Natascha is the CEO of MarketingXLerator, a marketing consultancy with a focus on social media. She co-innovates with small and large clients including SAP, Polycom, SLAP Company, LookingGlass, and HR Strategies.
Natascha has over 15 years experience in enterprise marketing and holds two Master’s degrees. Passionate about teaching others “how to fish”, she is an Adjunct Instructor for Advanced Social Media at UCSC Silicon Valley Campus, as well as a co-author of the book 42 Rules for B2B Social Media Marketing. She also teaches and practices yoga.
How did you get to where you are now?
I truly enjoy connecting with people and as a result I’ve had many teachers, mentors, and coaches who have supported me on my journey.
Professionally, I am now running my own boutique social media marketing consultancy; something I’ve been enjoying tremendously.
After working for many years in Silicon Valley at startups and large enterprises, I ended up at SAP. Social media was just gaining momentum and I got to be part of figuring it all out.
One of my passions is to make people independent. My motto is “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man how to fish and he will eat his whole life”. I don’t want to be that type of consultant you never get rid off.
In this vein, I enjoy teaching executives in the use of social media, especially in helping them define their own brand.
For about 3 years now I’ve been teaching social media at UCSC Silicon Valley Campus and am about to add few more classes.
With the social media space evolving so quickly, I am not sure where it will lead me with my business. I like to think of myself as a marketing consultant first and social media consultant second.
Personally, I am also a yoga teacher and eager yogi to balance my life.
What drives you as marketer?
What gives me the most pleasure is when a client or organization is moving on to the next level because of the work they have done with me. In the end, it’s all about working with people not companies. Empowering people to do something they could not do before and achieving the success they desired is satisfying.
Second, I like a good challenge. Social media is just a tool for marketers like email used to be in the 90s. I can already see social media becoming more specialized and less innovative. I’m afraid the time will come when social media is mainstream and much less interesting.
Hence, I am already thinking about what I might be doing next. I hope that through Digital Transformation and IoT some new exciting opportunities will emerge.
In the end, it’s all about making my clients successful. If that means that social media is not the best fit, so be it.
What do you think is the state-of-the-art in Customer Experience?
I don’t think that has really changed. Customers want to be treated with respect, in a timely manner and get what they want.
What HAS changed is the technology and that has made customers more demanding and given marketers more information than they ever had before.
Especially Millennials have very high expectations in terms of user interfaces, ease of use and speed; and of course, the mobile experience, including apps, is crucial for marketing success.
The holy grail of customer experience today is personalization. And not the kind of personalization from the past, where the mass email you receive addresses you with your name.
Today it’s about actually knowing as much as possible about a customer by using business analytics (yes, the buzz word: Big Data) on sets of data collected on social media, the Internet, CRM systems etc. This goes beyond the marketing department and is what people refer to as Digital Transformation. Marketers dream of the 360 view of a client, and new tools like Meeco that allow individuals to decide which of their personal data to sell to a brand are opening entirely new avenues, in terms of accuracy of data and depth of information shared.
What everybody wants in marketing is to know the customer’s intention. What if I knew for sure that Jim Smith is in a good mood today and determined to by some new accounting software? I could send him a special offer right now.
What do you see as the biggest challenges in measuring ROI for social media marketing?
Discipline and resources. Measuring ROI for social media marketing is difficult, so difficult that “just 15% of CMOs have quantitatively proven the impact of social media”.
To do it right, companies need software that can help them track activity and analyze it. If the goal is awareness, a direct correlation might be impossible to establish. Think of an ad in a newspaper. You might “know” that it creates awareness but can’t prove it with quantitative data.
But if my goal is to track conversions into closed deals, that is possible but requires investment in technology, training and resources to run this effort.
What happens frequently with small businesses, is that they use basic social media management tools that can give them statistics on the performance of say, Twitter or Facebook posts, but they have no way to tie that back to actual deals closed.
Google Analytics requires know-how to use it effectively, which means training time and then time to track and create reports.
The main enemy of social media is the effort it takes to do it well. Definitely not free.
As a marketer, how do you feel about the increasing number of marketing technology companies and what are your criteria when choosing or trying new tools?
I believe that it’s good to have many marketing technologies to choose from, as needs differ. And eventually, the market always consolidates into fewer players.
In the age of Digital Transformation and IoT, a lot more new marketing technologies will emerge, because we need them to solve unsolved problems. And many problems can hopefully be solved faster and simpler.
Personally, when I need a tool, I Google for it and often do the trial. Or I hear about a new tool and if it sounds intriguing, I will install it and try it.
It’s more challenging to choose a tool for a client, as it has to fit with their infrastructure. Plus - if they need a large scale social media management tool that can cost thousands of dollars a month - they also have to assign a resource and allow time for training, set it up and fine tuning. This makes it a lot harder to trial an enterprise tool vs. a small tool. The risk is higher to make a mistake.
The number one criteria to choose a new tool for a client is to make sure it will work for them! People have good intentions but only limited time on their hands.
How much dependency is there about Twitter data for consumer insights and listening and what would happen if Twitter disappears tomorrow?
Twitter is one of my favorite social media channels. But, if it disappeared tomorrow, the world would go on. Probably, some new tool would fill the void.
Twitter is not an easy tool and has a learning curve. That’s why I like it. Some tools that are super easy to participate in, like commenting on blogs, get a larger percentage of offensive and useless engagement. Twitter is also wonderful for personal branding. And Twitter Analytics (free) are great.
Frankly, I think that most companies are not set up to truly use Twitter data for consumer insights. Here an example of a company that was: When I worked at SAP, we had a team that ran the listening, monitoring and reporting for all social media channels the company owned, and also pulled in related data from the Internet at large.
This provided very useful insights, for example when a new product was launched or were announcements made. SAP also gathered input for ideation or customer questions.
AI might be on the way, but for now the human touch is still needed to make sense of data, even with business intelligence. But we are getting there.
Finally, compared to Facebook, Twitter has a much smaller audience. Many of my smaller clients aren’t even on Twitter or are unable to dedicate much time to it.
Which social media brand strategy has inspired you lately and why?
I’ve been fascinated by the use of social media for the US Presidential elections. Who would have thought 10 years ago that politicians would argue, incite each other, and break news on a public online channel like Twitter?