I recently attended a Utah AMA meeting where the guest speaker was the Chief Marketing Officer of Domo, Heather Zynczak.
To give a little context, Domo is a Utah-based analytics company founded by the former head of Omniture, Josh James. They specialize in creating dashboards for executives to get a quick glimpses of how their company is doing in many different areas.
Here are my key takeaways from what Heather had to say:
- Data allows you to take risks. These days, you occasionally hear that sentiment that data is killing creativity in advertising because of a focus on the metrics. In reality, the metrics help you to try out many ideas on small scale, see what is resonating first, and then iterate. One one occasion, the CEO of Domo came to Heather and said “I don’t like that ad. We should take it down.” Heather than showed him metrics on how it was their highest converting ad and was able to quote the exact dollars of revenue the ad had brought in so far, to which he replied “Okay, Okay. I get it. It can stay.” In the not so distant past, advertising, no matter how clever and award-winning the idea, wasn’t able to provide that kind of instant feedback and direction relation to ROI (and the nuances associated with it).
- Your competition isn’t who you think it is. Your competition is anyone who is competing for audience’s attention. This can be Oprah, Twitter, Angry Birds, Televison, etc . – not just companies who offer the same services you do. Learn to “know the watering holes” and how your target audience spends their time.
- Target on social and put mobile first. The majority of Domo’s revenue comes from leads generated online from social media channels (surprising for a B2B company). 30% of those leads are through mobile so they’ve created mobile landing pages that have an “app-like experience” to help conversion.
- Revenue is the engine; Marketing is the fuel. Great marketing is the thing that gets the engine humming and momentum built so that nothing can kill it.