Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

Biz360, Inc.
San Mateo, CA

Market360
> MarCom Performance Assessment

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

Today’s chief marketing officers can spend their budget dollars across an ever-increasing number of outlets and audiences. Biz360’s customers are prioritizing marketing spending by analyzing industry information to discover where their messages are and are not being heard. A top law firm and a high-tech manufacturer were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Prioritizing media relations efforts

§ Assessing strategic marketing effectiveness

§ Improving productivity

WHY BIZ360?

Biz360 automates the process of gathering and analyzing information from beyond a company’s four walls. The technology behind the Market360 service scours all forms of unstructured data including news items, press releases, product reviews, and message boards. Biz360 creates a potent combination of this search functionality with taxonomies for unstructured data at a company’s disposal. Firms can assess their marketing effectiveness against competitor or industry benchmarks. Marketing managers can drill down into the analytics and metrics on an ongoing basis to gauge press coverage, campaign progress, overall mindshare, etc. Biz360 enables companies to consider new ways of managing their marketing resources.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Companies using Biz360’s Market360 service see an immediate change in how they focus media initiatives. Customers are able to track their exposure and their competitors’ exposure at the publication and journalist level. By profiling each analyst or reporter, companies are in a better position to develop valuable media relationships.

Enterprise innovation: Marketing focuses on building positive associations with a company’s products or services. However, in many instances, a global enterprise has little control over how people will associate their company with new developments. Biz360 gives companies a tool to assess their overall communications presence instantly. Especially as rich media increases the importance of personality in B2B media coverage, companies use Biz360 to reduce the information overload and manage events and exceptions.

Technology gains: Companies are typically replacing or augmenting a variety of news-clipping services or Web-clipping activities performed in-house. Biz360 not only dramatically shortens the time it takes to assess marketing effectiveness, but it also delivers this critical context on a rolling, as opposed to periodic, basis.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: Customers reported that it requires roughly a month for Biz360 to tune the service to a company’s target media sources and industry profile. Experienced users recommend that the marketing organization develops a clear understanding of how it will use the information before expanding the implementation.

Learning: Companies report that the Market360 service is extremely easy to use. One client insisted that it was almost too easy for teams to accomplish the initial objectives and that managers should encourage marketing teams to exploit the broader strategic functionality of Market360.

Resources: Biz360 requires marketing teams to establish a set of mindshare metrics that may have tremendous influence on how they allocate their resources. Customers advised marketing executives to revisit those metrics periodically as the corporation’s strategic goals shift.

Fit: Media-savvy companies will find Biz360’s Market360 an invaluable addition to their toolkits.

COMPANY INFO

Biz360, Inc. is a private company with 20 employees.

650.373.3310
www.biz360.com
Published: January 2002