Build Automated Processes

Professionals with technology- and process-oriented personalities don’t typically gravitate toward the profession of Marketing. So, it’s no surprise that marketers shun discussions of process and would much prefer to focus their efforts on more exciting initiatives like creating a great campaign or managing a successful product launch. However, in a digital world, it’s process automation that enables Marketing to collect the data that they need to perform the analytics required to outperform their competition.

There’s a field broadly referred to as Marketing Operations Management that refers to the technology that enables merging and streamlining internal and external marketing functions, including employees, channels, processes, data, and technologies. It’s the application(s) and associated workflows that provide a framework to systematically plan, manage, and execute marketing operations, including budgets, planning, and content management.

As the complexity of running a marketing department increases, automated processes become necessary to align the appropriate people with the right marketing tasks; enabling marketing organizations to improve time-to-market, allocate resources and perform closed loop marketing. Without well-defined processes for marketing, it is impossible to manage the complexity, measure marketing outcomes, and plan strategically. To better understand the automation of marketing processes one needs to understand the components of the technology vendors serving the marketing community. There are many organizations that cover the technology industry, and each have their own paradigms. This chapter (and Exhibit 1) presents one way to think about the tech vendors serving marketing organizations to provide some structure, however imperfect these sorts of categorizations.

Internet and Infrastructure

As it relates to the discipline of Marketing, the Internet provides access to the basic services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter that form the digital world. This enables marketers to engage customers and prospects in today’s marketing environment. Marketing professionals use codes in social media, email and webpages to track the behavior of those interested in a product/service in order to measure their intentions and interest level. These codes can record which social media group or thread they followed, which link was clicked on in an email or which search term was used to access a website. This enables more targeted responses and campaigns to those customers.

Infrastructure are the tools and other broad components of technology the enable specific applications to be built. This category includes such things as databases (including Big Data management), cloud computing, and software development tools for all media including server, desktop, web, and mobile.

Marketing Platforms

Platforms are software that every organization requires to run their operations. For marketers, think of applications like CRM, Content Management, and basic Marketing Automation (i.e., managing campaigns, the customer journey, eCommerce). Companies can get this technology from one vendor or many. They are platforms (instead of just products) because of the inter-operability of the technology — they’re open with other, more specialized software.

Marketing Automation platforms focuson the definition, segmentation, scheduling and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible. Marketing Automation can be defined as a process where technology is used to automate several repetitive tasks that are undertaken on a regular basis in a marketing campaign. A tool that allows an individual to design, execute and automate a time-bound marketing workflow can be called a Marketing Automation platform.

Marketing Automation platforms enable marketers to automate and simplify client communication by managing complex omni-channel marketing strategies from a single tool. Marketing Automation assist greatly in areas like Lead Generation, Segmentation, Lead nurturing and lead scoring, Relationship marketing, Cross-sell and upsell, Retention, Marketing ROI measurement. These applicationshelp marketing organizations more effectively market to multiple channels and to automate repetitive tasks. focus on moving leads from the top of the marketing funnel through to becoming sales-ready leads at the bottom of the funnel. Prospects are scored, based on their activities and other data, and then presented drip campaign messaging via email and social channels, thus nurturing them from first interest through to sale. Commonly used in business-to-business (B2B), or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process.

Marketing Middleware

Middleware are the connective tissue that make it even easier for different products to work together. Instead of integrating each single product with each other, middleware serves as a common transport system for data between those applications. Solutions in this area include data management platforms and customer data platforms, and tag management, cloud automation/integration products, user management/single sign-on services, and API management.

Combined, with marketing platforms, marketing middleware make it increasingly manageable to orchestrate diverse marketing software products into a cohesive stack. Each business will be better able to tailor a marketing technology portfolio that best serves their mission, which drives innovation in marketing technology point solutions.

Marketing Outreach (Experiences)

Applications related to managing the customer experience is the broadest category, with the most vendors supplying solutions in this space. These are more specialized technologies that directly affect prospects and customers across their lifecycle, such as advertising, email, social media, events/webinars, Call Centers, sales enablement, SEO, content marketing, personalization, and testing/optimization and can be considered the front-office of modern marketing, i.e. the applications that face the customer.

Challenges and Opportunities

The biggest challenge for most firms is the adoption of the technology and the learning curve, as marketing teams have not traditionally been technology focused in marketing management. But these technologies will form a key part of how marketing departments will succeed going forward.

Technology supporting the marketing function try to develop measurable and defensible ROI by, among other things, the automation (and simplification) of processes that DO NOT differentiate a company so that marketing leaders can spend their efforts focusing on what DOES.

Link to the next article in the sequence: Analytical Marketing 2.4 – Implement Effective Metrics

Author

David Bartenwerfer is the founder and principal of Quantum Consulting and Technology. QuantumCT helps product and marketing organizations get smarter and prove, predict and optimize impact and ROI with economic and financial modeling that employs customizable algorithms and technology leading to fast and lasting insight and action. Mr. Bartenwerfer has over twenty years’ experience in the High Tech, Internet, Telecom, Media, Financial Services and Retail industries and holds a B.S. in Systems Engineering with minors in applied mathematics and economics from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. For further information, contact the author at davidbartenwerfer@quantumct.com.