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Martin Doetting[/caption]
It’s hard to believe any web analytics company has been in this space for 20 years, but Webtrends is counting two decades this year.
Yet amid the recent fetishization of data, the noise has drowned out so many of the new, and in some cases, established players. To combat this, last year Webtrends hired the VP of marketing at IBM’s Coremetrics, Martin Doettling, as its CMO. This May, Doettling brought Eastwick Communications onboard to develop a program in a similar vein of IBM’s Smarter Planet.
“Being at IBM and working on Smarter Planet, showed me the importance of bringing a story to the table,” Doettling says. “I don’t want legacy PR. I want to tell a great story with strong emotional impact.”
What put Eastwick over the top was a five minute video in which three CMOs were interviewed giving their take on the importance of analytics. Webtrends and Eastwick are now working on their first major campaign centered on the 20-year evolution from log file analysis to tools that shape customer interaction.
Doettling also instituted a week-long “social siesta” where Webtrends’ social interactions were turned off and examined. The siesta, which was lifted on Monday, led Doettling to put in place more precise measurement to ensure social activity is ultimately generating leads that could be acted on by its salesforce.
“We’re in the b2b space but my thinking is, we’re still marketing to individuals within these organizations who make decisions,” he says. “We’ll get through with targeted, not mass marketing.”
Much of its message will focus on what Doettling calls “the new frontier of digital interaction” in which real-time engagement is something of a misnomer. For instance, Webtrends’ work with a popular travel site shows the ideal time to nudge a consumer towards upgrades or add-on purchases is within 13 minutes after the initial buy.
“This is what we mean by real-time,” he adds.
When asked about the potential PR problem around privacy concerns and digital marketing, Doettling says despite the “creepiness factor” consumers ultimately crave personalized interactions. Experiments in which retailers turn off personalization result in dizzying bounce rates.
“At a subconscious level, we’re tuned into the fact that we expect personalized experiences,” he says.
