Here is the research study by Aberdeen group on the pressures driving the B2B Marketers towards automation:

The need to increase new customer acquisition revenue is the strongest driving force for Marketing Automation.

Moreover according to Sirius Decisions – research and analyst firm, “Only 25% of organizations are fully realizing the potential of their Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)”. This is for a number of reasons, b2b marketers often describe themselves as “self-taught” professionals and there is no B2B marketing school as such which can impart formal training of such type, even the organizations don’t spend much on marketing skill development. Having said that there are certain organizations utilizing their marketing automation to the fullest and are doing really well.  That ultimately leads to a huge gap between the average and the best-in-class organizations. The gap is almost 7 times when we consider the inquiry-to-close ration between the average and the best-in-class organizations. Thus we need to know what the best-in-class organizations are doing, which the rest need to follow, as the rewards are huge. The benefits of doing it right are enormous, for best in class organizations the average performance in terms of revenue was 59%. If you look at the industry average, the average performance increase was just 9%.

To build a fully optimized and automated marketing machine that drives revenue you need a roadmap, you need to know where you are today and how to bridge the gap between the present scenario and where you want to be.

Marketing Automation creates gaps, which can be broadly categorized as (given in the Figure below):

And the most important factor for you to be successful is that you need to look at Marketing Automation as beyond a tool and its functionality. It must be viewed as a process that helps generate new business opportunities, manage business inquiries, improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase, and increase alignment between marketing activity and sales results. And it must be supported by the proper skills, processes, organizational readiness and alignment.

Key Steps in Creating the Roadmap to Success:

• Knowing  the current state

In the context of demand generation and marketing automation this means understanding your customers:

• Understanding who they are,
• How do they buy today,
• How they choose between you and your competitor?
• How are sales leads generated?
• Is your sales team driving those leads?
• Are these leads coming through partner channels and is marketing supporting them?
• What does a good lead look like to sales?
• How is marketing supporting them?
• What is the qualification process of a lead?
• And finally what happens to dormant/inactive leads

• Determining the Final State

Once you know where you are, you need to determine where you want to be in future by designing an achievable and measureable future state. This means figuring out what processes you need to put in place, what matrices you need to have and what market automation platform you need to implement.

• Mapping up all steps and milestones with measureable progress.

Typical Roadmap to Success:

A timeline or an implementation roadmap exemplifying how this happens can be categorized in the following phases:

1. Initial Planning and Installation: This phase includes the bulk of work typically spanning around 60 to 90 days. It involves all the analysis work, creating the demand-gen framework, implementing the tools and also some campaign planning.
2. Launch Campaign: This phase involves launching of the campaigns, setting up the visibility for sales, starting with implementing the basics of closed loop reporting in terms of measuring the impact of your activities over the sales pipeline.
3. Evaluate and Optimize: This involves evaluating sales impact and adoption, lead scoring review and adjustment, process adjustments and adding newer campaigns.

Key Components of the Framework:

• Who is your customer:  This is about defining your ideal customer profile. A Lead Forward Revenue back analysis will not only provide insights into a lead management process but will also tell you who your ideal customers are based on the criteria’s like type of buyer, role/function, industry, motivations and pain points.

• Understand the Buying Process: By identifying who your customers are and how they buy, you can segment and map out the way you need to engage with them. Thus it is important to know the entire buying process and where your customers are in the buying process and thus engage with them accordingly.

• Develop a content strategy: This is very essential in terms of customer engagement. You need to determine who owns the content and how the content is organized. You need to look at content in context of the buying process and develop it with a purpose of assembling and categorizing it by objective.

• Lead Management Architecture:  Create an automated lead management system that nurtures and moves prospects through the buying cycle to close and continue to communicate relevant, personalized and timely content to the customers.

• Where does Marketing Automation (MA) fit:  You need to consider all your offline and online channels and make sure that your website is the main repository for all information and bundled with web analytics pushing all the information into the MA engine and finally route it to your nurturing campaigns, lead scoring system and CRM.

• Integrate the tools: Integrate platforms for a common view of the customer across channels; right information should flow across your CMS, CRM and MA platforms.

• Campaign Planning:  This involves mapping your messages. Having defined the content strategy and buying cycle, you need to look at your different buying groups and provide the right message at the right time.

• Create a Calendar of Activities: You need to consistently drive volume and velocity of your activities; it is critical as multiple interactions result in better scoring and helps identifying highly engaged prospects.

• Tracking and Reporting : Add Lead Scoring and identify/route prospects by their level of engagement, close the loop by bringing in opportunity and revenue information.

• Empower your sales team: This is the most important part which involves giving visibility to sales in terms of lead acquisition, activity of prospects so that they can engage with the prospects better.

The maximum value out of marketing automation can be achieved by realizing the key steps discussed above, and thereby setting up successful revenue engine.

In a recent Webinar we have discussed this subject in more detail. Click here to watch the on-demand webinar now.

This is where Responsive Web Design or flexible web design comes into play.

Responsive Web Design is a concept that blends CSS, CSS3 and JavaScript to create fluid site designs that can expand, contract, rearrange or remove content based upon the user’s screen size. Responsive web design responds to the user’s behavior and environment. Instead of developing different sites for devices with different screen sizes and capabilities, one site reacts flexibly to display optimally on everything. It can range from a 27-inch desktop monitor to a three and a half-inch iPhone display.

In simple words, it is a methodology of developing a website that changes the layout according to the screen size of devices.

Here is an example of how a website with flexible design appears on different devices:

• Browser Version:

• Mobile Version:

• iPad Version:

A few years ago, the elements that were flexible in a design were the layout columns (structural elements) and the text. Images could easily break layouts, and even flexible structural elements could break a layout form when pushed enough. They could only give or take a few hundred pixels, but often could not adjust from a large computer screen to a Netbook or iPad.

Now website designing has become more flexible in the literal sense. Web designers ensure that images are automatically adjusted and that layouts never break. The whole design matrix can now be a mix of fluid grids, fluid images and intelligent mark-ups where required.

Responsive web design images are primarily fluid images that can be replaced by context aware images, an updated version for better designing. This particular technique serves the purpose of responsive designing in true sense as the images are served at different resolutions, ranging from larger screens to smaller ones. The scaled images change fluidly with the help of updated developer tools and coding languages, allowing designs to look sharp in every context. Responsive web designing is remarkably different from traditional designing in terms of technology & creativity. There are three very important elements in responsive web design:

• Flexible Layouts
• Flexible Images / Media
• Media Queries

Flexible Layouts:

In responsive design, the first challenge is to design flexible, grid based layouts. As the browser width changes, fluid grids will resize and reposition the content accordingly. In responsive web design, all the elements become proportional to the complete area. So, rather than a column being 331px within a 960px site, it becomes a certain percentage of the overall width of the screen. Ultimately, this allows the design to adapt to different screen sizes.

Flexible Images/Media:

As obvious as it seems, adjustable images are very important. You can resize the image on the fly, or dynamically crop the image. By combining both methods you are enabling the image to resize automatically.

Media Queries:

Media queries allow you to determine the type of media the viewers have access to and the physical characteristics of their device and browser. It means you can set parameters for what gets shown and how. You can show the 3-column extravaganza on a big screen and 1-column mobile version on a Smartphone. Media queries behave similar to conditional comments. For example, you can have one stylesheet for a large display whereas different stylesheets for mobile devices with different widths. Media queries allow designers to create multiple layouts using the same content. To achieve scalability, CSS media queries are used to apply different page styling according to certain parameters, like min-width and orientation.

There are great benefits of having a website with flexible design – enhanced search engine optimization, better usability, better customer acquisition & engagement and much more.

But do people realize the importance of responsive web design?

According to Mongoose Metrics, a tracking and analysis firm, only 9 percent of the sites will be mobile ready by the end of 2012. Another study by Compuware, a software and services provider shows that 57 percent of the users will not recommend a company with a bad mobile site and 40 percent of them will prefer a competitor’s site rather than using a poorly optimized mobile site.

Increased competition, more choices and a weaker economy have created a buyers’ market. Instead of being sold to, customers drive sales process. While it’s crucial to build relationships, it is important to adopt digital engagement capabilities to maintain relevant, meaningful dialog with the audience.

• Digital technologies that drive conversion
• Dynamic personalized experiences
• Multi-channel engagement
• Improving call to action
• Continuous testing and optimization
• Creating communities to engage audience

Let’s begin by describing the term conversion. In eCommerce, conversion is linked to a transaction and direct revenue. But in this blog we are going to focus on conversion in a B2B set up, particularly in high tech companies. Here is how I describe conversion – “Conversion is an event that leads a prospect to take a pre-defined action which provides insight into the customer profile and eventually significantly contributes to revenue.”

For a high tech company, conversion is typically not instantaneous; there is a longer process involved before a customer is acquired. So, conversion for a high tech company could typically mean a whitepaper download, appointment with sales and so on…

So why does website conversion really matter?

A large portion of leads for high tech companies comes from their websites and that will continue to be the case as indicated below.

There is an increased competition for the mindspace for your buyers. Unless you are able to engage with your prospects and provide the right message to the right profile at the right time, they may go elsewhere to buy.

The Digital Maturity Curve

It is important to understand how mature you are and prepare a plan to improve.  The Digital Maturity Curve provides perspective of the various levels of maturity. Organizations should look to move up the maturity curve in a planned manner.

It isn’t easy to drive conversion amidst competition out there. Several factors cause challenges in driving conversion:

• Non engaging online experience – The major challenge for high tech marketers is that their web sites are not engaging anymore. The bounce back rate is increasing and conversion rate is reducing. Websites continue to be static and transactional, rather than contextual, social and engaging. If you consider the Digital Maturity Curve, where do you think you fall?
• Irrelevant Content – In most cases it is hard for a visitor to navigate through the product websites and find exactly what he is looking for.
• Lack of spend on conversion – Another concern raised by high tech marketers is that the cost for driving higher traffic to the websites has gone up but still the conversion rate is low. Well, traffic cannot drive conversion. A latest survey by Omniture showed that spend traffic to conversion is 92:1.
• Friction between sales and marketing is caused due to low quality leads – sales say it’s all junk!
• Lack of integration – If channels are not connected and if you are not treating your customers in a cohesive manner you will struggle to convert them; in fact you may confuse them…

There is no one technique but there are several ways by which you can increase your conversion rates:

1)  Digital technologies that drive conversion: As indicated below, digital technologies are critical in driving conversion.

• Content Management Systems (CMS): CMSs’ are not merely website editing tools anymore. According to a latest report by Forrester, “The web content management (WCM) market is in transition. The WCM market is growing based on customer experience management (CXM) needs, including multichannel delivery, content targeting, analytics and integration with other CXM technologies.”
• Search: Your ability to provide your customers what they are looking for in the first few seconds on your website will change the game in the very early stage.
• Analytics: There are CMS’s available in the market with pre-integrated analytics or with the ability to integrate with third party analytics. All the information stored in one platform can help deliver the personalized experience to your prospects.

By integrating technologies you will drive conversion by leveraging- “The Power of the Trifecta.” This is the ability to integrate the three main digital marketing technologies – “CRM, CMS and Marketing Automation.”

For more information on the tri-fecta, read our whitepaper on “Decision Points on the Path to Unified Customer Engagement”

2)  Dynamic Personalized Experiences: It is all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time…through the right channels. The more effective you are at delivering it, the more likely you’ll turn that visitor into a lead. The less time users spend searching, the closer they are to converting. When you align the data to the customers’ expectations, you’re leading them down the path to conversion.

3)  Multi-channel Engagement: All your channels – Website, Emails and Mobile, need to work together and deliver a unified message across the channels.

Integration and multi-channel engagement always pay back. A tactful marketer can very well track where the user is in the buying lifecycle by utilizing both integration and multi-channel engagement. He can do so in a number of ways, like:

• Utilize web behavior data to drive campaigns
• Insert dynamic recommendations in emails
• Drive personalized web behavior using behavior in CRM and Marketing automation system
• Test and optimize email and site content together

4)  Call to Action: Merchandise your product – Make your offering (whitepaper, video or blog) seem like a significant item. Make sure your landing page is relevant; it has value and indicates the next step.

5)  Testing and Optimization: Regular testing and optimizing together form the key to drive higher conversions.

6)  Community: Communities are a core part of B2B organizations to engage with their prospects and customers.

So how do you put this plan into practice? What are the next steps?

You can do it effectively in the following ways:

• Define your prospects’ buying lifecycle and create segments
• Create a dynamic personalized engaging experience that targets the buying lifecycle
• Create a targeted content strategy
• From the beginning think multi-channel and multi-device
• Integrated web, email and mobile marketing strategy
• Connect your Trifecta – CMS, Marketing Automation and CRM
• Test and optimize

In the recent Webinar we have discussed this subject in more detail. Click here to watch the on-demand webinar now!

What do you think of email marketing?

People consistently say, I don’t like spam; I don’t read email from companies selling me stuff; email is intrusive; or, my inbox is already too crowded, so why would I want more?

While each complaint has some validity, email is still one of the most important tools marketers have.  There are many reasons why: it’s measurable, easy to test, easy to improve and refine, customers have asked for it, it is easy to segment and it is cheap. And, when it’s done right – when an email offers value and/or a relevant message – people do actually like receiving them, no matter how crowded their inbox is.

Great Measurement

Emails have always been trackable, but today’s email marketing and automation solutions can track just about every little detail on your message. From the subject line to the opt-out percentage, it’s all measurable – you can track whether someone clicked on the blue button or the red, whether they like subject line “chance to win” or “win tickets now,” and so on. From there, you can easily track results, and refine your message for next time. This means that every email you send can be improved for the next campaign.

This is a valuable opportunity to learn about your subscribers’ interests and needs, and ensure that the next time you send an email, you’re delivering real value.

Getting Opt-ins is Critical

Today with junk and spam filters we all know it is fruitless to send out unsolicited email. However, opt-in emails have proven to be very successful – and providing an easy, one-click opt out also generates trust between you and the recipient. The good companies provide recipients with a one click opt-out process. Sending an unsolicited email, or making it difficult to opt-out, is a great way to poison a potential relationship before it even begins.

How to Build Your House List

What if you don’t have a large email list or a ‘house’ list? This is a great opportunity to leverage your partners. Why not see if you can advertise on their list? If you ran a contest in a partner’s email blast, these email addresses could become yours. You can always return the favor when your list is built up.  In addition, there is a ton of advertising space with third party companies’ email house lists. Just remember to always include an opt-in button when acquiring those addresses, to ensure you are gaining their permission to email.

“Renting” anonymous lists is an option, but not usually a great one; first, because they can get quite expensive and second, they are not necessarily relevant. But partnering with companies that serve similar target audiences, who have a strong relationship with their base, can be affordable and effective.

Most Will Give Brands a Chance

Most people will give brands a chance. Look how quickly Groupon took off – their whole business is based on you opening those daily emails. Furthermore, their emails are segmented by location and neighborhood. This is all based on information users have provided them – because their emails have provided value, users will stick with them.

Email Marketing Works

Email marketing can be one of the most effective marketing tools in your toolkit. Once you obtain an opt-in, it is critical that you develop the relationship with your customers, and provide value to them, in order to build trust; if you do, you can be sure they’ll keep on opening your emails. If they’ve given you their permission to speak to them, don’t ruin it by sending out irrelevant emails.

Continually focus on improving the quality of your email. Leverage partnerships to expand your list, and segment your list on an ongoing basis by rewarding users for information provided.

Remember, permission to communicate with you is a reward your users have given you. Ensure you value this reward and use it wisely.

But moving from theory to practice is easier said than done. Read on to see what goes into a digital ecosystem, and the steps you need to take to ensure a successful deployment that will help you enhance your demand generation activities and drive leads to sales.

It’s not just about the Web

The truth is, “digital marketing” isn’t just about the Web anymore—it’s certainly not just about Web sites. If your only method of interacting with your prospects is through your Web site, you’re left with partial toolset.

What about e-mail, mobile, social media or online communities?  Don’t forget about digitally-enabled offline channels like CR codes and QR codes!  There are a wide variety platforms to engage your audience how and where they want to be—each an essential part of complete digital ecosystem.

The challenge is, how do you bring the different capabilities and platforms into perspective?  What is a complete ecosystem?  What about platforms with overlapping capabilities?

This is where we need to apply a systematic approach that, when followed, can lead us to the right mix of capabilities, and eventually, platforms that we would implement.

The approach is based on three steps. Some require a bit of work, but the results provide the clarity needed to make thoughtful platform selections that impact your marketing performance.

1. Understand your Prospects and Customers: Understand their industries, roles and needs; their buying cycle, pain points and motivators.
2. Identify Needed Capabilities: Informed by your customer understanding, what are the fundamental capabilities you need to market and engage your prospects and customers?
3. Identify the Supporting Platforms: Your required capabilities dictate potential platforms.

Let’s take a closer look at the first of these three steps.

Understand your Customer

In order to engage your prospects and customers, you need to understand them.  Understanding them sufficiently requires three efforts.

Buying Cycle Analysis: All customers make their way through a buying cycle—whereas the sales process is how we see them move through the funnel—the buying cycle is from the customer’s perspective.  It helps us understand how they get from “awareness” to “commitment” within the buying process.

Segmentation Analysis: Here we identify the parameters that are relevant when targeting your customers—their role, industry, income and other potential segmentation parameters.

Pain Point and Motivators Analysis: Pain points and motivators are identified per buying cycle state and segmentation parameter—this enables you to create a context-driven engagement.

All these layers, when overlayed—the buying cycle stages, segmentation parameters, pain points and motivators—provide a matrix that enables you to precisely target your audience.

This matrix is like an empty Christmas tree without ornaments; your next task is to identify marketing messages — the ornaments — to populate the tree for each common permutation for each stage of the buying process, segmentation, pain points and motivators.

When you understand how your customer buys from you, and how to precisely match their journey with targeted messaging, you’ve taken the first step to figuring out how to engage with them.

Tackling Steps Two and Three

Now that you’ve got a better understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them, you’re ready to think about how to effectively engage with them.

From our experience in helping law firms select a CMS platform, let’s take a quick look at some of the ways law firms are leveraging their CMS platforms in their digital marketing efforts, and some of the features you should look for in a CMS; and then we’ll review eDynamic’s approach to CMS selection and how it can help you when it comes time to making a decision on a new CMS.

What can a CMS do for you?
At its most basic, a CMS helps you deliver the right content, to the right audience and at the right time.

As a law firm, you no doubt have a great repository of knowledge and content at your fingertips.

Your CMS will allow you to align your content creation and editing environments with the skill sets of your internal users, no matter their level of technical expertise. An effective CMS empowers your staff, at all levels, to become “content experts,” by providing an easy-to-use platform for all of your users to push content out to the Web and other channels.

In fact, many CMS systems offer a “write once, publish anywhere” environment, with support for multi-channel publishing from the same content. With your CMS, you’ll be able to publish content, like thought leadership, news and alerts, to mobile, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

Multi-channel publishing of your content adds a “richness” to your Web presence that allows you to stand out from your competition.

Optimize the Experience
Digging a bit deeper, a CMS can act as a “personalization engine” and deliver experiences to visitors based on their individual preferences.

This is especially important in law firms where a lot of material is available for site visitors, so delivering the right content to the right audience can drive engagement.

By leveraging the integrated analytics of a CMS, including browsing history, time-on-page, download stats and more, you can determine which visitors are viewing which content. From there, you can segment them into categories and evolve your content delivery based on visitor response and traction.

Furthermore, your analytics can help you develop strong content attributes and taxonomy to enable great search experiences. You can also add detailed metadata attributes to your content, helping ensure that search results align with visitor expectations.

All in all, your CMS helps ensure your visitors have a great experience with your Web site, no matter if it’s their first time on the site or if they are a regular visitor.

Delivering Opportunities
In addition to improving the experience of your web visitors, a CMS can provide plenty of opportunities for your firm to improve as well.

Overall, the better and more relevant your content, and the more “findable” it is on your Web site, the higher your page will rank on the leading search engines; this, of course will help increase your organic search results, and as you’re no doubt aware, the higher you show up in search rankings, the more traffic you’ll see.

Internally, your CMS can help your team members become contributors. As discussed earlier, a CMS can enable anyone to be a content provider – by empowering your staff, attorneys, talent and HR to publish content, you immediately make them feel more invested in your firm.

How to Choose
eDynamic believes the foundation of a CMS selection process starts with your firm’s unique needs.

What are the ways that you want to communicate with your clients and Web site visitors? And how can a CMS help you execute and improve those strategies?

With that in mind, our strategic approach eight essential steps:

• Digital Strategy Review
• Identify Vendor Universe
• Score Vendor RFIs
• Vendor Demonstrations
• Vendor Short-List
• Vendor POCs
• Final Selection
• Selection Completion.

Each of these steps is fairly self-explanatory, but let’s take a closer look at the first. This is where you truly build the foundation for your CMS deployment – where you identify your goals and outline the CMS capabilities you need.

The Digital Strategy Review is the keystone on which the entire platform selection process rests. It’s here that you identify and refine your strategy – your goals and requirements, and the key capabilities you need from a CMS in order to meet those requirements.

From there, you can decide on the best vendors, review and shortlist them, before moving into the final stages.

If your law firm is looking to take its digital marketing to the next level, a Web CMS is a great place to start.

At this point, we know content marketing is a top priority for organizations. About 90 per cent of organizations are marketing with content, according to a recent MarketingProfs/Junta42 report, “B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends”
(http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/B2B_Trends_2010.pdf), with 26 per cent of their budgets allocated to content marketing.

But is that money being spent effectively?

Since it’s not hard to see economic uncertainty continuing into 2012, we can all agree that marketers – indeed, most departments – will be under increased scrutiny when it comes to budgeting.

Over the years analytics and digital marketing metrics have made it a little easier for marketers to show just where the marketing budget is being spent, and how effective marketing initiatives are. But today’s content-rich marketing programs present new challenges of scale – for all this “stuff” we’re creating, what are we getting out of it?

An effective content management strategy, including web tracking and analytics, is key for realizing return on ROI and demonstrating effective use of resources. For marketers, a straightforward way to look at whether or not you’re making money on your content strategy is to look at how many of your leads are making it to sales. A recent Aberdeen Group Report, “Analytics for the CMO” (http://aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/7065/RA-marketing-business-analytics.aspx), noted that best in class firms see 60% of their sales pipeline coming from marketing, and that 59% of these firms have implemented content/asset management tools.

Compare this to the industry average, where only 10 per cent of the sales pipeline is marketing driven, and only 35 per cent of firms are using these tools.

Delivering compelling, cross-channel digital marketing experiences to prospects and customers can have direct impact on your conversions. Personalization – delivering the right content, to the right person, at the right time – can help drive leads to sales.

Content management solutions, working alongside marketing automation and your CRM platform, can provide the backbone of these personalized experiences. Analytics, Web tracking and social media monitoring tools can help you determine how effective your efforts are. All together, they can be integrated into a “digital marketing ecosystem” that engages prospects and provides measureable, results-based data.

If you’d like to learn more about how digital marketing tools can help you connect your content to revenue, eDynamic is sponsoring an exclusive NYC Analyst Seminar in New York City this month (November). Join Stephen Powers, Principal Analyst & Research Director at Forrester Research and Rolf Kraus, Director, Content Management, Portals and Collaboration Practice at eDynamic, at City Hall Restaurant, for a discussion on how improving your online customer experience can help you drive conversions and deliver highly qualified leads to sales.

Learn More: http://cms.edynamic.net/Customer-Digital-Experience.aspx

In order to keep up with the data demand, developers need to find new ways of looking at and working with large datasets. Read on to learn about one such method and how you can leverage it to make working with large datasets a breeze.

The Large Dataset Challenge

Large datasets can be a challenge, but they’re a fact of life in the digital world we live in. Fortunately, there are methods to overcome those challenges.

As a real-world example, let’s look at a bookshop that sells books (in a variety of formats) in brick and mortar stores, online, and through a call center. The limitations of working with large datasets become readily apparent when they come from different sources and in different formats. All of these database sources are optimized for the particular application they accompany and not for centralized analysis. It becomes more complicated once you want to compare that sales data to budgetary data.

Normalizing the data and writing the query that would tell you what the most popular book among women aged 16-24 is could be done in a traditional relational database model, but it wouldn’t be long before it became slow and cumbersome. Adding in a few queries, and filters of queries of more un-normalized data, and then asking for an analysis over time, and things would quickly grind to a halt.

Before we can work to beat this problem, let’s look at what causes it under the hood. The limitation of relational databases is that the fundamental data structure that they use is a two-dimensional table. It does this for a reason, derived from Set theory; independent sets of data contain information connected only by keys. This makes for fast querying of stored values like order information, but does a poor job of describing the relationship each piece of data has to the other. The more queries and filters required, the slower it gets.

The data cube solves that limitation.

What is the Data Cube?

While we refer to it as a “data cube” for simplicity, the mathematical construction is of a hypercube (think hexacontatetragon) or multi-dimensional array. Numeric information such as sales figures (facts) is categorized by dimensions (“Customer”, “Date”, and “Product” etc.) and stored, allowing indexes to be built through the structure of the cube – overcoming a key limitation with relational databases. This allows for large queries to be executed quickly on a large dataset.

Figure 1: Graphical representational view of data cube

Working in More Than one Dimension

There are a couple of unique data concepts that working in additional dimensions introduce.

Slice: A slice is a subset of a multi-dimensional array corresponding to a single value for one or more members of the dimensions not in the subset.

Figure 2: Graphical representation of a OLAP slice

Slice and Dice: Slice and Dice is a user initiated process of calling data by specifying slices via roll up, rotations and roll downs.

Figure 3: Graphical representation of OLAP Slice and Dice

As datasets increase in size and scope and large sets become the norm, learning different ways to overcome their inherent challenges becomes high priority.

Using the data cube concept – moving from a two dimensional table to a multi-dimensional data representation – can help you work past the limitations so you can start using large datasets effectively and efficiently.

At eDynamic, we see the trend shifting towards delivering not just content, but relevant, timely content that fully engages prospects. With that in mind, we think it’s more accurate to say that “Context-Sensitive Content is King.”

That’s a mouthful, but the idea rings true. If you’re creating content just for the sake of putting it out there, it’s just noise; people are getting overwhelmed and tuning it out. To effectively engage prospects, you need to deliver content that matters to them.

In a recent Junta 42/MarketingProfs Spending Survey, respondents said that 33 per cent of their marketing budgets were being spent on content creation.

However, a second Junta 42/MarketingProfs survey (B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks) noted that 36 per cent of responders said that producing engaging content was their biggest challenge.

So how do you bridge the gap?

eDynamic has identified four steps to successfully engaging clients in order to deliver content that meets and exceeds expectations:

1) Employ a closed-loop engagement cycle: Build a profile of the prospect; analyze it; and respond to the prospect in their language.

2) Characterize prospect: Properties include buying cycle state and segmentation parameters.

3) Develop content to align with the prospect expectations: Content that speaks directly to the prospect profile, with a consistent message.

4) Automate the closed-loop prospect engagement: Use a content management system and marketing automation platforms to automate the engagement cycle, creating an effective process for engaging all future prospects.

Content without context is just noise. A Unified Engagement Strategy – integrating content management, marketing automation and CRM – can help you deliver timely, context-sensitive information, across multiple channels, to your prospects earlier in the lead processing cycle, resulting in highly qualified leads moving through the sales process faster and more efficiently.

Demand generation remains a top priority among B2B organizations.

By now, most enterprise-level organizations are leveraging Web content management systems and marketing automation systems to help drive their lead generation strategies.

However, many enterprises continue to operate these two platforms separately, in their own unique silos, not realizing that CMS and marketing automation platforms work extremely well together.

By leveraging the strengths of both platforms together, organizations stand to see significant improvements in their demand generation activities.

Here are five steps to generating highly qualified leads using an integrated web content management and marketing automation platform (MAP):

1. Leverage Analytics Data

Both your CMS and your MAP return analytics information based on your prospects’ behavior. How did they find your Web site? Which links did they click, what pages did they visit? How much time did they spend on this page?

When this information is kept in separate silos, it’s valuable… but integrating this data together can help you create a much more complete view of a prospect.

2. Segment Based on Behavior

Once you’ve established a better understanding how visitors behave, you can segment them based on that behavior.

Leveraging the visitor data gathered by your CMS and MAP platforms, you can determine who your visitors are, and in turn, segment them into groups based on industries, company size, roles, common pain points or motivators.

3. Deliver Valuable, Relevant Content

The content a prospect sees can make the difference between a “bounce” and a lead; thus, what each segment sees must be relevant.

Your MAP can push the visitor into the right bucket, and your CMS can deliver the right content. For example, if the visitor is looking at a specific product, the CMS can push a link to a demo of that product to a dynamically delivered sidebar.

4. Deliver Content At the Right Time

The data collected by your CMS and MAP platforms can help you understand prospects, and can also help you understand where the customer is in the buying cycle. In turn, this helps you determine the ideal time to deliver the ideal content.

Is the prospect still in the “research” phase? Your CMS can push use a dynamically generated Web page to register for a White Paper to them. Are they already engaged, but still not sure? Your MAP can deliver a personalized e-mail calling them to action.

5. Use all Available Channels

Today’s CMS platforms include blogging tools, multimedia (video, slideshows, PDFs) content publishing tools, and more. And of course, your MAP can handle e-mail campaigns.

All of these channels can be useful in keeping prospects engaged as you move them through the buying cycle, but it’s important to keep your messaging consistent across all methods of communication. If your Web CMS and your MAP are in separate silos, you might be sending inconsistent messages, or too much repetition of the same message, both of which are surefire ways to drive a customer away.

Content management systems and marketing automation platforms are proven solutions for B2B demand generation. Working together, these platforms are even more effective. By leveraging their data, segmenting visitors, and delivering relevant content at the right time, across all channels, you’ve gained an understanding of your prospect that will help you lead them down the sales path, and allow you to deliver a highly qualified lead to your sales team.