More Opportunities Than Ever. And More Challenges

The rise of digital marketing has been a mixed blessing for many organizations. While added channels and technology platforms have multiplied the opportunities to engage with customers via social media, web, mobile and other venues, digital has also vastly complicated marketers’ ability to coordinate messaging, smoothly integrate campaigns and control costs.

It wasn’t that long ago that a marketer could successfully plan and implement a one-stop campaign comprised solely of direct mail or email, and then simply wait for the results. Today, such a plan must include an array of other channels, all coordinated and connected to ensure a unified benefit story and a consistent customer experience that extends across promotions, events and campaigns.

Now multiply those channels by the processes, suppliers and review cycles in your current workflow and you can see the level of complexity that has been added to what was once a relatively straightforward series of steps. Even if you began automating your marketing processes several years back, that automation may be showing its age by not keeping up with the rapid pace of change brought on by digital marketing.

This Teradata White Paper will examine the impact that increasing digital channels have had on the marketing landscape. It will also outline the major benefits that can be realized by implementing the latest marketing operations automation tools within your current marketing environment.

The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

Marketers a few years ago might have foreseen the exciting changes on the horizon, with added channels and communication advances providing ever more innovative ways to connect with customers. What marketers did not expect, however, was that they would have to implement 21st century tactics with 20th century budgets.

Doing more with less has become the standard operating mantra of business, even as more suppliers—and more process steps—have been needed to coordinate relatively new marketing activities such as websites, social media and mobile campaigns. How to keep all of these plates spinning is the newest challenge for marketers. Because the slightest lack of coordination can throw a program out of balance and send an entire campaign crashing to the ground.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Here are some examples of how the addition of digital channels has multiplied the complexity of a modern marketer’s task list.

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The Advantages of Driving Digital Automaton

Recent advances in marketing technologies are now enabling forward-thinking organizations to regain control of today’s complex digital marketing environment. Integrated Marketing Management (IMM)—and specifically, the marketing operations pillar of IMM— provides the tools needed to not only streamline your workflow, but also interact with your customers and prospects in innovative and personalized ways, across whatever channels you need to reach them.

Here are the three major advantages that companies have achieved by using IMM tools to help coordinate and strengthen their digital marketing efforts.

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1. Better Control Over Marketing Budgets

Thanks to digital marketing automation, marketers can not only do more with less, they can also demonstrate the value of the activities they execute. In short, they can now work faster, work smarter and see exactly where marketing dollars are going. Planning and financial management solutions let marketers align campaign plans with organizational goals and get real-time data to manage marketing budgets. This helps eliminate unaligned or misaligned marketing investments and provides better visibility and insight into marketing spend across the organization.

2. Better View Of All Activities

With an integrated solution to support marketing operations, marketers can implement proven and repeatable processes based on their specific business needs. By centralizing all of the tasks, dates, deliverables, resources and individuals needed to successfully complete a marketing initiative, the marketer has a global view of all activities so that projects get completed when they should.

An integrated marketing operations solution offers a single system-of-record to keep your initiatives on schedule, in budget, and in alignment with your brand requirements and business objectives—including a formalized, cross-channel approval process. Like an electronic assembly line, each process runs with optimal timing, accuracy, cost efficiency and visibility, and the entire cycle is repeatable upon successful completion.

3 More Accurate Measurement of ROI

Accountability remains the holy grail of marketing and IMM can put that elusive goal finally within easy reach. By making your multi-channel digital campaigns more effective and timely, you increase the chances of driving greater revenue, which is the most direct way to improve your marketing ROI.

On a more granular level, automation tools provide better visibility into what’s working and what isn’t so you can continually adjust and improve the return on your marketing spend. As marketing integration builds connections between every member of your team, you’ll be able to provide management with the kind of insight that shows a marketing organization’s ability to deliver quantifiable results that justify the dollars devoted to campaign efforts.

A Case Study: Putting Foundational Marketing Operations Technology To Work

A Global 2000 financial services company faced the challenge of sustaining eight separate business lines, each with its own supporting in-house marketing team. Many of the activities of the teams produced a similar end product (direct mail, prescreen offers, collateral, etc.), but each had processes different enough that it was difficult to cross-train team members or centralize necessary support functions.

With few common processes or best practices in place, under-leveraged technology, and an inability to integrate support partners into their marketing, productivity shortfalls were becoming apparent.

Audits and compliance reviews were particularly cumbersome, with numerous time-consuming processes, including a combination of spreadsheets and paper files. The lack of marketing spend transparency prohibited the company from optimizing marketing dollars and there were few capabilities to measure the effectiveness of marketing programs.

The financial company recognized that Marketing Operations technology was critical to improving the operational efficiencies and compliance tracking of the marketing program development processes through the use of program templates, automated workflow tools and enhanced reporting capabilities. Specifically, they wanted to integrate all the company’s marketing functions to share resources and develop common processes.

Since implementing an integrated marketing operations solution, the company has seen impressive gains in their marketing efficiency, specifically:

• Centralized creative assets, approvals and documentation
• Best practices applied to workflows and driven through the marketing operations application
• Cycle time reduction by greater than 5 days
• Reduction in training time for new team members by 66%

Conclusion

Marketers have reached a new era in the evolution of communications technology, one that has added new channels and new complexity to their traditional roles. In most cases, budgets and staffing have not kept pace with the new digital channels that must be addressed, as company management continues to insist that marketers find ways to do more with fewer resources.

In response, companies are increasingly turning to the latest Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) automation solutions to help fully support new digital marketing channels while achieving benefits that include: better budget visibility and control; a holistic view of all marketing activities, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction; and unsurpassed insight into marketing ROI.

There is every reason to believe that digital marketing will continue to evolve, adding yet unknown channels that will need to be integrated into the marketing environment. By keeping a company’s technology to support marketing operations current, these future challenges can quickly be leveraged into opportunities when the time comes.

About Teradata

Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), is the world’s leading analytic data solutions company, focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications. Teradata’s innovative products and services deliver data integration and business insight to empower organizations to make the best decisions possible and achieve competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.Teradata.com.