have much to do still in integrating
data, findsGraham Jarvis
ALTHOUGH MARKETING (and its counterpart, sales) have traditionally been among the last functions to receive the full attention of the IT department, the rise of the multichannel world, in which customers are much more in the driving seat, has elevated marketers in the pecking order. Not only do they have more budget to spend, but it’s an area where they often have a good deal of autonomy on buying decisions, especially now the cloud is opening up applications to non-technical audiences.
Applications that are on the agenda include marketing automation solutions to track marketing campaigns, webinar and web conferencing services such as WebEx, as well as the various array of social media and direct mail and email management tools. A key driver is that today’s online world allows marketers to track almost everything a customer does, because so much is now done on the Internet.
But it is not so easy to find out what applications are likely to be the best fit for an organisation. It’s important to think about which cloud and on-premise solutions will improve a marketer’s ability to increase an organisation’s sales, customer loyalty, revenue and
profitability, with particular attention to company priorities, which are likely to include customer retention in current tough trading conditions.
Analyst firm Gartner has a good picture of the most popular cloud-based and on-premise marketing solutions. It regularly produces ‘magic quadrants’ to analyse where certain vendors and their
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TheUltimateGuidetoCloudComputing
‘best of breed’ products are positioned in the market, including quadrants for ‘CRM multichannel campaign management’ and ‘social CRM’ (CRM being customer relationship management, of course).
There is a huge choice of CRM software and the term can mean many things to different marketers, but marketing does need a wide range of tools to fulfil many activities, such as email marketing, social CRM, search engine marketing, mobile marketing, social media, e-commerce, customer services and lead generation.
“If you look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrants, you will see that on-premise
solutions are best of breed for multi-channel campaign management, and so you would look at systems from companies such as Unica, SAS and Teradata,” says Laurence Buchanan, head of CRM at Cap Gemini. These top systems are though mainly aimed at enterprise customers, and there is now a great choice of cloud systems that cater for many niche marketing functions and also integrated solutions – but integration does remain a big challenge.
Whythecloudisvital
According to Arthur Sweetzer, chief marketing officer at 89 Degrees, a US marketing agency, “many marketing executives are struggling to gather and leverage marketing intelligence across disparate addressable marketing channels”, and only a third of marketers have integrated their CRM systems into operational marketing systems such as profile- and behaviour-driven email.
He gives four reasons why cloud systems can accelerate time to market, promote relevance to prospects, and improve marketing revenue by as much as a third over a year. First, as few have integrated the marketing ‘data warehouse’ with email marketing applications, he suggests using a cloud marketing intelligence database instead, and second, the sheer speed of getting such a cloud system running means that disparate data silos can quickly be brought together.
Then Sweetzer notes that marketers can pick and choose the functions they need much more easily from cloud providers than from traditional managed services companies, and finally that a key goal is to look at the insight that centralising multichannel marketing data can give.
Marketinginthecloud
navigate successfully through the sea of data smarter, faster, and at a lower cost than ever before,” he says.
Cloud-basedcategories
Here’s a listing of current cloud marketing categories and a brief selection of providers.
• CRM solutions: Whenever one
mentions cloud-based CRM, the
Before marketers rush out to buy any of these solutions, and considering that there are so many different cloud software offerings on the market, take note of these tips:
• Don’t be blinded by the features of any given solution, but make sure that it meets your key business requirements
• Be clear about how you are going to measure the success of implementing cloud-based marketing solutions
• Ensure that each solution is integrated to capture customer data and track online behaviour for CRM purposes
• Recognise that the market has changed, and how people buy has altered too: solutions that were effective in the past might not be today
• Look for cloud-based solutions that are affordable, easy to use and adopt
• Invest in quality training and make sure that you try out and test the cloud-based applications before you are committed to them
• Do it because it will drive benefits like being able to react more quickly to changes in the market, reduce the time-to-market of a campaign, and lead to revenue growth
• Get going now. There’s no point in waiting as the technologies to make marketing more efficient and effective are there, and wasting six months testing each application won’t help anyone, so learn by trial and error