Preface

From Janet

I was first drawn to a career in marketing as a kid. I vividly remember watching the revolutionary Apple Macintosh ad of 1984 during Super Bowl XVIII and the sense of amazement and wonder I felt after watching the ad. It was like nothing I'd seen before in a TV ad. As a young marketer, I was drawn to Apple's "Think Different." campaign, featuring inspirational figures that broke the mold, like Gandhi, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, and more. I still have a copy of the ad featuring Jim Henson - one of my all-time favorites. I also found myself drawn to the inspirational marketing messages of Nike ads of "Just Do It." or "Stop Dreaming. Start Working." These ads covered my bulletin board. I loved their creativity and the way they inspired me.

While the creativity of marketing drew me to the profession, marketing was beginning to make a profound shift in the early nineties. I entered marketing, in my estimation, at exactly the right time for me. In 1995, barely out of college and working in my first job, I was invited to a nearby business by a friend to be a part of a focus group to evaluate a new tool to find information on the growing Internet. The search engine I was evaluating that night was Yahoo!

In the mid-nineties, as the Internet began exposing a new, graphical format for finding and reading information on the network, I found myself drawn to it. The World Wide Web and its GUI interface offered me a way to marry my creative side with my technical side, so I learned how to program in HTML. The question remained at that time, though: how will this really be adapted for marketing? There weren't many measurement tools in the nineties to understand how marketing efforts on the Internet were affecting a business. Aside from basic traffic information from server logs and tools to process that data like WebTrends, marketers were mostly happy with seeing that people were visiting their websites.

In 1998 GoTo.com, later renamed Overture, launched the first pay-per-click advertising model. The product revolutionized how businesses advertised on the Internet. With this new model, advertisers no longer had to pay solely by impression (the ad being shown). Instead, advertisers could pay for their ads on an action basis - when the searcher clicked on the ad itself and thus visited the advertiser's website. As the pricing model grew in popularity with advertisers and search engines began adding this ad model to their sites, I found myself shifting from a more creative marketer to a more analytical one. Between the website measurement tools being developed, such as Urchin (the precursor to Google Analytics), and new digital advertising options with associated metrics, such as Google AdWords, in a very short time marketers had developed new metrics that better defined marketing key performance indicators than broad measurement tools of the print and TV world, such as BPA audits or Nielsen data respectively. These metrics were exact.

I found myself shifting too. After being laid off once and surviving a layoff at my next company, I longed for a way to prove my worth to the business I worked for. Digital marketing gave me the best chance at exactly measuring my impact, and the impact of all of our team's marketing efforts, on the business. I began to embrace data and statistics, and I found ways to use them to bolster my position. While I began my career in marketing fully expecting to harness my artistic creativity, I find that I now channel my analytical side so much more.

In 2005 I founded my own search marketing agency, Search Mojo (now renamed Marketing Mojo), focused on search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising. One question I ask all account manager candidates interviewing with our firm is, "Do you see yourself as a more creative person or a more analytical person?" There's no right or wrong answer to this question, per se, but I expect that many recent college graduates entered the marketing field for similar reasons that I did. They saw enormously creative business-to-consumer ads that inspired them. And while there is some artistic creativity in search advertising, analytics play a much larger role today. If you don't enjoy spreadsheets and math, you may not enjoy what marketing has become.

There is, however, still a long way to go. Today, we have more data and tools available to us as marketers than ever before. As an agency owner over the past fourteen years, I've seen so many clients, large and small, with poor measurement implementation or the inability to connect the data points to provide them with a full understanding of their results. Just last year a client with over 1,500 employees confessed that they were storing their incoming website leads in a spreadsheet, then entering each lead by hand into the sales CRM. Yikes.

Today the wealth of information available to us as marketers can seem overwhelming. I encourage you instead to think of the data available as an opportunity. I wrote this book with Julia to help clarify where disconnects exist between the marketing team and the rest of the company and to help close that gap. I wrote it so that other marketers can see the value that marketing data brings to strengthening your positions and reinforcing the marketing team's value to the organization. I've added many actual examples to illustrate mistakes as well as fantastic successes when the right data is implemented and utilized correctly in an organization. I hope we can help you create a dynamic shift in your company and solidify the value that your marketing team brings to your organization.

From Julia

Armed with my very new MBA, I joined a web hosting company (originally part of AOL) that would later be merged into UUNET in the late nineties. What a fantastic time to be a marketer in technology! We were truly pioneers; everything we did was the first or one of the first of its kind. We were the first to launch co-location services. We were the one of the first companies to launch hosted ad servers and ecommerce platforms. We dominated the Lotus Notes hosting market. We coined the term "enterprise hosting." Everything we did was new; we defined this very large and rapidly growing market and set its direction. How would I ever top that experience?

A few years after the dot.com bust, I joined a network monitoring startup. I was employee number five, and the first dedicated marketing resource. Despite the extreme lack of sleep, I loved the experience. This was another "greenfield" opportunity; not the market itself this time - network monitoring had been around for a while with huge incumbents like IBM and HP - but the opportunity to create marketing strategy, programs, and processes, really everything, from scratch. The truly fortuitous part of this is that this is exactly when digital marketing was beginning to revolutionize not only how we could reach our customers online, but also how much we could actually do and how quickly. I didn't have bureaucracy to cut through or a "this is how we've always done it" attitude/culture to get around. I evaluated digital marketing tools and services purely on their own merit. Is this the best way to generate qualified leads for sales? Is this the best bang for my marketing buck? ROI wasn't a "pie-in-the-sky" idea; it was vital for a boot-strapped startup like us. If a tool, program, or campaign didn't produce or perform an absolutely necessary function, we didn't do it again. We didn't have the time or the money to waste.

I continued my education on the job. Digital marketing appealed to the nerd in me. I was our Salesforce.com administrator and defined every field. We were an early adopter of marketing automation; I defined every one of those fields as well, plus the integration with Salesforce.com. I met Janet, who was just starting her own SEO agency (later helping us with digital advertising too). During our engagement, she was my partner in really exploring what the new digital marketing tools could do. Because I defined all the data fields plus the sales and marketing processes to ensure data governance, we were able to pull ROI reports out of our new systems and make smarter decisions about what programs, campaigns, and content we should produce to achieve our goals.

Since that initial experience of setting up ROI reporting capabilities across multiple digital marketing platforms in a greenfield environment, I went to two other companies that had existing databases and sales processes, and while I spent more time on evaluating and cleaning up data (a lot of time on cleaning up data), the fundamentals were the same. Set up your marketing/sales databases and the processes that would feed those databases from real marketing campaigns so that I could actually pull reports that showed marketing value.

I listed a lot of what happened in detail because I've come to understand that most marketers do not get these kinds of opportunities or learning experiences. With this experience and background, I started to assume that everyone thinks this way: Data is my friend. I'm going to collect as much data as possible because I'm not sure exactly how I'll use it later or need to filter it but I'd rather have the data than not be able to do the analysis. In the end, everything I do needs to be able to be tied to actual sales for the company. My epiphany happened in week one after joining Janet's agency.

Janet reached out to me when I was between jobs and looking...