Case Studies: Success Stories of Data-Driven Marketing Analysts

 Asenior marketing manager in a Fortune 100 company once told me: ‘‘Every week I have to go to a gun fight, the senior executive leadership meeting, and I am tired of going to this gunfight carrying only a knife. His frustration was the result of having no concrete data to answer hard questions about the value of marketing activities in his division. We are living in difficult times, and marketing measurement and data-driven marketing are becoming 

increasingly important. Now more than ever, managers need to justify their marketing spending, show the value that they create for the business, and radically improve their marketing performance.Why is data-driven marketing so difficult for many organizations? There are many reasons, ranging from ‘‘we don’t know how’’ to the challenge that branding and awareness marketing activities are fuzzy and don’t directly impact sales revenues in a 

short time period. The challenge is compounded by the exponential growth of data. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that data storage is growing at 60 percent per year, which suggests the volume of stored data is doubling approximately every 20 months. These vast amounts of data are overwhelming and marketers struggle, with limited time and resources, to measure the efficacy of what they do. A few marketers and organizations, 

however, have mastered datadriven marketing principles and marketing metrics. Invariably, these individuals are heroes within their firms, are promoted faster, and rise to more senior positions. As we will see, organizations that embrace marketing metrics and create a data-driven marketing culture have a competitive advantage that results in significantly better 

Depicts the many interpretations of

events" in marketing literature. Event marketing, which is mentioned in the context of this paper, is shown in the grey fields.activity might be owned by the firm or owned by a third party and supported by the company via sponsorship programs (Kotler & Armstrong 2010, 505). For example, Javalgi Traylor, Gross & Lampman established that sponsorship had a favorable influence on the sponsoring company's image (Javalgi, Traylor, Gross & Lampman 1994, 47–

Scholars discovered that, on a product/brand level, sponsorship aids consumers in remembering the brand linked with it, both in terms of brand recall and brand awareness (Herrmann, Walliser & Kacha 2011, 259–281). Sponsorship is also an excellent approach to demonstrate devotion to a community and develop ties with it (Wohlfeil & Whelan 2005, 184). Besides, "Self-Initiated Events" is made up of “Events within Sales Promotions or Public 

Relations Event-Marketing as Strategic Concept (Total Approach)” and “Event-Marketing as Communication Platform (Partial Approach)” (See figure 4). Nevertheless, in this study, event marketing is described as an experienceoriented marketing communication technique aiming at favourably impacting customers' familiarity and attitude toward the company in which customers are able to take an active role. Therefore, the focus of explanation will be on “

Event Marketing as Strategic Concept 

(Total Approach)” and “Event-Marketing as Communication Platform (Partial Approach)”. Zanger and Sistenich (1996, 234, as cited in in Wohlfeil & Whelan 2005, 186) defined two coexisting methods to executing event marketing techniques as follows: The partial approach defines event marketing as the planning, organizing, managing, and controlling of events within the context of a company's marketing communication strategy. On the other hand, the  approach views event marketing as a catch-all term for all aspects of current 

marketing totalcommunications that contribute to the creation and implementation of an experience-oriented strategy. To be understandable, the total approach is likely to be used by the director, SEO, or marketing manager, whereas the partial approach appears to be used by personnel (Wohlfeil & Whelan 2005, 186). Event marketing is the key media to communicate brand messages. In order to strategically exploit its communicative potential, 

event marketing must generate brand-related realities for consumers as part of a broader integrated experience-thus in need of guidance from internal experts. Those internal experts are the second source of content. As previously mentioned, such internal experts will have great knowledge about products, processes and target audiences but may lack time and knowledge to produce content and communicate their expertise. The last source stated is 

Content curation is finding relevant

information for the audience and communicating it through one's own channels. It could be seen as lazy and simple but it is difficult to find interesting information. One pro of content curation is that the audience one is trying to stimulate can get content that they would otherwise not have the time or ability to find on their own. As stated by Lieb (2011), it is important to remember that there is user-generated content that one cannot be in total 

control of. Such content be it reviews, comments, ratings or contests, is generated for you, rather than by you. User generated content should preferable be produced by users that are pleased with you and want to create positive content. Montes de Oca (2011) adds to this by providing a list of user generated websites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter that could be important to consider when the sources of content is being planned and determined. 

According to the framework by Pulizzi & Rose (2013), it is important to establish how to execute the previous steps and who will manage it. According to Odden (2012), a business needs a content marketing strategy in order for everyone within the company to have a clear understanding of the goals, also because the different types of channels that exist can be overwhelming. Brito (2013) discusses that a business should have a community manager, 

Conclusion

who is responsible for the channels. The community manager is suppose to monitor the channels and its content monitor the conversations that are happening on the channels and also analyses the data, but also might be responsible for flagging consumer issues. Conversations An important element that also needs to be established is the conversation and connection with the customers. Listening to the consumer is an important aspect that 

some companies overlook in their content marketing framework, as well as talking to the customers. Establishing listening posts is a way of tracking where the conversations are happening. The conversation between the company and the consumer might be overwhelming for the company. However, the company needs to be active with the response to consumers (Pulizzi & Rose, 2013). Several tools can be used in order to track and measure the conversations that are happening about the brand or its products. Trackur and 

Radian6 are two tools that can be used to monitor on-going conversations on social channels (Odden, 2012). According to Gunelius (2011) there are three different forms of content marketing: long-form, short-form and conversations and sharing. The first form, long-form content marketing involves a longer text with quite a few sentences, examples of this are blogs,articles and press releases. The second form, short-form content marketing involves a 

short text with just a few sentences, examples of where you can use short-form is Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The third and final form, conversations and sharing content marketing can happen through conversations and sharing of already published content, such as blog comments and twitter updates. The core of content marketing is to understand what consumers need and want in order to create and publish useful and relevant content towards