Data-First Marketing

CHAPTER 1Marketing in the Age of Analytics

PROVING MARKETING'S VALUE TO THE BUSINESS

In 2006, I (co-author Julia) met the CMO of a VoIP startup at a local technology marketing event. Founded in 2004, it was well-funded to the tune of $80 million after a couple of rounds of investment. This was clearly a competitive space, with other VoIP startups investing heavily in marketing and advertising to establish themselves, in addition to the very large and well-known phone company competitors who already “owned” the customers that the upstarts were trying to steal. The main business strategy seemed to be to acquire as many new customers as quickly as possible, but customer acquisition costs were high while revenue per customer was not, as VoIP's main competitive edge was being the low-cost alternative to traditional phone call plans, in particular for international calls.

In a discussion with the CMO, she talked about the search engine optimization (SEO) that her team was doing – optimizing for something like 15,000 keywords. To say I was speechless was probably an understatement. I had several thoughts (none of which I actually blurted out, thank goodness). Fifteen thousand keywords? How was that even possible? Were there really fifteen thousand keywords around VoIP? How many people did she have on her team, whether in-house or at an agency? This was years before Amazon came to be so dominant; with all the brands that they sell, if Amazon said they were optimizing their website ...