Ricoh VP of Marketing Talks Improving Performance Through Relevance Marketing

Companies that make sure their marketing content is relevant can more than double their return, according to Sandra Zoratti, VP of marketing, executive briefings, and education at Ricoh.

Thanks to a fractured media landscape and an explosion of social media channels, today's customers and prospects are more deluged by marketing messages than ever before.

But make no mistake, these aren't passive recipients. Some 41 percent of consumers say they would consider ending a brand relationship because of irrelevant promotions, and an additional 22 percent say they would definitely defect from the brand, according to a CMO Council study.

A new book, Precision Marketing: Maximizing Revenue Through Relevance, unpacks the relevance problem, and offers a six-step prescription.

We caught up with the book's co-author, Sandra Zoratti, by phone last week. Zoratti was named the 2012 Business Marketer of the Year by the Business Marketing Association in May.

CMO Site: Hasn't relevance always mattered?

Sandra Zoratti: You're right. The difference is today we have so many more channels and marketing messages out there that consumers are disengaging with brands who don't deliver relevance. Half of consumers say irrelevance is driving them to leave brands [but] 60 percent of marketing messages are still generic.

CMO Site: Where should a marketing organization start, with the brand or the audience?

Zoratti: Choose a campaign around which you want to test the increased return you can get using relevant content, based on data-driven insights. When we do side-by-side comparisons, the least uptick we see is a 2x.

We propose using data to develop insights in three ways. First, select the right target; second, align content properly to those targets; third, measure on the tail end, to see if you're hitting the mark and where you have room for additional improvements.

CMO Site: But isn't it expensive to tailor content?

Zoratti: The ROI is typically double, so the return more than justifies it. The real obstacle is accessing and utilizing data. Because, truth is, siloed data, inaccurate data, duplicate records... that's the problem that makes most marketers stall.

CMO Site: Do these principles apply to non-digital media, like print?

Zoratti: The majority of our implementations have been around print campaigns. We've done loyalty statements, magazines, telecommunication promotions, direct mail, transactional statements...

Track using a metric that's meaningful to the business [such as] revenue, response, return on investment, or, in some cases, customer retention or customer reactivation.

CMO Site: When it comes to relevance, what mistakes are marketers still making?

Zoratti: They're missing hidden costs and hidden opportunities. For example, with email, marketers are seduced with the fact that can send out 10,000. If they get a 1 percent response rate, they're happy. But what they don't understand is there's a hidden cost: The 99 percent who didn't respond, some of them may be very frustrated. And now you've damaged your ability to connect with a large percentage of prospects.

CMO Site: When figuring out relevance, what's more revealing: the content targets say they want or their behavioral activities?

Zoratti: We describe this as a continuum, going from something that's a little rougher to the ideal. First, [use "if/then"] business rules to figure out the target. Next, use segmentation, or groupings based on deeper attributes. A lot of companies have dabbled in both of those. But the next level is what I'd call "look alikes" or "twinning," where you understand the profile of your high-value customers and go and find more who look very similar across a number of attributes and behaviors. The fourth level uses predictive analytics, which is based on actual behavior. [This last] is also the hardest to capture fully.

CMO Site: Finally, what about publishers, agencies, and others who offer to create relevant content for a marketer?

Zoratti: Marketing really has to be integrated and multi touch. It's not easy to do, but it's so worth it -- because it's something that sets a company apart from its competition. [Companies that hand over content creation to an external agent] are missing it. They're doing just one little piece of what needs to be a whole process. I'm talking about something that is much more encompassing.

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— Ellis Booker is a freelance journalist with extensive experience with business-to-business marketing.