The Rise of the Enterprise Marketing Platform

Technology can no longer be seen as a back office responsibility owned by the IT organization. The CMO must own and mandate the organization to create a marketing technology roadmap. Creating, funding, and implementing the marketing technology roadmap may arguably be the CMO’s most critical task over the next three to five years. By 2012, if your organization has not implemented an enterprise marketing platform that joins marketing functions and applications (both offline and online), you will more than likely not be in a position to compete and win, regardless of the strength of your product offering or current market share.

The Place for Point Solutions

If one was to create a technology roadmap based on the marketing department today, it would look a lot like an Excel spreadsheet with each buying center on a different tab--Marcom, direct, loyalty, media planning, and so on.. Each separate worksheet would have a capabilities matrix that would include a number of vendors and processes to achieve and execute each capability. And, of course, a budget would be associated to each task as well. More than likely, each tab would have a manager associated with that list of responsibilities who would likely drive and purchase technology based on their group's desired capabilities and deliverables. This explains why most technology purchases today are point solutions that satisfy a discrete task (such as ability to send email communications faster) versus evaluating technology based on how well it compliments and integrates with the enterprise marketing platform. Of course this is difficult to do if you don’t have an enterprise marketing platform or roadmap.

It’s simple; everyone wants to integrate marketing. However, seven out of ten marketers are currently using at least three different technology applications to perform day-to-day tasks. More than 20 percent are using more than seven applications! And if these numbers refect only marketing individuals, how many different applications are probably being used department-wide?

You will not be successful at integrating your marketing organization by trying to incorporate dozens of different systems and processes across marketing. You need to make it easier. Reduce the number of point solutions, and thus the number of different vendors and processes, by implementing a platform that provides a single interface that consolidates core marketing functions such as database marketing, email marketing, and reporting and analysis.

While the enterprise marketing platform will never perform all needed functions, by streamlining all of the core marketing functions, it will immediately increase marketing efficiency and provide the CMO a deliverable towards integrated marketing as well as establishing a baseline for the marketing technology roadmap. Then the marketer can easily identify gaps that need to be filled by point solutions and evaluate point solutions that will plug into the platform and extend the platform capability.

How to Select an Enterprise Marketing Platform – Learn from Past CRM Failures

The CRM initiative over the past decade has taught us many things about automating front office technology, processes, and people. It has provided more examples of what not do than what to do, but the CMO stands to benefit nonetheless. And while this is no attempt to identify all of those examples as part of this writing, we are going to discuss one in particular: the idea of a single customer database.

One of the promised, but never delivered, big benefits of CRM was the goal of a 360-degree view of the customer. The database would no longer be accessible to only the Oracle or Siebel DBA in the IT department. The front office would be able to see all customer data.

This never happened. As a matter of fact, it actually got worse. Why? Companies went from having a single database (only available to trained IT staff and usually sitting on a slow mainframe) to having multiple data marts all over the place, each containing different data and frequently overlapping or conflicting data. With your CRM training came a data model diagram that looked like a NASA launch sequence. Terms like star schema were invented, which was very appropriate, because NASA would understand astronomy.

Marketers just wanted to see their customer data. The hope of easy access and visibility to all customer information was replaced with a relational cube, whatever that is. Simple questions like, "Who are my best customers? Who is most likely to respond to a campaign for this new product? How much profit did that program generate?" still elude most marketers post-CRM.

The marketing department doesn't want another database. What we want is easy access to all customer interactions. Marketers don’t think in terms of data; we want information. We want information that helps us understand our customer and their interactions and experience with our brand and our markets. And we also want access to our content and marketing assets. We want a single interface or portal that gives us access to all marketing information, assets, and policy. This interface supports all marketing roles and connects us with our partners and their services as well. This is the goal of the future marketing department, but how do we get there?

The Future Marketing Portal – a Result of the Enterprise Marketing Platform

The idea sounds great--a single interface that connects marketers with the applications (or services) they need, gives access to all marketing information, policy, content, and assets, and provides a framework for partners (vendors) to work within. The key to making this vision a reality begins with a technology backbone that sits underneath this portal that connects to various data sources (both internal and external), integrates core marketing applications, provides a technology architecture in which to plug in additional point applications, and manages all the processes needed to organize and administer such platform.

In order to get our marketing portal, we need to implement a marketing technology platform that integrates marketing services, processes, and people.

Joe Stanhope is Vice President, Platform Strategy at Alterian.