Want to make a new best friend? Invest in the right marketing technologies and your CMO/VP of Marketing will be your new best buddy!
If your company is like thousands of others, the marketing group is probably the last man on the totem pole to receive any sort of IT budget allocation. Marketing is an art, right? Wrong. Marketing is both art and science and the right IT investments in marketing can mean the difference between uneducated guessing with haphazard execution and calculated, strategic marketing plans with synchronized delivery. Here are five technologies that smart CMOs are implementing today:
1. Marketing Automation – Traditional marketing functions operate on the “push” model. Communications are triggered only when someone internally presses the big, red metaphorical button to send an email, send a print mailer, execute a call, etc. Smart marketers now leverage marketing automation tools that employ a “pull” model enabling marketers to set triggers and filters that utilize workflow and business logic to create automated responses and automated outbound communications. Event-Driven Marketing (EDM) solution providers like Conclusive Marketing specialize in event-based, trigger marketing, but even SaaS-based providers like Salesforce.com have great solutions for automated workflow.
2. Web Analytics – Yes, you probably have some form of analytics to track visitors to your website, but how deep does it really go? Simply tracking the number of visitors and the number of hits doesn’t cut it anymore, the marketing team wants to go deeper. Today’s marketers want to know: who is visiting the site, where they are coming from, what keywords are bringing people in, what content on the site is most compelling, and what competitors’ presences on the web are. This requires not just the right technologies, but investments in analysts to help sift through the vast quantities of data, as well as third-party content providers for competitive search intelligence like HitWise, Compete.com, and others.
3. Marketing Database Management – the magic formula for marketing is 40/40/20. That is, 40% of the success of a marketing campaign relates to the list (those you’re trying to reach), 40% is based on the content (what you say), and 20% is based on the offer (what you’re using to entice action). The list is the scientific element and the part that IT can most help with. Marketers must first be able to consolidate and synchronize the thousands, if not millions, of prospects they have from multiple sources and then slice, dice, and segment those prospects into relevant buyer segments. That way, the right message and right offer go the right person, thus increasing the likelihood of prospect action.
4. Email Marketing – This is a basic one, but email marketing is one of the most effective and measurable tools that a marketer can employ today. And did I mention it’s cost-effective too? In a world measured by brand awareness, web traffic, and other high-level metrics, it’s nice to have a direct pipeline into an audience that can be measured down to each individual recipient. Better yet, email marketing that employs marketing automation described above can turn the marketing group into an end-to-end lead generation and closure machine!
5. Campaign Management – The mother of email marketing, campaign management helps marketers pull together the overall objective, flow, and tactical elements of a marketing campaign so that everyone is on the same page and results can be tracked across email, print, interactive and other marketing tactics. Any company that is running sophisticated cross-channel campaigns needs some sort of campaign management to bring together not just the tactical elements, but the people resources and processes that are required. Some of the noteworthy players in this space include Unica, Aprimo, and others.
