As a CMO or Director of Marketing, you face an uphill battle looking for an integrated marketing solution. This question in the LinkedIn Marketing Automation Experts group, “MA (Marketing Automation) vs. TAP (Technology Assisted Prospecting) - once and for all” (http://linkd.in/qNZdoQ), addresses the misuse of term Marketing Automation; however is narrowly focussed on prospecting. Ideally the question should address the marketer’s need for TA customer life cycle marketing, the famous 360 degree view of customer interactions with the organization. I don’t like the TACLCM acronym, so I will refer to it as Integrated Marketing.
The 2009 Forester report, B2B Lead Management Automation Market Overview by Laura Ramos, provides a good analysis of what marketing automation means to different marketing and sales executive. They are looking for information from a variety of technology that can include: Content management (CMS), demand generation, CRM, digital asset management (DAM), campaign and marketing resource management (MRM), database services, listening platforms, data mining tools, sales portals and dashboarding functionality.
Integrated marketing provides the marketer the ability use bit and pieces of the various technologies in their marketing ecosystem in order to achieve marketing and sales goals.
There is no single vendor who can currently offer you an integrated solution. More importantly, the cost and challenge of implementing such a beast would be extremely difficult to justify strategic investment.
That’s why, typically and often pragmatically, you settle for a limited tool set that fits your budget and set more limited goals. You can end up overpaying for functionality that you do not need (e.g. for an email engine to replace the one that you are already using and are happy with) because it comes bundled with the new solution.
Ideally you need a solution that allows you to gradually implement functionality as your comfort and understanding of your marketing ecosystem improves. You should be able to gradually and continually implement additional features in accordance with your marketing needs and goals. In effect, you must first learn to crawl before you can walk and then run. You need the ability to implement integrated marketing piece by piece without having to pay for what you do not need yet.
To take a page from Agile programming techniques, you should only be concerned with what you need today or in the next few weeks, not what you will need next year. This allows you to implement quickly, to derive benefits in the very short term, and to be flexible in accommodating changing needs and a changing market place.
Today’s MA or TAP solutions require you to commit to a specific platform that incorporates features you do not yet need, and use tools that you may not be as good as the ones you are currently using or wish to use.
Whatsnexx Studio scenario palette
As a marketer you require a silver bullet that allows you to rapidly implement the functionality you need, to gradually add new functionality as you required it, incorporate new channels and media as they emerge, and to use whatever technology you wish. The only reason I bring this up is because Whatsnexx offers such a solution!
