I caught up with Hope Frank, CMO of Webtrends at The CMO Club Summit and look forward to seeing her at Pivot next week. Hope thinks big especially when it comes to marketing and offers a positive assessment of 2011 and an outright bullish one for 2012. It is safe to say that Hope lives up to her name.
DN: As 2011 winds down, are you thinking “good riddance” or “darn I’ll miss it?”
2011 was a pivotal year for digital marketing and businesses. Marketers are getting smarter about their programs and investments, which drives them to companies like Webtrends. We maximize marketing ROI, through optimization, testing, targeting and program measurement with our analytics offering. This is an area companies are laser-focused on. We are certainly looking forward to watching our industry mature in 2012.
DN: Looking back at 2011, what new things did you try that worked or didn’t work?
Webtrends has been on an incredibly steep curve of development to meet the immediate needs of brand marketers today. In 2011, we introduced the industry’s first unified analytics offering to provide brand marketers a view of their performance across mobile, social and web properties. Amazingly, we also introduced Webtrends Social, a complete social offering from ads to apps to analytics. Both of these developments have driven deep digital marketing success for our clients.
DN: Are you particularly proud of something you tried in 2011?
Without question it would be the globalization of our Webtrends products and services. In 2011, we opened our Japan office, and enjoyed tremendous growth from our EMEA, South America and Asia Pacific teams. Our products and services naturally translate to marketers globally who are looking to effectively measure their programs and discover new ways to engage their audiences.
DN: Is the current economic uncertainty effecting your plans for 2012, and if so how?
We do not see the current economic climate affecting our business in any negative way. In fact, we are seeing companies be smarter about their digital investments, driving them to our optimization and analytics solutions. We expect to continue to see strong growth in 2012.
DN: Looking ahead to 2012, are there some emerging trends that you hope to capitalize upon? If so, what are they and how important do you think these trends are to your business?
The shift of analytics from the IT department to the CMO will continue, as products continue to develop in the direction of clean, simple dashboards and interfaces that allow marketers to develop, manage and measure digital campaigns through intuitive tools and services. We have seen this unfold with “ahead of the curve clients” such as Zinio.
Zinio has been an avid customer of our analytics products and services and has applied it in a super intelligent fashion to shape their business. They don’t just sell magazine covers, Zinio sells the treasure of storytelling under the covers. Based on Webtrends analytics, Zinio is able to determine which articles are the most compelling and leverage those in their “Explore” section. Zinio allows for exploration and discovery of category-driven stories FOR FREE to complement the 5,000 titles Zinio sells. View examples here .
DN: Can you boil down your Pivot presentation to one or two key take-aways?
Genius in the Age of Enlightenment: Evan Greene, CMO, of The Recording Academy (The GRAMMYs) and Jeanniey Mullen, CMO of Zinio and VIVmag will join me to showcase creative innovation within social programs in music, fashion and publishing.
Key take-aways from our presentation at Pivot will include:
- Don’t let the tools get in your way
- Dive back into the art of marketing with jaw dropping concepts and creative
- And a unified analytics approach to new creative and outreach is critical to ROI on digital
DN: Finally, among the trends I’m tracking are complexity (for marketers) and data-overload (for consumers). Can you comment on these?
Tackling complexity in analytics was another major achievements in 2011. We developed the only unified analytics offering in the industry. Webtrends Analytics 10 allows brands to measure effectiveness across their mobile, social and web properties, and see these measurements integrated in an easy to understand dashboard. It was a major step forward for our industry.