4 Legal Tips for Using Customer Testimonials

Editor’s Note: Legal information is not legal advice. For any questions regarding the law, please consult an attorney.

Customer testimonials are great for your business. They build customer trust, create goodwill for your product, and show potential customers a positive brand history. But there are some things you need to watch out for when using them. Endorsements and testimonials are governed by truth-in-advertising laws.

First, we’ll take a look at the effectiveness of testimonials, and then we’ll go over four key legal tips for using them correctly.

Effectiveness of Reviews and Testimonials

Let’s examine whether testimonials are actually useful. It seems almost self-explanatory that when choosing between two similar providers, the one with excellent reviews and numerous testimonials would appear to be the better choice. But just how persuasive are reviews?

Quite a bit, it seems. Over 70% of customers look at product reviews before purchasing, and a survey sponsored by Zendesk found that 90% of participants were influenced in their buying decisions by positive reviews, which is huge. Take a look at the graph below:

If your business can capitalize on positive customer testimonials and reviews, that will almost certainly influence the buying decisions of your customers. The primary reason is testimonials build trust. They show that your business is good at what it does and that your product does what you say it will. Testimonials also go a long way toward showing a history of good service, which is extremely important to most customers. They want to know that you’re not just a flash in the pan.

Testimonials should be authentic and not “salesy” so that they stand out as unbiased and genuine accounts of how happy your customers were with what you provided. Sincere and high-quality testimonials not only help to overcome the doubts of skeptics about your product, they even go a long way toward changing the minds of prospects who aren’t sure about the legitimacy of your product.

The reason for this is called “social proof,” which is also known as social influence. Social proof is essentially the power of the crowd. If a person is unsure of something (like a product or a business) but everyone else seems to love it, that person is more likely to give it a chance.

But there are specific rules that you need to follow if you are using testimonials or endorsements. The law says that they must be truthful and not misleading.

Let’s take a look.

1. Disclose Your Relationship with the Endorser

You must disclose any special relationships between you and your endorsers. For example, employees who promote your product must disclose that they are your employees, and business owners must create a policy that states this. Within your business, you should make sure you share this policy with employees, shareholders, and investors.

One way that endorsers can disclose their connections is to include tags or hashtags on social media promotions. For example, have a look at this tweet about Nutella from Brooke Burke-Charvet:

You can see that at the end of her tweet, she uses the #ad hashtag. This shows that she is promoting Nutella as an advertisement, and that she is being paid to promote it.

As another example, Amazon requires that all Amazon Associates (business owners and bloggers who earn referral fees by placing links to products for sale on Amazon.com on their own websites) must disclose that they are an Amazon affiliate and that they are paid when users purchase a product from their promotion.

You can be held liable for failing to disclose material connections with your endorsers.

All disclaimers and disclosures should be in clear, simple language so that viewers can’t miss or misunderstand your message. For example, use the #ad tag or a short statement like “This product was sent to us for review purposes” or “This review was funded by [Company].”

2. Ensure That Testimonials Are Accurate

You need to make sure all testimonials are accurate. One of the primary rules of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is that endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences of the endorser.

The FTC uses the following example to show how honesty about products should be conveyed:

“An advertisement for a weight-loss product features a formerly obese woman. She says in the ad, ‘Every day, I drank 2 WeightAway shakes, ate only raw vegetables, and exercised vigorously for six hours at the gym. By the end of six months, I had gone from 250 pounds to 140 pounds.’ … Because the endorser clearly describes the limited and truly exceptional circumstances under which she achieved her results, the ad is not likely to convey that consumers who weigh substantially less or use WeightAway under less extreme circumstances will lose 110 pounds in six months.

“If the advertisement simply said that the endorser lost 110 pounds in six months using WeightAway together with diet and exercise, however, this description would not adequately alert consumers to the truly remarkable circumstances leading to her weight loss.”

The other aspect of this (also illustrated by the above example from the FTC) is that endorsements must reflect typical experiences; and if the experience is not typical, it should be disclosed in an easy-to-spot disclaimer. Here’s an example of what this type of disclaimer would look like:

You can be held liable for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements.

3. Get Written Permission from Your Customers

Be sure to keep a paper trail of any endorsement agreements or arrangements that you set up. If a customer agrees to endorse your product, get their agreement in writing (an email is sufficient).

This protects you in case a customer later wants to retract their testimonial. If they’ve agreed in writing that you can use their testimonial for a set period of time, you won’t have to remove their testimonial until the contract ends.

You can include clauses in your Terms of Service or Privacy Policy that any user reviews submitted to your website can be used for marketing purposes.

4. Don’t Lift Testimonials from Review Websites

If you see a good testimonial for your product on another site, don’t just copy and paste it onto your own website. Most review sites have a clause in their Terms of Service stating that user-generated content (such as reviews or testimonials) is owned by the user and licensed to the website.

This means that if you copy and paste the testimonial, you are infringing on the intellectual property rights of the person who wrote the review, which is not the best way to treat people who love your product!

Instead, you can use links on your website that go to these review sites, or you can use plug-ins that connect to crowdsourcing review websites like Yelp. If you want to have reviews easily available on your own site, use resources such as BazaarVoice.

Conclusion

Remember that you can be held liable for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements and for failing to disclose material connections with your endorsers.

It’s not hard to follow the FTC’s guidelines. Simply ensure that all testimonials are honest and that they accurately represent the product. Also, ensure that you and your endorsers disclose all affiliations and any payments that are being made for the testimonial. By following these rules, you can benefit from the use of testimonials without being subjected to investigations or penalties from the FTC.

About the Author: Leah Hamilton is a qualified Solicitor and writer working at TermsFeed, where businesses can create legal agreements in minutes using the Generator.

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Content: Not Another Channel

Content this, content that. Content marketing, content strategy. Everyone's talking content, all the time.

The question being most frequently asked is: who's responsible for all this content. Is it communications? PR? Social media? Marketing in general? 

The honest answer to all those questions is yes. All these divisions (and more) play a role in content marketing and in content strategy. 

Too many marketers, and the organizations they represent, mistakenly view content as a channel. Like social media, email, search, media, or direct marketing, they want content to be departmentalized, siloed, circumscribed, and cleanly defined.

Content does indeed require an enormous amount of domain expertise.  A content strategy is required to set goals for content marketing initiatives, and to define how those goals will be measured. Editors and project managers work to build governance around those goals and define how content will be created, approved, distributed, find an audience, be measured, optimized, conform to checks and guidelines (e.g. legal and brand). Within this paradigm areas of hyper-specialization might exist: web and app developers, writers, graphic designers, photographers, videographers, editors, legal – the list can go on nearly ad infinitum.

And that's not to mention the involvement of the aforementioned channels: search, email, media, and social media are just the beginning. All of these require content to function. 

Email is a container for content. Search optimizes content. In advertising, content masquerades as "creative" (because it's more expensive), but at the end of the day, that's just a gussied-up word that means content. Social platforms and websites would be dismal destinations indeed were they not continually refreshed with content. 

Essentially, content is the lifeblood of digital and offline channels, but content itself is not a channel.

Still, marketers have difficulties seeing past channels, which is why content struggles to gain a foothold across the enterprise. Like converged media, content requires players throughout the marketing department and indeed, across the organization, to collaborate and to align. 

Precious few content initiatives these days happen without paid media, for example. Whether social promotion or ads that drive audiences to content executions, media and by extension, advertising, are integral to content campaigns. Yet content and advertising are still viewed by the overwhelming number of companies (with notable exceptions, such as Intel) as very different divisions, the Mars and Venus of marketing.

Search teams, email teams, more often than not look to disparate sources for content, leading to inconsistencies in voice, tone, look and feel. If content (and brand) aren't aligned across a panoply of paid, owned and earned media channels (that become more numerous each month), they risk consumers not recognizing the brand, voice, message or product as they flit across media, channels, screens and devices.

A text, and email message and a banner ad have little in common, other than the fact that all are, in the end, content delivery systems.

Here's where organizations will be challenged in the coming months and years. They will go out and build content teams. In fact, they already are. We’re seeing hiring move up gradually from manager/director level roles to VP-and-higher job descriptions with "content" or "editor" in the title.

But those roles can't be siloed off. They can and must be defined as being on par with, equal to, and collaborative with all the channel-centric marketing initiatives the enterprise undertakes. 

That can only happen with this one big step forward, more of a mindset challenge than we’d collectively realized when embarking on this content journey. 

Content is not a channel.

To start thinking about your own company's content efforts as a broad initiative that crosses all channels, download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketing.

Author Bio: Rebecca Lieb is a strategic advisor, research analyst, keynote speaker, author, and columnist. Her areas of specialization are digital marketing and media, with a concentration in content strategy, content marketing and converged media. She works with many of the world's leading brands on digital marketing innovation. Clients range from start-up to non-profits to Fortune 100 brands and regulated industries, including Facebook, Home Depot, Nestlé, Anthem, Adobe, Honeywell, DuPont, Fidelity, Gannett, IBM, Save the Children, Pinterest, Cisco, ad and PR agencies, and The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Author Bio: Larry Levy served as the Co-Founder and CEO of Appinions Inc prior to its acquisition by ScribbleLive, where he now sits as the SVP. As a serial entrepreneur, Larry brings a wealth of hands-on experience. Prior to Appinions, Larry served as co-founder and CEO of Semagix Group, which was sold to Warburg Pincus in 2006. Larry was also the founder and CEO of Protégé Holdings, recognized as an “Upside 100” company, as well as the founder of Citria and Delrina Europe. He holds a BCom and BAcc from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and is a chartered accountant CA(SA).

 

 

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Google Analytics 101: What Every Small Business Owner Should Know about the Powerful Website Analysis Tool

Understanding your customers well enough to ensure you’re giving them what they want and need — that’s the key to success for any small business in any industry. It’s easy enough to learn about the customers and prospects who actually walk into your store or office, but what about those who visit your digital storefront? They’re every bit as important as the customers you deal with face-to-face. How do you get to know them?

Google Analytics is one powerful — and free — website analysis tool that can help you better understand your current and potential customers. It can also help you understand how people are interacting with your company website, where they’re coming from and how often they visit, what parts of your site are capturing their attention and what parts aren’t sparking interest.  

It’s easy to see why Google Analytics is one of the most popular website analysis tools — it’s easy to use. You don’t need to be a digital genius to work with this most useful of Google’s website tools. But if you do find yourself with questions, Google offers a plethora of ways to get answers, from its own Google Analytics YouTube channel to an active blog and detailed help pages.

If you’re going to use Google Analytics, it’s well worth your time to read through as much of the information as possible. We’ve put together a Google Analytics 101 to help you get a quick start:

Setting up your website to be tracked

Head over to google.com/analytics to sign up for a free account, or simply log in if you already have an account. Over the years, Google has substantially streamlined the process of setting up a website to be tracked. Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you’ll need to tell the tool what websites or mobile apps you want to track. Google calls this “setting up a property.”

Here are the steps Google outlines for setting up your website as a property to be tracked:

• Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
• Click on the Admin tab.
• Choose the account to which you want to add the property. Use the dropdown menu in the Account column to do this.
• Once you’ve chosen the account, in the Property column, click on “Create new property” from the dropdown menu.
• Select “website.”
• Enter the site’s name.
• Enter the website URL.
• Choose an industry category and reporting time zone.
• Click “Get Tracking ID.”

After you’ve added your website as a property, you need to set up the tracking code in order for Google to begin collecting data on your website.

Setting up the tracking code

Google Analytics needs some help from you in order to know what site to track and how to collect data. Once you’ve established your website as a property, you need to set up the tracking code for it. Google says you can do this in two ways:

• Use Google Tag Manager to add Google Analytics tags. This route makes it easier to incorporate tags from other sources like AdWords Conversion Tracking.
• Or, if you only want to add the basic Google Analytics tracking code, you can add the tracking code into the HTML of every page on your website.

If you think you want to set up Google Tag Manager, Google provides comprehensive information on how to do that, and they suggest you start by reading their About Google Tag Manager page. Since we’re focusing on Google Analytics for beginners, let’s talk about the second option, which is incorporating the tracking code into your website’s HTML.

If you have access to your website’s source code and are comfortable editing HTML, you can do this step yourself. Or, if you work with a webmaster or developer, he or she can help you. Google outlines these steps:

• Sign into your Google Analytics account, select the Admin tab, and choose the property you’re working on from the Account and Property columns.
• Next, click “tracking info > tracking code.”
• Your tracking code snippet will appear in a box with several lines of JavaScript in it, and will begin with <script> and conclude with </script>.
• Don’t do anything to change the snipped portion. Just copy and paste it into the HTML for every web page you want to track. Be sure to place it right before the closing </head> tag in the page code.

We strongly encourage you to read the Google Analytics help pages on these topics; this blog is merely a summary, and we couldn’t begin to explain the process half as well as Google does! Armed with the primer we’ve provided, dive into Google’s more detailed information and you’ll soon develop a better understanding of just how powerful a website analysis tool Google Analytics is.

Dashboard basics

Google has created an intuitive, versatile and robust dashboard that allows you to crunch numbers in a multitude of ways. Learning how to use the dashboard is easy, and it can help you really understand how well your website is performing, what’s working, what’s not, and where you can improve.

Starting on the home page, click on the account you want to analyze. The dashboard will generate graphs, percentages and pie charts with a wealth of information from the last 30 days, including:

• Number of visitors, percentage of first-time visitors and percentage of repeat visitors.
• Average length of time visitors stayed on the page.
• Where visitors were from and what language they speak.
• Conversions.
• Site speed.
• Traffic source.

If you want to see stats for a different time period, it’s easy to change the date range. You can also narrow the reporting time frame to month, day, week or even hour. Moreover, you can compare two sets of date ranges to see how your results have changed over time.

Reports you should know and use

Google Analytics makes it easy to put the raw performance data of your website into meaningful perspective. The tool can generate a multitude of reports that you can customize in many ways. You may find the following reports particularly valuable:

• The Audience Overview can tell you how many people visit your page, what time of day they’re visiting, where they’re from, what browser they’re using to access your site, and even what size monitor each visitor is using.

• Acquisition allows you to view a traffic report that shows where the majority of your traffic comes from — search engines, referrals from other sites or different pages within your own site.
• If you’re wondering where visitors are entering your site, the landing page report can tell you that. Data showing visitors entering from your site’s index page may mean they’re finding you through a search engine or may have bookmarked your site. If one particular page gets a lot of traffic, however, it may mean the content is a popular topic. You can also track ad campaigns using landing pages.
• Want to know how many people are actively using your site? The Active User Report lets you choose a date and see how many people have actively used your site within the past seven, 14 and 30 days of that date. The data can help you understand if your website is holding users’ interest, or if you need to re-evaluate what you’re doing.
• You may have 1,000 visitors a day and still wonder what they’re really worth to your business. Google has an answer for that in its Lifetime Value Reporting tool. Google says the report “lets you understand how valuable different users are to your business based on lifetime performance across multiple sessions. For example, you can see lifetime value for users you acquired through email or paid search. With that information in hand, you can determine a profitable allocation of marketing resources to the acquisition of those users.”
• The keywords report shows you keyword terms visitors searched for on a search engine, such as Google or Bing, before visiting your site, and how long they stayed (on average) on a particular page after searching for a keyword.
• Driving traffic to your website is important, but you also want those visits to convert into potential or actual customers. The conversions report allows you to track how many visitors signed up for your newsletter, who clicked on your shopping page and more.
• It’s important to understand how you’re acquiring new customers, and the Treemaps report can help you do that. The report graphically interprets incoming traffic across different channels, so you can quickly understand traffic trends.
• Segmentation is key to the success of your marketing trends, and the Cohort Analysis report can help you identify like-minded groups of visitors. You can group users through a range of parameters, such as the date they first visited your site, then track their behavior over time.

For a visual walkthrough of some of the above mentioned features, click on the video below.

You have to set goals

All the analytics and data are aimless if you don’t have goals in mind. Goals can help you measure your site’s performance to see if it’s achieving what you want and need it to do. Google classifies a “goal” as an activity that’s completed, like a conversion, that contributes to your overall business success. For example, e-retailers might count a purchase as a goal.

“Having properly configured goals allows Google Analytics to provide you with critical information, such as the number of conversions and the conversion rate for your site or app,” Google says. “Without this information, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns.”

To establish goals, log into your Google Analytics account and click on the Admin tab. Next, choose the account and property you want to view. Once there, select “goals.” As you might guess, clicking “new goal” lets you generate a completely new goal, or you can click on an existing goal to edit it. To create a new goal, you can use a template provided by Google, create a custom goal or create “smart goals.”

Be sure to visit Google’s page on creating and editing goals for a full rundown on how to create goals using each different approach. Meanwhile, it’s worthwhile to note there are multiple types of goals and each delivers different data:

• Destination goals let you designate a pageview or screenview as a conversion.
• Duration goals look at the time a user spends on a page and treats that duration as a conversion to measure engagement.
• Event goals consider how a user interacts with your site and counts specific behaviors as a conversion.
• Page/screens per session goals evaluate the number of pages or screens a user sees per session, with a specified number counting as a conversion.

Once you create a goal and save it, Google Analytics begins collecting that data immediately and will continue to do so until you turn off the goal. Once you have your goals set up, you can analyze these conversion rates in the Goal Reports. Other reports also track goal conversions, including Visitor Reports, Traffic Reports, Site Search Reports, and Events Reports.

A final word

Of course, like any website analysis tool, Google Analytics has a paid premium version that offers additional functionality. However, the basic, free account has enough versatile tools to satisfy most small businesses.

Google never rests on its laurels, so we can expect to see more changes and new developments for Google Analytics in 2016. Following the blog, taking advantage of the YouTube channel and read through help pages to keep abreast of updates and to understand how to leverage the power of Google Analytics to benefit your small business.

© 2016, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.

The post Google Analytics 101: What Every Small Business Owner Should Know about the Powerful Website Analysis Tool appeared first on Vertical Response Blog.

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How to Consistently Create Remarkable Content

It’s no secret that creativity and innovation are two key ingredients in a highly effective content marketing strategy.

And yet, consistently coming up with new, imaginative content ideas for your business or brand can seem utterly vexing at times.

We all want to have better ideas, but it isn’t always as simple as just putting on our “better idea” caps.

That’s why successful content marketers often have methods that help them produce remarkable content on a regular basis.

Let’s look at one such method.

A little innovation can go a long way

In the book The Art of Innovation, author Tom Kelley describes the creative process of the global design and innovation firm IDEO (taken from the word ideology).

Over the years, he’s watched the company grow from a small group of fun-loving designers into a firm of more than 600 professionals.

David Kelley, his brother and IDEO founder, helped Steve Jobs develop the Lisa computer and worked on Apple’s famous mouse design.

IDEO is ranked number 10 on Fast Company’s list of the Top 25 Most Innovative Companies and is the winner of 38 Red Dot awards, 28 iF Hannover awards, and more IDEA awards than any other design firm.

Reinventing the wheel … every day

IDEO has redesigned everything from children’s toys to high-tech medical equipment.

In a vintage spot on ABC’s Nightline in 1999 called “The Deep Dive: One Company’s Secret Weapon for Innovation,” IDEO became well-known when a team at the company applied a modern redesign to the classic shopping cart in just five days.

Their process was inspiring and encapsulated their mantra:

Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of a lone genius.

Kelley points out that Thomas Edison’s legendary innovation followed this philosophy.

Edison ambitiously filed more than 1,000 patents and — more importantly — developed influential technology, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the lightbulb (the Steve Jobs of his era, to say the least).

We think of him as just one man — The Genius — but he employed a large creative team that stood on the shoulders of important creatives that came before them.

Much like Edison, the team at IDEO are a group of innovative people working in a kind of “focused chaos,” but Kelley outlines their deceptively simple methodology.

IDEO’s method in 5 simple steps

1. Understand the market, the client, the technology, and any constraints that are perceived for the problem at hand. Content marketers need to research who their audiences and prospects will be in order to make an educated guess as a starting point.
2. Observe real people — in real-life situations, using real language — to find out what makes them tick. Once you start publishing content and growing a small, loyal audience, you can tune in to their fears, hopes, and desires to help steer your course.
3. Visualize groundbreaking concepts and the customers who’ll use them — a brainstorm-intensive process that imagines the customer experience. Discover your prospects’ concerns so that you can speak to their needs.
4. Evaluate and refine to create quick, iterative prototypes that build on each other incrementally with the understanding that “no idea is so good it can’t be improved.” You must learn from your mistakes and optimize your cornerstone content.
5. Implement the new concept for commercialization and business. This is the longest and most technically challenging phase. In content marketing, this is what Seth Godin refers to as being prepared to “get rich slow.” Successful content marketers take the time to earn attention, build trust, and turn it into a profit.

These steps certainly resemble agile content marketing.

Innovative content marketers, start here …

Content marketers are constantly tasked with building authority and getting people to talk about and share their content.

Unfortunately, studies have shown that creativity can’t be bought.

Producing abundant and engaging content requires a great deal of focused intention, a fair amount of passion, and a lot of elbow grease:

1. Start with an educated guess for your content strategy.
2. Create and release content knowing it’s likely to be a bit flawed.
3. Optimize it often, based on audience feedback.

Repeating this process over time enables you to create the best content for your audience.

You’ll also need some creative teamwork and a network of fans and customers who will share your content.

When we tap into our creative sides, we must embrace risk and not fear the occasional setback.

One final, important innovation mantra

Fail often to succeed sooner.

No one (in their right mind) says content marketing is easy, but having a solid starting place is a huge step ahead of the competition.

Editor’s note: The original version of this post was published on November 6, 2012.

About the author

Kelton Reid

Kelton Reid is Director of Multimedia Production for Rainmaker Digital, writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Find out how great writers keep the cursor moving on his podcast The Writer Files, and find Kelton on Twitter.

The post How to Consistently Create Remarkable Content appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Landing Page Flaws That Kill Your Conversions

What is the purpose of a landing page?

To acquire valuable information from prospects that will allow you to market to them effectively, right?

It’s a simple transaction. You, the marketer, lay your offer on the table. If the prospect finds your offer valuable enough, they’ll give up some of their information to receive what you’re offering. Nothing else in marketing could be so simple. It’s a great “take it or leave it” scenario.

So how do you know if your landing pages are doing well?

The average landing page conversion rates are all over the board. Some people claim the average is 2%, while other say you should be at around 20%.

Wishpond looked at data from a number of different companies and found the average conversion rate for a B2B landing page is 13.28%, while the average for B2C is 9.87%.

If you’re struggling for conversions, the best thing you can do is repeatedly test variants against the originals. But if you’re always producing low-quality variants, it’s unlikely you’ll see a budge in conversions.

That’s what today’s infographic is for. It will show you what a lot of landing pages get wrong – and how you can rectify those flaws. From here you’ll be able to create better variants that’ll kick your originals in the rear.

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

Additional Resources

We’ve created a lot of free content to help you take your landing pages to the next level. Here are some of my favorite webinars (blog posts are included under Related Posts):

• The 7 Principles of Conversion Centered Design
• How to Design High-Converting Lead Gen Landing Pages
• 3 Secrets to Perfecting Your Landing Pages and A/B Tests

Signup for these webinars. They’re presented by top-notch folks who have been around the block and done their fair share of optimizing. Now they share that knowledge with you, for free.

They’ve already been recorded, so as soon you watch the webinar you’ll get to watch it right away. You’ll have some great takeaways for each.

What techniques have you used to increase landing page conversions?

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

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Get Organized: One Day Designer at a Time

Whitney English needed a better way to stay organized. Not finding what she was after at the store, she sought to create her own ... and the Day Designer was born.Related Articles

1. Your Business' Branding Is Not a Bonny Bear
2. March 29, Celebrate Mom & Pop Businesses with an Email Campaign
3. 5 Pieces of Advice for Mothers Who Run Businesses from Home

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7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization

Not sure if I buy into the whole 7 is the luckiest of all numbers thing. According to the Daily Mail, however, 7 is the most significant number across religions and cultures, it also appears in some of the world's favorite fictional works and a poll of 30,000 people revealed 7 is overwhelmingly our favorite number.

Regardless of where you fall on the Lucky 7 scale, it is by complete happenstance that I present to you today 7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization. These all are culled directly from The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization  — our recently-released eBook which was developed in partnership with The CMO Club. 

In bold is the topic for which each quote is referring to specifically. 

1. Consumer Insights

"I think in an ideal state there is a dedicated consumer insights team, but a team that doesn’t work in its own little silo. A team that is interactive not only with the marketing team but also the product team, as well as with others who touch the customer technology. They have to understand the full circle of customers’ curiosities so they can put together a real, robust view for those who need it." — Patrick Adams, CMO, PayPal

2. Integrated Engagement Planning

"Ultimately [integrated planning] is a function that’s run through the marketing team. We establish the brand voice and try to create and implement consistency across all of our efforts, all of our communications channels and all of our internal divisions/business units." — Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy (The GRAMMYs)

3. Content Development

"We have a dedicated team that’s focused on content strategy and on creating what I call the content supply chain, mapping out where all the sources of content come from. Do we have the content already? How do we create new content? Who creates the content? It may be internal, it may be external. What format does that content take? Then, how do we work with the appropriate teams to get that content in market? — Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

4. Evaluative Analytics

"We set up this analytics center of excellence. At the same time we did the same thing in sales and the same thing in finance so that we could create more integrated capabilities in order to drive much more consistency and connections of our data. Not too long ago we launched a marketing analytic workbench. Now we can take all this information from various platforms and put it in one place and analyze it and make real-time decisions about how our multichannel customer engagements are performing and make adjustments. — Karen Quintos, CMO, Dell

5. Customer Data Management

"We’re building a centralized marketing profile that is at the customer level and becomes the common definition used by marketing teams across the organization to drive their campaigns. Getting the data house in order, making it real time and managing it at the attribute level is what’s important. As is making sure that the experts who are really close to the products have the ability to control what’s most important to them in that profile. This allows
us to federate it out and take a much more efficient view across the organization, rather than be a big centralized behemoth that is too slow and ultimately doesn’t work. — Steve Ireland, SVP/MD, JPMorgan Chase

6. Alignment

"Alignment happens at multiple levels. First, you’ve got to align on what your model is and then be true to it. Pick one and do it properly and continue to talk about how to improve that model versus pretending you’re picking one yet trying to do another. Align the top 25 people in your organization with that and have them talk consistently about it. The second level of alignment is the foundation tools. Let’s get aligned on what the brand stands for and how to express it at a high level. The third level of alignment is strategic alignment. Let’s agree on what the strategic plan is, and as a consequence of P&L, what the KPIs are for the brands and the business units globally. The fourth level of alignment is what the brand plan looks like and what the programs are going to be in each market for each brand. The last level of alignment is how our teams are going to work together as one team to execute on that plan. You can imagine if you are off at any one of these levels the further you are into the organization, the greater the gap is. So we try to talk as an organization about the impact of what we are doing, even as to how that impacts you four levels into the organization. — Clive Sirkin, CMO, Kimberly-Clark

7. Accountability

"n order to be effective, marketers need to have credibility. Because they have to do a lot of leading by influence, they have to do a lot of aligning and engaging and evangelizing, and that only works when people trust you. They only trust you if you deliver the goods and are accountable; you do what you say and you say what you mean.
— Peter Horst, CMO, The Hershey Company

To get more incredible insights and thoughts like these, download The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization.

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