between touches?” (In the above example, it’s Step 4.) “The goal is not to sink under analysis paralysis,” writes Fry. “It is to simply understand the backbone of your customer journeys.”

A data gap does not invalidate conversion values for long sales cycles. Charles Farina of Analytics Pros explained:

If you are able to qualify a lead quickly, work to connect your metrics to center on qualified leads. From there, try and work further down the funnel.

In other words, if a form fill can be qualified with a second interaction (say, responding to a phone call), that data—the percentage of form fills who become qualified leads—can guide conversion valuation, even if months pass before those qualified leads become sales.

Even with complete data, Farina suggested, you’ll rarely optimize based on close-of-sale metrics: It simply takes too long. If you make changes to service pages today, would you put everything on hold for months while you waited to see how many leads from the updated pages became customers?

What you really need, Farina suggested, is a two-stage optimization process:

Focus on bringing more quality into your funnel, then use the fully connected journey to make additional optimizations on top.

For many, the perspective is liberating: Data points from one or two steps post–form fill can make conversion data vastly more relevant, no matter how long the sales cycle stretches past the initial conversion.

Step 3: Integrate data into goal completions.

There are elegant solutions for integrating Analytics data with CRM data and similar sources:

The potential value of an integration—like pulling Salesforce data into Google Analytics—is clear, but securing the budget is, for most, unrealistic. (Image source)In the prior example of the flooring company, Snowplow joined the data from web analytics and marketing automation tools to provide ongoing visibility about how users progressed through the journey. But that ongoing portrait—while closer to the ideal—isn’t mandatory.

If you don’t have a sizeable analytics budget or an in-house team of developers to manage multiple connections, use a snapshot of your post-conversion data to adjust Goal Values in Google Analytics.

1. Make periodic calculations for Google Analytics Goal Values

Goal Values assign dollar values to conversions—replacing the faulty “a conversion is a conversion” logic with estimated revenue from on-site actions.

To set Goal Values, you need to calculate the value of a lead on a goal-by-goal basis. In its simplest form, the process divides the total number of goal completions by the revenue from those conversions.

  • 100 form fills
  • 5 form fills convert to sales
  • Each sale generates $10,000 in revenue

Thus, a form fill is worth $500. The calculation requires two data points outside Google Analytics: The number of web leads who became customers, and the value of each sale. (If you don’t have access to both, skip to the second option.)

In a perfect world, the calculations are exact enough to establish ROI for marketing efforts. However, for long sales cycles, obtaining that degree of accuracy is almost impossible—but that shouldn’t keep you from using Goal Values.

Goal Values Are fixed numbers…with relative value

When it comes to long sales cycles, setting the Goal Value of a form fill is less about ROI and more about weighting the impact of on-site behavior. Relative differences in dollar values, as detailed in the fourth step, allow for better comparisons of how each page or channel performs.

For example, if a lead who initiates an engagement with a phone call—tracked via CallRail or Marchex—closes at twice the rate of a form fill, that difference will be reflected in the Goal Value. Likewise, a newsletter signup from a blog post will probably be weighted less (by using sales data from newsletter subscribers).

To think of it another way, not assigning Goal Values gives every goal the same value: $0. If your Goal Values aren’t accurate enough to determine ROI—whether left as $0 or calculated based on sales data—you might as go with the calculated estimate that at least has a chance of being directional.

Note: If seeing “inaccurate” Goal Value figures will ruffle feathers in other departments, create a new View with the same Goals and add estimated Goal Values.

Use Lookup Tables to generate dynamic Goal Values

Not all form fillers—even of the same form—are equal. A Lookup Table in Google Tag Manager (GTM), as Bounteous details, can set dynamic Goal Values based on form inputs.

So, for example, if a form question includes the size of the company, you can adjust the Goal Value based on the likelihood of conversion, average order value, or lifetime value of that demographic.

Set a different Output (Goal Value) for each based on Input (the form-field options):

The Default Value is used if none of the other criteria is met.Create a Data Layer variable to capture the business category data (the Input field) upon submission. Then, create an Event that pulls in the business category information and the associated lead value from the Lookup Table.

Finally, use the Event value as the Goal Value for the that conversion:

Even if you don’t know the value of a given type of lead—or any lead at all—you still have another option.

2. Estimate the relative value of online touchpoints

If quantitative data on lead conversion rates and order value isn’t available, you can add relative values. Branko Kral of Orbit Media detailed the process for a stem-cell clinic with a long sales cycle and limited data.

They identified the primary touchpoints, then assigned relative values from $100 to $10—the actual dollar values were irrelevant—to gauge the impact of campaigns that spurred a range of micro- and macro-conversions:

  • First-time calls – lead to most new business
  • Repeating calls – also highly valuable
  • Call-back requests – capture contact info and explicitly ask to be contacted
  • Blog subscriptions – capture contact info and indicate trust
  • Video views > 50% of the video length – patients who book often mention they’ve watched the patient testimonial videos
  • Email link clicks – typical for inquiries higher up the funnel
  • Social share clicks – spread the word
  • Views of a Contact Us page – a subtle but valuable indicator of interest

It’s easy to poke holes in the process: How do you know that a social share click is worth say, half that of a video view? You don’t. However, that initial, heuristic estimate is a baseline for hypothesis development and testing.

After all, if you don’t assign Goal Values, you’re still allocating resources based on which actions you perceive to be most valuable. Adding relative Goal Values to on-site conversions makes it easy to visualize the implications of your assumptions throughout your site.

Step 4: Analyze and act on that data.

Adding calculated or relative Goal Values to conversions populates one metric (Page Value) and makes others—even basic channel grouping reports—more instructive.

Page Value

The Page Value metric provides URL-by-URL valuations of every page. (Image source)In Google Analytics, Page Value “is the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an Ecommerce transaction (or both).” As Effin Amazing notes:

Goals are a Session dimension metric, which means that you cannot use them in a Hit dimension report like Pages report, Event reports, or any type of Custom report built around a Hit dimension.

Page Value bridges the gap between these Session dimensions and Hit dimensions by tying a specific page URL to a monetary value when users complete a goal or transaction.

It’s one way to see the value of content at a URL level. With a Goal Value calculated from actual sales data, the Page Value metric may (roughly) estimate revenue; without it, it still offers a weighted estimate of importance for pages in the conversion process.

That URL-by-URL view can break down further into:

  • Mediums (e.g. organic vs. direct visits to the same page or group of pages)
  • Website sections (e.g. /case-studies/ vs. /whitepapers/)
  • Anything else you can think to add as a secondary dimension.

A caveat on taking action

A one-time estimate of close rates or average order value is good for only so long. The more often (monthly, quarterly) those calculations can be reworked—and Goal Values adjusted—the more reliable that data will be. (Goal Values are not assigned retroactively.)

Further, if an initial estimate suggests that email visitors are more lucrative than those from other channels, that may justify a push to acquire more email addresses—only to capture the addresses of less-relevant, less ready-to-buy visitors.

Every update of your Goal Values, then, is an opportunity to spot diminishing returns and shift marketing resources to another channel or site section. Disappointing as it may be to realize that you’ve exhausted a strategy, you’ll never notice unless you rerun the numbers—all you’ll see is conversions trending up, a vanity metric reaching ever-higher to nowhere.

Conclusion

When it comes to long sales cycles and web conversions, “perfect” is often the enemy of anything. But just because you don’t have uninterrupted lead-to-sale data doesn’t mean you can’t make your web analytics more meaningful.

Indeed, the second and third interactions after an on-site conversion—those you’re most likely to have on hand—may be the most influential metrics no matter how much data you accumulate.

Importing calculated Goal Values based on those metrics back into Google Analytics offers a more accurate valuation of the actions that take place on your website.

Even if those values are relative, you gain visibility into the assumptions you have about your site. Whether or not they hold true, the outcome will improve your marketing.

By Derek Gleason    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Predictive Analytics and AI Drive Up Customer Lifetime Value

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By Matthew Kelleher

We focused our efforts on seeing whether using Predictive Analytics combined with AI driven marketing automation can help improve the customer experience around the key stages of the customer lifecycle – prospect’s first purchase, second purchase, multi-purchase, VIP and churn. Our strategy was to improve marketing performance at each of these stages by using Predictive Analytics to understand where each customer is on their own journey.  When the brand understands the customer’s next likely action, they can specifically target those individuals with more effective comms, ultimately, driving up total customer lifetime value.

Results at each stage of the lifecycle have been excellent. For instance, one brand saw an increase of 83.5% in second purchase rate. This, and other case studies, can be found here. Anyone who attended my presentation at either Technology for Marketing or Festival of Marketing recently, would have seen me present the outcome of the longer analysis to see if they could improve Customer Lifetime Value. For those of you who could not attend, you will have to wait for the release of the new case studies to the website in the next couple of weeks.

The obligatory Q&A session followed my presentations at both these events. But to be honest, I always find these questions instructive and rather good fun. Too often, and I’m not alone in this, I get carried away with what I want to say, and questions illustrate key elements that I’ve missed! So, these were the six questions that were asked (although I must admit I thought there were more) with a few more thoughts than I had time to give on the day.

  1. How has GDPR affected your data gathering? How did you fight an increase (if any) in unsubscribed customers?

    Whilst it has felt like forever, the period since May 25th is still, in the grand scheme of things, relatively short! Our impression is that, in general (can you see me caveating this response very heavily!) the long-term impact on sign ups and consent is relatively little. However, for some organisations their ‘re-permissioning’ experiences have been fairly disastrous. For instance, a database of active contacts of 500,000 reduced to 6,500 (if you are in this group then you are not alone). It’s not the objective of this blog to cast aspersions on the quality of advice given to some organisations, all I can really say is that without the correct permissions, processing data for comms or even for Predictive Analytics is not possible. There are minimum amounts of data required to make Predictive Analytics work, so for many organisations with smaller databases Predictive Analytics may not work and the issues surrounding GDPR only serve to increase that group.

  2. Do you have an example of using Predictive Analytics for recruitment initiatives – getting new customers rather than increasing the value of current customers?

    RedEye has not worked with any organisations to develop models around acquisition. However, our whole strategy is built around recent prospect/customer behaviour as the key driver for predicting their next likely action. Marketers can better understand how an individual prospect or customer is behaving in relation to their brand. By tracking as many interactions, across as wide a number of channels as possible, this can then be compared with the typical behaviour of customers who have completed certain journeys. And this is applicable to many different market sectors.

  3. What were the actions that came out of the predictive model to reduce churn. How were they implemented?

    25 minutes is a very short amount of time to pack in a lot of things. One that I often leave off the list is a detailed description of the treatments employed at each of the stages. But there is a very specific reason for this… the platform RedEye has developed provides the data to the marketer, and it is up to the marketer to then leverage this information. They know their brand and customers better than anyone else. A review of the treatments used by Travis Perkins would be a completely different presentation. Every brand will develop specific treatments and the insight of what Travis Perkins did is therefore of less relevance when we’re looking at how the system was plugged together to provide the outcome. I often say ‘if you knew a specific customer was likely to never buy from you again – what would you want to say to them?’. Every marketer would have a specific answer to this, I am sure!

  4. How did you link website behaviours to an individual? Was it logged in users only?

    At FoM I briefly shot off an answer, which was that we utilise a tag management solution, which was a bit blasé. The RedEye solution has always been built around a personalisation capability centred on the value of an individual’s browsing behaviour, which is also at the core of our approach to Predictive Analytics as described above. We then link this to channel engagement information, transactional data and any other type of data a client has that has a personal identifier of any kind. It is this data that is at the core of the CDP function and therefore the bedrock of Predictive Analytics. With regards to the issue of ‘logged in’, no, the customer or prospect does not need to be logged in, they just have to have given their consent.

  5. Did any of your clients face major hurdles in pulling together all the data from siloed and legacy data pots? If so, how was this overcome?

    I would say that the vast majority of organisations that RedEye work with have internal hurdles with regards to data silos. Some clients who want to input more data find they are restricted by internal systems, and there is very little that RedEye can do to overcome these bottlenecks. But assuming that the data is available somewhere in an organisation, the CDP is there to help marketers resolve these issues. We try to make this work more effectively in two ways. Firstly, we create easier ways to format data into the system, using simple connectors to input (and export) data. And secondly, we offer support staff to help this happen for clients who are resource strapped.

  6. Which is the best CDP you would recommend for publishers?

    If I remember this question from the day it was asked by Nish! Well Nish, as an executive of RedEye I would say get in touch with us! But being a bit more professional, and having asked my colleagues on the Customer Data Platform Institute I would recommend BlueConic and Lytics who I’m informed have good experience working with publishers.

If anyone else has any other questions I would be delighted to do my best to answer them, get in contact with me here.

By Matthew Kelleher

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

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