Case Studies

Case Study – Global Business to Business Manufacturing Company

Situation:

This $10+ billion global business to business electronic component manufacturing company develops technologies that help their customers build and deliver consumer and industrial electronics products. With over 28,000 employees in over 30 countries in North America, Europe and Asia, the company has more than 75 years of experience delivering world-class products to its customers around the globe.

Marketers at this company on three continents use a variety of channels, and twelve different languages, to generate online and inbound call center leads for their global sales force to pursue to sell their products. They sought to gain a better executive level and practitioner level understanding of the performance of their paid search, online display and email marketing channels and gain insights about the impact of each of their tactics on their overall lead generation and sales funnel. Through these insights they hoped to identify opportunities to significantly optimize the combined performance of these channels – with a particular focus on the creative approaches that served as the best “introducers,” "influencers” and “converters” within their sales funnel.

Challenge:

Prior to implementing use of the IQ Insight™ cross channel marketing intelligence software product on a multi-lingual, global basis, marketers at this organization decided they needed to begin the process with an English-only implementation for their three divisions in North America. This effort would involve collecting, cleaning, formatting, normalizing and integrating marketing campaign performance data, customer data, and post-conversion behavior data from approximately 50 product lines, within nearly a dozen business units, of the company. Marketers would then be able to view and analyze all their data – normalized to a common set of their key performance indicators – through a single, user-friendly interactive interface and reporting tool.

But one of the key challenges faced by the client, as well as their partners at Visual IQ – was the fact that all the individual ads/campaigns for each of the 50 product lines, 12 business units and 3 divisions were grouped together into single paid search accounts within each search engine, and a single online display advertising account with DoubleClick. So in order to track, report and analyze marketing performance at the level of granularity that the client wished, a methodology needed to be devised for separating the results from each of these constituent parts out of the merged data being provided by the search engines and DoubleClick.

If a solution to this challenge could be devised, the next challenge would be to emulate the process that had been set up in North America in 11 other languages, report on approximately $20 million in media spend, and provide views of specific slices of the company’s marketing performance to approximately 120 users worldwide based on the business units and product lines for which they had responsibility. This would include everyone from the company CMO to practitioner level marketers for individual product lines.

Goals:

The client wanted to create operational efficiencies in the management and analysis of its global marketing performance data across its worldwide search marketing, online display advertising and email marketing channels that would equate to a labor saving of 33%. They also wanted to increase their media efficiency – as measured by ROI, by 26%.

Solution:

Visual IQ’s software support staff first worked with the client’s various North American teams to create the appropriate business rules for cleansing and normalizing performance data from a variety of sources – including multiple search engines, ad servers and an email platform provider – to ensure that the data would be presented using a common set of the clients key performance indicators so that apples-to-apples comparisons of results could be performed.

This also included the extremely detailed process of identifying each keyword ad and online display ad that mapped to each company division, business unit and product line and writing business rules for the separation and import of performance data into Visual IQ’s software to ensure that all marketing results and analysis could be viewed by product line, business unit, or division. Once this set-up process was complete, marketers at all levels were taught how to access the combined marketing performance data for which they were responsible through the IQ Insight software product, run the reports required to perform their jobs, perform analysis of their results, and identify opportunities to optimize their future efforts in order to produce improved performance.

Once this set-up and implementation process was complete in North America, it was subsequently rolled out in Europe and Asia – which the additional requirement of customizing the IQ Insight interface into 11 languages, and configuring data feeds from multiple search engines, ad servers and email providers in those languages as well. Across the entire global enterprise, the company has significant interest in the relative performance of various creative approaches – both in terms of ad copy and landing page copy – so is placing much of its initial analysis and optimization on the creatives that produce the best performance by geography, division, business unit, product line, timeframe, channel and tactic.

Results:

Within two months of starting to use the software, the client was able to implement changes to their marketing processes that produced a 50% increase in operational efficiencies in managing their marketing performance data. This exceeded their goal by 30%. At this time the client is still in the process of analyzing their combined results and rolling out changes to their campaigns and marketing mix, so have yet to calculate increases in media efficiency/ROI. Check back soon for an update on the progress made toward their 26% increase in ROI goal.

Learn about the marketing optimization challenges that Visual IQ solves for our clients.

Let’s discuss your cross channel marketing challenges and how Visual IQ can provide you with the solutions.