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How to Make Marketing Integration aWhole Lot Easier
Written by David Eldridge, Chief Executive Officer, Alterian
Want to really frighten someone? Invite the poor valuable in the short term to drive understanding significantly by developing a single hub for allsoul to a meeting titled "Marketing Integration and hence relevance. marketing processes, content, budgeting andPlanning." workflow.Marketers should also work out a schedule forMany marketers would probably rather manually sharing critical data. For example, preference Plenty of marketing resource managementcleanse a million database records than suffer information changes or a response to an email technology platforms exist today that can helpthrough a project to sync up data, goals and campaign may trigger immediate changes. These marketers improve how they manage campaignstechnologies from multiple teams within the alerts need to happen in near real time and and suppliers and share resources. And manymarketing department - or potentially further a marketers must be prepared on act on them companies have made strides regarding digitalfield. immediately. Other updates can be less time asset management, budgeting and financialThat's because when most marketers hear the critical. analysis.word integration, they picture some unattainableland of perfect marketing harmony. They assume Making all marketing data seamlessly available for An emerging challenge today is approval. Asthe goal to be total, perfect integration and lose operational purposes in near real time is a bigger campaigns stretch across channels, marketers canheart, not realizing that can achieve smaller task altogether, and while worthy, should not get create unnecessary work and delays when sovictories along the way with big payoffs. in the way of getting your analytics up to speed in many company and agency executives need toshort order. review materials, remember who else to rout themIntegration is a real need, and a worthy cause. It to, and if changes are required re-review them, re-just needs to be demystified. Marketers need to Connecting Apps remember who gets the re-route and so forth.know what is really achievable and what is practical Another short-term goal is to connect the variousdepending on the needs and capabilities of their applications that drive marketing. Today's It's much worse on the back end of a campaignorganizations and suppliers. complex campaigns require a high degree of when there's scattered accountability forHere are some thoughts on where marketing coordination and monitoring across various measurement.integration makes the most sense and how it can inbound and outbound channels, which is onlybe readily achieved. possible through integrated applications. Most It was further cited that increasing the quantity ofcompanies solve this by acquiring an application leads was rated among the lowest strategicStart with Marketing Analysis suite from a single supplier or linking separate priorities.Improving relevance is the key to improving applications via an Application Programmingmarketing success, and to avoiding expensive Interface. Get the Numbersmistakes like getting blocked from your And this leads us to the real motivation forThis solution, for example, enables offline andcustomers' inboxes. This means not just getting marketing integration: it's fundamentally aonline marketers to share the same tools andthe segmentation, offer and timing right but also financial one. For all the talk of multichannelderive their own insights, using the chunks ofthe channel and sequencing of communications - marketing, few companies have a grip on howothers data relevant to them, without constantlyand taking into account across all channels the different channels are performing individually andasking for reports or help from other marketingpreferences your customers have told you about. together and if they are making wise investments.departments. Is email before direct mail really performing betterTo accomplish this, databases need to be joined. If a marketing platform is not on the cards, you than the other way round for this segment andBut this does not require the painful integration of should make it a major priority to select offer? How can I create campaigns that sharedozens of separate databases into a single applications that are operable when needed resources across channels thereby driving downrepository optimized for all uses. across multiple marketing teams. mar... [download for more]
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