In today’s online and mobile world customers are educating themselves about products and services long before any flesh and blood sales persons utters a word. Consumers can easily find their own way to detailed product information, user reviews, professional reviews, demonstration videos, user generated unboxing videos, sales rankings, price comparisons, social media sentiment, buying guides, and more. For this reason, marketing is more important than ever and the Chief Marketing Officer has never been more powerful nor controlled more budget, for both media and technology.
At the same time, however, the job of a marketing leader has never been harder or more stressful. The digital landscape has become so vast and dynamic that the marketer must master an endless parade of new channels. Just as they were getting used to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, along comes Pinterest and SnapChat, and undoubtedly the next hot channel is just around the corner. With an expanding universe of marketing channels comes an ever increasing volume of data. With all this data available, CMOs are expected to quantify their results with the precision of a CFO. While each new channel begets a host of new adtech and marketing tools to help the CMO manage campaigns, measure performance, and optimize results, each of these solutions produces data and reports in their own unique format.
It has gotten to the point that when the CEO asks “how is our marketing doing?” it strikes fear in the heart of the CMO. This perfectly benign question usually kicks off an all-night exercise of cutting and pasting data and charts from various marketing execution systems into a lengthy presentation to answer the CEO’s question. When PowerPoint (now in its 28th year) is the tool of choice for marketers to aggregate and translate performance data from their various systems you know the situation is dire. Making matters even worse is the fact that many large brands can’t even access their own campaign data as it is held hostage by their various marketing agencies. Not only does the client get charged a markup by the agency for report requests, but it’s the classic case of the “fox guarding the henhouse” to ask an agency to report on their own performance.
Several years ago, a former marketing leader from a Venrock portfolio company did a stint as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence in our offices. She identified this lack of a single “CMO dashboard” integrating data from various point solutions as a problem she had experienced firsthand. Essentially she wanted a “System of Record” for marketing. After several months of researching potential technical solutions she concluded that, despite the crying need for such a product, building one would be too difficult. She gave up frustrated and joined another best of breed marketing tool company. This unsolved problem stuck in my head.
A few years later I met Beckon. The team at Beckon have been marketers, built marketing point tools, worked in agencies, and have built, installed and used systems of record in other enterprise functional domains such as finance and sales. Having seen the problems facing modern marketers firsthand they have taken a novel approach to building a system which can pull in data from over 100 different marketing point tools. While some of this data is available via well supported APIs, much of the data comes in via spreadsheet imports and email parsing (think TripIt.) The next thing Beckon does is normalize the data so that marketers can compare different campaigns across different channels with one common taxonomy. They allow the marketing team to add metadata such as geographies or regions, product names or categories, customer segments, agencies, objectives, and so on, in order to put the marketing results in appropriate context. They allow for What If analysis, planning, and time series tracking. Beckons creates beautiful visualizations and answers to plain English questions that don’t require analysts skilled in SQL queries. And because this is not a BI tool, but rather an application built “by marketers, for marketers”, it is loaded with best practices for omni-channel marketing performance management right out of the box with no IT Department involvement.
Over the past year some of the best brands in the world have adopted Beckon. Coke, Microsoft, GAP, and BSkyB are among the clients using Beckon to manage their omnichannel marketing. The real sweet spot for Beckon are mass marketers and indirect sellers who spend across at least five different channels. While I have written about my keen interest in predictive and intelligent software, the truth is that relevant, advanced modeling is only possible if the data sets the models are built on are comprehensive, normalized and continuously updated. Finance, for example, measures its performance according to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), a consistent, agreed-upon methodology shared within and across companies. As a result, we can understand a company’s financial performance quarter to quarter and compare performance to other companies in a standardized way. Marketers have never had a similar system. That’s what Beckon finally brings to marketing – a strong, united data foundation upon which all kinds of consistent, robust marketing analyses can flow – benchmarking, planned versus actuals, test and control, lift over baseline calculations, econometric (mix) models and more. Beckon gives marketers self-serve access to many of these analyses within its application and can also flow its standardized, merged and continuously updated data sets to advanced analytics teams and tools.
Marketing can finally have its own system of record the way sales has Salesforce, manufacturing has SAP, Finance has Oracle, and HR has Workday. Beckon is Marketing Performance Management. Finally the CMO does not have to hide when the CEO calls (or beckons) them to their office.
VC Waves 