A note about hybrids: while it would be tidy to state that the three options on the previous page represent the entire list of options for any IMM technology selection, the reality is that myriad variations exist. Vendors are continuously adapting their offerings, building extensive integrations and making acquisitions that cause them to shift their core products to incorporate more and more solutions. Thus, there is no static system that will persevere indefinitely. That said, if you can identify your comprehensive marketing management technology needs up front, you can make the task of selecting a suite, platform, or point solution less daunting.

Requirements List

It’s tempting for marketers to be lured by the potential of every new marketing technology that promises better, faster, easier management of their increasingly complex jobs. And while new technology offerings often solve problems in innovative ways, the challenge becomes integrating new tools into an existing technology infrastructure.

To mitigate temptation, it’s best to identify a list of musthave technology solutions that will carry you into the next era of marketing management. As your marketing interactions become more diverse, you may end up augmenting this list, yet Web Analytics Demystified issues the following guidance on the three essential aspects of a comprehensive Integrated Marketing Management solution.

1. Strategic Planning and Workflow

   Despite shifting budgets and an influx of cash dedicated to technology, marketers are still accountable for proving the value of their efforts in no uncertain terms. Doing this requires foresight and planning on a grand scale to align campaigns across all channels with organizational goals — while managing spending and ROI in real-time. The marketing management toolkit needs to offer resource management and workflow process that creates a collaborative environment between Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and outside agencies. This fusion of teams and efforts will help to identify what’s working (at what cost) and how individual efforts are meeting customer needs. Without these collaborative elements, the strategy behind the marketing will never break free of the alltoo-common enterprise silos.

2. Big Data Storage and Analysis

   All of the strategic planning and collaboration in the world cannot deliver exceptional marketing unless there is a sharp focus on the customer. This focus comes into view through data. And as we well know, customer data today is compiled from many disparate sources. It’s not uncommon to interact with consumers across Web, Call Center, Email, Social Media and Mobile channels within the course of just one transaction, let alone over the lifetime of the customer relationship. The next era of Digital Marketing Management will relieve the burden of managing custom-tailored IT system interfaces, multi-source and multi-format data by managing this information in a private marketing cloud. We advocate for a Hadoop-based private cloud architecture because we’ve seen it work for large enterprises. This digital marketing cloud should include data from operational marketing systems as well as a bi-directional flow to the customer database or CRM system of record. Further, MapReduce capabilities within the cloud will enable analysis of customer segments, behavioral history, and marketing effectiveness that can feed back into the strategic planning process. Your private marketing cloud can be hosted by your own IT department, an internal Marketing Technology group, or the platform vendor.

3. Multi-Channel Campaign Execution

   When it comes to routing inbound marketing referrals to relevant content, or delivering outbound messages at precisely the right moment, marketers require a technology solution that can analyze, automate, and deliver in real-time. While these capabilities have long been part of the IMM promise, the next generation of marketing management will include a messaging center that coordinates and executes as an integrated part of the platform, rather than an add-on solution. This digital messaging center functions as a real-time campaign execution hub that has hooks into the digital marketing cloud and extensible data systems. These hooks are carefully designed conduits that manage customer dialogues by calculating the precise message for individual consumers across a wide range of qualification, lifecycle, preference, and other stored attributes. A functional digital messaging center will handle Recipient Management, Targeting, Personalization, Content Management and Deliverability reporting across Email, SMS, and Social channels.

Integration Pains

It’s worth noting that every integrated marketing solution will have its own unique integration challenges. Given the broad diversity of marketing solutions and applications in existence today, there will ultimately be a need to integrate an email delivery vendor, an antiquated customer database, or a social monitoring technology that is a must have for someone in the organization. Integration challenges will vary widely based on the budgets, constraints, and legacy technologies that each organization brings. In our experience we’ve recognized that there are a few known stumbling blocks that you should anticipate.

With any multiple-vendor integration project, there will be services and costs associated. If you’ve got a crackerjack team of marketing technologists then this may not be an issue for you. Yet, for most companies this requires working with IT to integrate, QA and launch efforts, which all come with their own development queues that could slow you down tremendously. Additionally, when working with multiple systems, you may also encounter data translation errors. Simply migrating data from one system to another can be challenging in itself, yet translating data into a NoSQL environment or a relational database for use by your automated marketing solution can present problems. Finally, integration can wreak havoc on the user experience because of underlying inconsistencies in data such as single sign-on or unique customer identifiers that may differ between applications. Each of these issues reinforces the case for a marketing management suite or platform where many of the integrations are already taken care of ahead of time.

[Download PDF to see Figure 2]

The Next Era of Digital Marketing Management

“Many marketers dream about true IMM - where both sides of marketing, the operations and the campaign management functions, are aligned, synchronized, and efficiently adding value to each other.… Imagine your world where workflow alerts go beyond approvals, and combine with automated predictive modeling to identify opportunities for cross channel synergy. For example, highlighting customers where an SMS or social followup to an email campaign can improve results. Imagine if your spend management analysis tracks the success of campaign deployments back to budgets and allows decisions on re-allocation, or the occasional double down, for each initiative.…”

This dream-like vision of true Integrated Marketing Management, published only a short year ago, is now a reality for many organizations. At the time that this statement was published, many marketing organizations were struggling to assemble a series of point solutions because of limited marketing technology budgets, and many still are today. Yet, the tides are turning and tech savvy marketers are executing on this vision of true IMM.

We at Web Analytics Demystified believe that a real-time marketing interaction management solution that treats each customer as an individual by building relationships based on a digital memory of preferences, purchases and inferences is attainable at mass-market scale. Today, these capabilities are competitive differentiators for enterprises that have adopted the next generation of marketing management, but within the next five years, they will be table stakes for any company that interacts with consumers across multiple channels.

Customers First

It’s no accident that customer interactions dominate more than half of the digital marketing management platform of the future. Without customers your business would quickly become extinct. With them, you can learn immeasurable things about your products, the level of service your teams deliver, and your corporate standing in the eyes of consumers. Yet, marketing management on the consumer front is about so much more…. It’s about engaging with customers to build relationships. This requires a fundamental mind-shift for marketers to turn the corner on marketing tactics of old and embrace the marketing revolution at hand. That shift is no longer about marketing to consumers, but rather it’s about engaging with them.

Many marketers are doing this today. But others still have yet to realize that they are missing key elements of their marketing programs because they cannot meet consumers on the channels of their choice and when they do reach them, they often miss the mark with irrelevant messages or missed opportunities. The fact is that marketers are not driving the need for an improved version of IMM; consumers are. Marketers have, by and large, ceded control to consumers and they need technologies to help manage the internal processes necessary to understand behavioral trends and respond to implicit and explicit consumer demands on the channels they’re operating on in real-time.

[Download PDF to see Figure 3]

A 340-Degree View

Bill Gassman, a world renowned Gartner Analyst, was famous for stating that the notion of a 360-degree view of the customer was simply rude… He thought that 340-degrees would allow consumers to have at least a little privacy. We agree. When treading into the sensitive waters of real-time interactions based on website behavior, predictive algorithms, and psychographic profiles, it’s essential to maintain a high degree of privacy. Marketers wielding marketing platforms of the future will have the ability to tread across the “creepy” line with targeted marketing with greater ease than ever before. Thus, it’s imperative that consumers are kept informed about what data is used to deliver marketing messages, which includes potentially explaining why an individual is receiving any given communication.

The future of Digital Marketing Management holds Marketing Analytics as a key component, which includes access to not only program and campaign-level details, but also access to a customer data warehouse often containing personally identifiable information. Thus, the imperative for stakeholders vested in precision marketing performance is to steward that data with the utmost security. Each petabyte of data amassed within the marketing ecosystem has the potential to reveal patterns of performance that not only shed light on what customers did, but what they are also likely to do in the future. Yet, if handled improperly, that data could also influence a mass exodus of customers.

The New Chief Officers

The next era of Digital Marketing Management also requires a new roster of executives to lead the way into an evolved state of interactive marketing. While many C-Suite roles are chastised as mere vanity titles, these functions are important in elevating the oversight and management of key marketing functions. To put this another way, marketing departments have not only outgrown the technologies that were previously sufficient to interact with consumers, but the job has grown too big for a single Chief Marketing Officer. The historic tenure of a CMO, which was previously pegged at 24 months, was recently displaced with a study that found CMOs in office for a whopping 43 months on average.4 The reason cited by the authors of the study is that CMOs are becoming more entrenched in their roles as the importance of marketing is realized across enterprises. At the same time, CMOs are also fortifying their teams with new chiefs that are shouldering the burden of the growing marketing management responsibilities. Here are three chief roles that have the potential to impact your business in profound ways.

The Chief Marketing Technologist - Perhaps the most senior role sitting below the Chief Marketing Officer is that of the Chief Marketing Technologist. This new hybrid comprised of one part techno geek and one part direct-to-consumer marketer will fill an increasingly important role in marketing organizations across the globe. With a dotted line to the CIO, the Marketing Technologist is in command of all data necessary to operate a fully functional marketing management platform. Scott Brinker, who is a self proclaimed Marketing Technologist and also the President and CTO of Ion Interactive, believes that the Chief Marketing Technologist needs to align with senior management on marketing IT governance and “to incorporate and leverage marketing technology as a product and within products”.5 These functions underscore the importance of marketing technology management and begin to reveal some of the internal benefits of employing such a system.

The Chief Data Scientist - The influx of big data has given rise to a new breed of scientific chief of the data persuasion. According to McKinsey consultants, data scientists pack a hearty payoff for businesses that employ them. In other words, this isn’t just another vanity title. “Retailers, for example, can increase operating margins by up to 60% simply by having these experts analyze large data sets to their fullest. The U.S. health care industry, meanwhile, stands to capture more than $300 billion annually in new value with their help, McKinsey finds.”6 The term Data Scientist was coined at LinkedIn by D.J. Patil, who described these professionals as “… people to make the data come alive”. But, Diego Klabjan, an associate professor at Northwestern University, explains that a “data scientist is able to derive unique and unexpected values from data or propose changes in business processes supported by the data.” – a definition that sheds a glimmer of light on what this new class of chief officer will contribute to the marketing management discipline in coming years.

The Chief Experience Officer - With a renewed interest in customer relationship marketing, the existence of this role takes that commitment beyond lip service by making it a reality. Chief Experience Officers may be prevalent at agencies, but direct to consumer enterprises from retail to healthcare are setting up Chief Experience Offices of their own. The core function of this Chief Officer is to ensure the satisfaction of your customers – regardless of the channel(s) by which they interact with the brand. This comes at the cost of soliciting their feedback, incorporating it into your product development and customer service cycles – AND – demonstrating that you were listening by following through with a customer follow-up. This is no easy task for any brand, particularly one with millions of customers. Yet, to really up the game in your marketing management, this will be a critical role on the marketing team.

Marketing Fluidity

The Holy Grail for a Digital Marketing Management solution is one that operates fluidly. This fluidity comes from diligent attention to detail in the strategic planning stages and well-defined processes that facilitate operational collaboration. These elemental components establish the foundation for a marketing operations function that is capable of engaging with consumers on multiple levels in highly coordinated fashion. By adding a marketing analytics function, the ability to manage against a solid basis of quantitative data provides a bedrock of certainty. While automation plays a critical role in this process, don’t bank on the idea of “set it and forget it” marketing. This is perhaps the most blasphemous statement in digital marketing. The job of the interactive marketer is never complete because it feeds off of a continuous loop of customer feedback, experiential behavior and erratic buying cycles. The beauty of a well-functioning digital marketing solution is that it can react dynamically and make course corrections at any moment based on consumer demands. This only happens in a fluid and agile environment where human strategists rely on machine-analyzed data patterns.

R.I.P. Serendipity As We Know It

Good marketing is seamless. It’s an extension of the phenomena you experience when you take notice of something for the first time and then begin to see your new interest everywhere. Good marketing creates these exposure opportunities and experiences on your behalf based on the digital footprints you create when browsing online and interacting across social networks. Good marketers use technology to deliver these serendipitous moments in anything but coincidental orchestration. The flipside to this type of seemingly serendipitous marketing is really bad marketing that misses the mark. Examples of bad marketing abound, yet the irony of fluid marketing is that it’s so good; it seems like coincidence.

Where it's Working

While examples of great marketing may not jump out at you, there are companies that are making an impact on customers one at a time. With the help of advanced Integrated Marketing Management technologies from Teradata, we’ve uncovered a handful of organizations that are demonstrating the future through their innovative deployment of these solutions.

A national retailer was in need of a technology refresh to help them better connect with their loyal customers. To do this, they identified a need to kick-off a customercentric marketing program that would involve the relaunch of their Customer Rewards program. This required an integrated marketing solution, so they turned to Teradata Campaign Management to segment customers and create better messages and offers. Using email marketing and integrated campaign management, this nationwide retailer delivered personalized dialogues to collect, maintain, evaluate, and analyze buying patterns of customers. The results helped the retailer reduce costs by more efficiently marketing to known customers and lift revenue through increased average order sizes. Additionally, their RFM analysis helped determine customer profitability and ultimately led to a more successful Rewards program.

A leading US financial services corporation was looking for a way to maximize their outbound communications with customers to reduce operational costs and engage customers to sign up for new services. By analyzing their customer data using marketing analytics, using the Teradata Digital Messaging Center this company was able to create and deliver targeted emails at key stages of the customer journey including Welcome and Statement announcement programs to retain profitable customers. They also utilized credit card branding to enhance email performance with re-designed templates that showcased branding of individual credit cards. These marketing tactics were made possible by solutions from Teradata that produced significant results. By automating the mailing of 180 different message types (rewards, offers, services, etc.), and tailoring emails to specific credit card brands, they were able to save 60 person-hours per week in email setup and maintenance time. What’s more, they produced an annual savings of $60k while improving communications with customers at the same time.

An international travel and hospitality corporation wanted to engage its upscale clientele with more relevant emails to improve its customer acquisition efforts in digital channels. They knew that by engaging customers with more enticing emails they could increase open rates beyond industry benchmarks, drive more traffic to their digital assets and increase inquiries via digital channels. The organization turned to Teradata to create a series of email content management templates designed for targeting to specific customer segments. These new templates were catered to the company’s specific offerings and conveyed messaging that would appeal to their discerning client segments. Using A/B split testing, they refined the messaging to arrive at an optimal solution for success. The results proved that the effort was effective because the company increased email open rates by 30%, which exceeded industry standards. Additionally, they increased customer engagement by improving click through rates by more than 100%. These improvements contributed to a significant increase in customer inquiries via digital channel precisely as designed.

Achieving Greatness

These stories of where it’s working only begin to scratch the surface of the power of digital and integrated marketing management capabilities. As more organizations adapt technology platforms and employ the specialized resources necessary to mine the data and produce truly engaging interactive marketing, we will start to see even more stories of success. Meanwhile, the next generation of Marketing Management will offer a platform that can help you get started on your way to greatness. Here’s what you can expect from the next generation of marketing management solutions:

Simply Send the Most Advanced Highly Personalised Messages - Product images, consumer reviews, price changes, and more can be automatically attributed to your messages from the private digital marketing cloud. This level of personalization is possible through a combination of customer profile, tracked behaviors, and segment intelligence. The result is higher open rates for email, SMS, social and other digital channels that will achieve greater relevance for customers.

Fast Campaign Turn-Around Times - Faster campaign turn-arounds not only get your messages into the field more quickly, but also capitalize on critical buying cycles. With your data and business logic already in the cloud you save time on imports, campaign set up and testing for faster response times.

Reduced It Dependency -In addition to a Marketing Technologist on your team, you’ll be able to employ technology of your own to manage and execute effective marketing. These solutions allow you to store your data in every format you like – no custom data schemas, no preformatting, no worries.

Easy Setup– While the promise of easy integration is thrown about all too often, this time it’s true. The future of Integrated Marketing Management will allow you to tear down data silos within your company and leverage valuable data from other systems.

Highest Data Security - The all-important data security layer is not overlooked here. Data never leaves jurisdiction and is saved in your own private cloud with redundant data centers. This can be communicated to consumers to bolster confidence and keep them thinking about your products, not your data practices.

Conclusion

The next era of Digital Marketing Management takes a strategic approach to building customer relationships by maximizing big data intelligence, leveraging technology automation, and integrating directly with campaign execution. This is digital marketing and campaign management delivered together like never before.

Yet, to achieve this new level of marketing excellence, organizations must embrace a new mindset for marketing. This mindset begins with empowering Marketing Departments with the appropriate technology platform to interpret, process and respond to consumers across digital channels in real-time. Next, marketers need to assemble a team capable of conducting the scientific analysis necessary to reach consumers on their terms as well as designing user interfaces that not only work on every new device available to a consumer, but that don’t impede the fluidity of a great digital experience. Finally, ensure that the technology you employ has an integrated deliverability component that offers a feedback loop to show where your marketing efforts are working and where they fall short. Digital Marketing Management is a new science and organizations that accelerate their metamorphosis will achieve significant competitive advantage over their peers that are lagging behind.

To learn more about what’s possible today or to see any of Teradata’s solutions for Integrated Marketing Management, we encourage you to reach out to Web Analytics Demystified or to Teradata directly to engage with us and to develop your vision of the next era of Digital Marketing Management.

About the Author

John Lovett is a veteran industry analyst and expert consultant who has spent the past decade helping organizations understand and measure their digital marketing activities. As a Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified, Lovett regularly consults with leading enterprises to offer strategic guidance for building innovative digital measurement programs. Prior to joining Web Analytics Demystified, Lovett was a Senior Analyst with Forrester Research, where he was responsible for analytics and optimization technologies. Currently, Lovett is the President of the Digital Analytics Association. He is also the co-founder of the Analysis Exchange program that is introducing eager students to analytics by helping non-profits with mentored analysis. Lovett is the author of Social Media Metrics Secrets (Wiley, 2011). He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, three boys, and yellow lab.

About Web Analytics Demystified

Companies wishing additional guidance on the topic of Digital Marketing Management are encouraged to contact the Senior Partners at Web Analytics Demystified directly. Web Analytics Demystified has more than 25 years of experience helping companies choose digital analytics solutions and build strategic models for deployment within the enterprise. Our staff of former Forrester and Jupiter Research analysts has literally written the book on digital reporting and analysis. We provide strategic guidance on analytics to some of the best-known brands in the world.

Contact us directly by calling John Lovett at (603) 262-5636. Alternatively visit us on the web at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com.

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.