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Beckon Marketing Scorecards

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Beckon Inc., San Mateo, CA, USA
Company Description:Built by marketers for marketers, Beckon is omnichannel analytics software for marketing in all its modern complexity. Our software-as-a- service platform integrates messy marketing data and delivers rich dashboards and scorecards for cross-channel marketing intelligence.
Nomination Category:Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category:Best New Product or Service of the Year - Business Products

Nomination Title: Beckon Marketing Scorecards

Describe for the judges the nominated product or service, including its features, functions, benefits, and performance to date (up to 525 words). Include in this section the date since the beginning of July last year on which the product or service was introduced to the marketplace:

In today’s incredibly fragmented marketing landscape, marketers have increasingly become overwhelmed by the complexity of the marketing data they must gather and analyze. According to a McKinsey survey, 65% of CMOs say the pressure from the CEO to prove the value of marketing is increasing. Marketing leaders need to answer the question, “How is marketing performing?” But with so many channels, tools and vendors, and so many campaigns and executions going all at once, summarizing what is happening and what it all means is staggeringly complex.

To combat the mounting confusion over—and pressure to deliver—omnichannel marketing performance reporting, Beckon launched Beckon Marketing Scorecards in March of 2015. A strategic planning and management tool for delivering visibility into overall marketing performance, Beckon Marketing Scorecards visually map the results of marketing efforts to a strategic framework, showing with simplicity and precision how tactical activities work together to advance key objectives.

Based on the balanced scorecard system developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton of the Harvard Business School over 20 years ago, Beckon Marketing Scorecards also have roots in Six Sigma—a data-driven approach for eliminating defects and achieving stable, predictable results in manufacturing. For marketers, the “defects” they identify and ultimately help to reduce are suboptimal marketing outcomes like low conversion rates, poor paid-to-earned media ratios, flagging customer loyalty and expensive customer acquisition tactics.

Further, Six Sigma holds that all processes have cause-and-effect relationships that can be measured, analyzed, controlled and improved in order to drive higher output quality—or higher ROI, in the case of marketing.

Lastly, the Six Sigma philosophy, brought to the marketing arena with Beckon Marketing Scorecards, says that great marketing and great brands are not built by virtue of a single decision (a one-time annual budget allocation across channels, say), but by the millions of ongoing small decisions the extended marketing team makes. When marketers track, measure and optimize their marketing efforts using a tool like Beckon Marketing Scorecards, they’re learning and improving systematically, making more data-driven decisions and marketing with greater overall agility.

Beckon Scorecards are currently being deployed by some of the largest marketing organizations around the globe, including Coke, Gap and others, to:

• bind tactical metrics to strategic frameworks.
• report performance against pre-specified criteria.
• provide marketing context for disparate datasets.
• quickly derive actionable insight making next steps and decisions clear.
• align marketing teams around common goals and objectives.
• tell the story of marketing success to the wider business.

In addition, Beckon Scorecards are completely customizable and can be designed to measure and communicate marketing effectiveness through whichever lens is most critical to the marketer. Marketers can use a number of frameworks that provide the context for analyzing marketing performance against any number of objectives such as:

1. how well customers are moving along the buyer’s journey from awareness to engagement to purchase.
2. how marketing is tracking against business objectives like greater efficiency and effectiveness.
3. how well the team is meeting marketing objectives like increasing advocacy or earned media impressions relative to paid media impressions.
4. how well marketing has executed each campaign or initiative, and how each campaign compares against each other.

Provide a brief biography of the person or persons who lead the team that developed the nominated new product or service (up to 125 words):

Jennifer Zeszut is CEO of Beckon—a SaaS analytics software company created by and for marketers. Jennifer has been a marketing leader for most of her career working with top brands like eBay, Proctor & Gamble, and Cost Plus World Market. She was the trusted advisor to many more brands as head of Strategy and Analytics for Razorfish for many years. Prior to Beckon, she founded Scout Labs, a leading social media monitoring, analytics, and engagement platform which was sold to Lithium Technologies in 2010. She’s been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, FastCompany and TechCrunch and was invited to speak about entrepreneurship at the White House as part of President Barak Obama’s Startup America Initiative