Choosing Distributed Marketing Technology: 7 Key Considerations for the CTO/CIO

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DMMYour CTO Should Know About7 Things

Technology

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7 Things Your CTO Should Know AboutDistributed Marketing Management Technology

Introduction

Investments in marketing technology are growing rapidly within most organiza-tions. The technologies being selected are designed to solve a rapidly changing and wide range of marketing needs for everything from advertising placement to marketing operations workflow.

Because most of these solutions are now cloud based, solution selections are being made without the traditional input of IT and without any capital expendi-ture review process. And, frankly, IT wouldn’t know where to begin if they were involved. The number of marketing technology solutions available in the market place is mind numbing. Further, many of these technologies overlap in functional-ity, yet solve different marketing challenges. And, the marketing space is changing so rapidly that even the CMO can’t keep up.

The historic, natural reaction of a CTO in such an environment would be to de-mand a pause to develop a master plan and to explore a single vendor solution. Today, that would be the wrong decision. The large solution providers that you would typically turn to are as lost as you are. The blurring rate of change in consumer ad consumption habits, the blur-ring rate of technology innovation leave large IT solution providers unable to keep pace. The marketing world is a wild, wild west and your marketing colleagues need you to help them be nimble.

This paper looks at helping the CTO / CIO team look at 7 foundational elements when selecting DMM technology:

1. How to focus on foundations

2. The importance of a platform solution

3. How DMM drives revenue and reduces costs

4. The need to be agile

5. The importance of architecture

6. Point vs. Aggregated Solution

7. Understanding marketing content creation in a new era

DMMYour CTO Should Know About7 Things

Technology

DistributedMarketingManagement


1. Focus on the Foundations

The chaotic marketing landscape doesn’t mean your marketing technology strategy has to be rudder-less and reactionary.

Most of the chaos comes from the myriad of point solutions. These address everything from how to optimize the messaging of PPC ads to how to run better webinars. All important, yet all stand-alone.

Underneath this chaotic collection of always changing point solutions, however, are six important customer-centric foundations and one internally focused foundation. As the CTO/CIO of your organi-zation, this is where your focus and guidance of marketing technology should be.

The Foundational Elements to Guide Marketing Technology• Customer data – CRM systems.

• Customer insight – reporting, measurement, analytics and campaign management

• Customer on-boarding – lead-to-revenue management, sales enablement and loyalty marketing

• Customer-facing content repositories – digital/marketing asset management , web content management, dynamic, multi-channel content creation

• Customer engagement – message delivery channels, real-time marketing and marketing fulfillment automation

• Marketing Process Optimization Systems – Marketing re-source management

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2. Look for a Platform Solution

Look for platform solutions in the area of market-ing technology, and let the platforms aggregate, assimilate and/or feed the ever-evolving, ever-changing point solutions.

When you achieve a single point foundation of customer data, have solid resources for glean-ing insight from that data, have self-improving on-boarding processes, have a single, highly agile marketing content repository, have automated marketing fulfillment, and have a strong internal workflow and budget process management for your marketing operations, the point solutions employed by your marketing team will naturally extend the value of the foundations you’ve laid. In the absence of these foundations, the point solu-tions will seek to fill the void and, as a result, create organizational chaos and inefficiency.

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3. Drive Revenue and Reduce Costs

Focusing on the 6 foundations oultined will also serve to drive revenue growth and to reduce costs. The first three foundations – customer data, customer insight and customer on-boarding – are all key contributors to growth. The last three – customer-facing content repositories, customer engagement and marketing process optimization – can also contribute to growth but are largely focused on cost reduction through the elimination of costly redundancies and the automation of labor-intensive pro-cesses.


4. Seek to be Agile

Each of the foundations previously outlined– whether focused on the person, the content or the pro-cess – uniquely contributes to an agile marketing organization and enables the organization to quickly respond to the always changing, ever innovating marketing environment.

How Agility is Created With a Single Platform• A single or connected customer data platform provides the basis for

focused, personal engagement.

• A single or connected customer insight platform provides the knowl-edge of what, when, where and how to engage the customer.

• A single or connected customer on-boarding and development plat-form provides a launching point for new and/or expanded customer revenue.

• A single or connected customer-facing content platform provides dynamic, automated, and real-time marketing content creation.

• A single or connected customer engagement platform provides automated, multi-channel message delivery and facilitates customer initiated conversations.

• A single or connected marketing operations platform facilitates a coordinated, efficient marketing process.


4. Seek to be Agile, Continued

Long Term SuccessWith these long-term foundations in place, the short-term point solutions used by the marketing team to capitalize on new innovation opportunities and hot marketplace trends become less relevant to the long-term IT strategy for the organization. New innovations will always emerge and fade. New tactical technologies will climb the hype cycle slope with great fanfare and then fall into oblivion or become absorbed into broader solutions.

By having the key foundations in place, your marketing organization can have great agility in respond-ing to innovation opportunities and yet keep them in their proper role of building tactical application based on your strategic foundations.


5. The Importance of Architecture

Unfortunately for the CTO, marketing technology has not matured to the point where a single solution provider can effectively meet the foundations outlined above. For the large enterprise, companies such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, SAS, Infor, Microsoft and TeraData all desire to be the single solution provider and have all made substantial acquisi-tions in this endeavor. None, however, have effectively integrated their acqui-sitions and all have substantial gaps. They simply aren’t organizationally agile enough to match the intense pace of change, particularly in the areas of customer-facing content repositories and customer engagement.

Because of this current state, the archi-tecture of the solutions you select for your foundation matters immensely. The following characteristics are essen-tial:

• Open Architecture – The ability for your foundational marketing tech-nologies to integrate foundation-to-foundation and from foundation-to-point solution is critical. Most marketing software platforms have been developed with an open archi-tecture philosophy but it’s always best to double check.

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5. The Importance of Architecture, Continued

• Flexible Application – Marketing execution methodology varies dramatically even within an indus-try. At the core, your platform solutions should be able to flex to meet any number of use cases. Test several widely varying use cases on the technologies you are considering.

• Configuration not Customization – Avoid custom built solutions. A candidate for your foundation technology suite business should primarily speak in terms of how they will configure the platform to meet your unique needs. If custom programming is required, make sure the company’s philoso-phy is to contribute your custom work into the configurable core. It may sound counter-intuitive at first that your customization will benefit others, but becoming a “branched” code set is not a viable long term approach.

• Continual Enhancement – Ask to see the recent product enhancements from a prospective tech-nology provider as well as the next 18-month product roadmap. If the provider isn’t showing con-tinual enhancement, your ability to match pace with the rapidly changing marketing landscape is at risk.

In summary, at the foundational marketing technology level, architecture matters a lot. Because no single provider has brought all the foundation elements effectively together in a single suite, watch carefully for open architecture, flexible use, configurability, and a history of continual product en-hancement as you assemble your solution.


6. Point vs. Aggregated Solution

With thousands of marketing technology solutions in the market, it is virtually impossible for IT department personnel to even be aware of them, let alone engage in reviewing them. However, with many of these solutions, the stakes aren’t always high. In such cases, IT may simply choose to leave the decision solely in marketing’s hands or rely on one of the foundation technologies to create the connection.

As an example, multiple providers can help an organization manage its email marketing. While the solutions have different nuanced features and functions, the service provided is basically the same.

In the case of email marketing, it’s also likely that the one of the customer on-boarding foundation tech-nology providers will offer an email solution that they either provide themselves or through a point solution provider. The providers of the customer en-gagement foundation technology, particularly those providing marketing fulfillment automation will do so as well. In fact, these platform solutions typically aggregate solutions across:

• Email• Social• Mobile• Landing Page• Digital Display Advertising• Print advertising• Digital Signage• Direct Mail and more

This can greatly reduce the demands on marketing and IT alike to select and manage point solution provider relationships.


7. Understanding Marketing Content Creation in a New Era

As consumer habits change, support systems must change as well. One area of rapid change is the manner in which content must be created.

Historically, creating a campaign schedule and creating or staging existing content for the campaign met the consumer’s expectation. But that is rapidly becoming no longer the case. Today’s consumers want to be part of the marketing communications loop. They expect communications that are rele-vant not only to them but to their current situation. Meeting this need requires a whole new approach to how content is managed.

Digital asset management must be re-examined. Content that was once stored as assembled documents must now be stored as the individual “marketing objects” that comprise those docu-ments and robust, dynamic content assembly engines must be employed to assemble content on-demand and in the channel of choice for the consumer and any given point in time. Content that used to take days or weeks to create now must be assem-bled in seconds or sub-seconds.

Stated another way, CRM data, analytics, lead nurturing and other foundational technologies all provide insight and instruc-tion that converges at the content. The content creation and customer engaging marketing fulfillment automation processes must be equal to the task to dynamically create and serve con-tent when, where and how a consumer seeks it.

To learn more about content cre-ation in a new era, read the white paper, “New Era Requires New Platform Approach to Corporate Marketing.”

http://info.saepio.com/white-paper-MarketPort-for-Corporate-Marketing

http://info.saepio.com/white-paper-MarketPort-for-Corporate-Marketing


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