The blog

Today, marketers are facing the challenges of increased competition, new distribution channels, proliferation of media channels and changing customer preferences, all of this to make data more scattered and more difficult to convert into meaningful information that supports decisions on how to allocate your marketing budget – and most importantly to measure and report the return on the investments made.  But it is possible to link information about customers needs, preferences, habits and behaviors across all channels to the performance of a business’s sales and marketing activities. It all comes down to making sure the right things are being measured and visualized. By defining and tracking your marketing KPIs on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, you as a marketer can act on the data to immediately improve marketing performance – and this is exactly where digital marketing dashboarding comes into play.

“The ocean is rising, but so are we”, “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic”, “I’ve seen better cabinets at IKEA”. The sight of young and old raising their voices and signs during climate protests has become a familiar one over the past months. And then there’s the latest #TrashTag challenge that has taken social media by storm. Initially targeted at bored teens, the action encourages people to share pictures of littered areas before and after clean-up. As society recognizes the environmental challenges we face, consumers are becoming more mindful of their buying behavior. The #TrashTag challenge.

Every year, numerous quantities of research try to estimate the size of the Belgian e-commerce market. Most of the time these high-level estimations are derived from the consumer perspective to tell the story on how Belgian e-commerce performs. We believe, however, that there are always two sides to a story, and that we should also pay attention to the merchants’ perspective. Therefore, The House of Marketing together with SafeShops.be explores this black hole of merchant-based facts through the E-commerce Barometer. As opposed to other research, the E-commerce Barometer brings forth accurate information on Belgian e-commerce based on real transaction data, in collaboration with payment service providers in Belgium. A payment service provider or PSP is a third party that facilitates and helps merchants in the acceptance of payments.

Customers are or should be, at the heart of every organization. We segment them to personalize our offering and approach them differently to satisfy their needs most efficiently and effectively. However, in this day and age, are we really doing the best we can? Are traditional segmentation techniques still the way to go, or are we missing something? We all want to get personal and communicate the right message at the right time at the right place to the right person. This is where traditional segmentation techniques might not be effective enough to enable organizations to offer this kind of personalized experience. We all understand the value of segmentation as a means to better target our effort, but should we continue using segmentation when technology and big data has paved the way for hyper-personalization and one-on-one offerings?

The parsnip hype (‘pastinaak’ in Dutch) recently put online advertising in the spotlight again. A Facebook ad, aimed at female fans of the cooking show Dagelijkse Kost living in Eeklo, encouraged them to buy parsnips. The sale of this vegetable rose significantly in two local supermarkets. At the same time De Correspondent published a contradictory viewpoint, based on the eBay case. This company stopped all Google advertisements in 2013, but after eight weeks sales figures remained stable. Conclusion: for years eBay had been spending millions of dollars on useless online advertising. Does online advertising work or not? The truth lies in the grey area. To reinforce this conclusion, we spoke with Koen Pauwels, Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Northeastern University and member of our company's advisory board. He followed the discussions closely and carried out a study on online advertising. Based on his knowledge and our experience, we analyzed the viewpoints in the article in De Correspondent.

First things first: What does innovation actually mean? We describe it as creativity, yet the kind that creates business impact. Yes, innovation covers brainstorms about new ideas and technologies, but the key goal is to ensure sustainable growth. An innovation strategy enables you to introduce both small-scale and radical changes in your processes and offerings to provide customer experiences that can sustainably outperform your competition.

Technology is fundamentally changing the behavior of consumers, and with it the way customers expect to interact with companies. How can brands break through the virtual noise given the limited time they have? Creating personalized customer experiences is a major opportunity to do so.

In this day and age, companies and brands are encouraged to exceed customer expectations by delivering personalized experiences. Hence, it's about time you change the title on your business card into 'experience maker'. There are many definitions, but this one sums it up perfectly: “A true experience maker is only happy when the customer’s life is made a lot easier”. Or as CMO Claire Cronin stated during the Adobe Summit in May 2018: “At Virgin Atlantic, we are memory makers and the customer is the compass.”

You are planning on throwing a B2B event, and you want it to be the ultimate experience for your audience. Clients, leads, influencers, whoever is invited, they have to be wowed. Well, that’s great, because experience is key for the marketing future and you are on the right track. But what could be a good as well as efficient approach for setting up this event behind the scenes? That’s right, start leveraging your marketing automation tool for events as well.

Nowadays you can no longer go around growth hacking (or marketing, but we'll get to that later) – just ask Google. The internet is full of growth hacking articles, tools and tactics. If we take a quick look at the search volume on growth hacking, we see that it’s been getting an increasing amount of attention worldwide since 2012. Worldwide Google trends of the search term 'growth hacking'. The term growth hacking was first introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010. In truth, the practice has been around much longer. It helped companies like DropBox, Uber and AirBnB transition from budding startups to multi-million dollar enterprises in just a few years’ time. Much of it comes down to the use of resource-light and cost-effective tactics and processes of continual ideation, prioritization, testing and analysis – with a continuous focus on the one metric that matters most: growth. The term was first used in the start-up scene, where resources are scarce and where growth is the only way to survive. There’s a misconception, however, that growth hacking is only useful for startups. In fact, every company can benefit from it, although a minimum requirement is your product market fit. Growth hacking requires that you have a product that’s not just good, but that also matches the needs of who you’re selling it to. Once that’s in place, you’re good to go. How to get started with growth hacking? For more practical insights, we sat together with Nicholas D'hondt, growth expert at our new spin-off Upthrust, which answers the need for operational digital marketing talents.