Got Collateral? Get Aprimo.

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Kati Dafoe
Not talking about calcium today.Maybe you already "got milk," but that's not all you need in life. Experts say we need a balanced diet of dairy, protein, grains, fruits and vegetables. You wouldn't try to survive on only one of these. You'd run into all kinds of problems if you only ate ground beef or blueberries. You know better, so you try to include every food group.

I hope you also know better than to think you're set for life if you're using marketing software that addresses one, tiny area of your marketing organization. Yes, it may be improving your outbound marketing and lead distribution efforts, but what about your materials and inventory? You may have a microsite builder, but are you working on search engine optimization or PPC Advertising?

We do software, and if you do collateral we can help. If you and your team realize that much already, half the battle is behind you. Are you looking for collateral customization software? Collateral management software? Marketing collateral software? Marketing collateral management software? Digital asset management software? Brand content management software? (Phew.) No matter what you call it, we do it.

James Gilchrist, a Graphics Designer at Aprimo and one of my coworkers, may be talking about this functionality so check out his posts for more information.


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Dangers of the "I can figure it out" attitude

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Eric Teitsma
Let's face it, a lot of us feel we are pretty smart and that we can pick up new tools on our own.  That search engine managment tool cannot be that different from Excel right?  Just point us in the right direction and we will figure it out.  I will admit to falling into this trap more than once.  Have you?

Need a hint?  Do you never read the manuals on our home appliances/electronics because you can figure it out by yourself.

But then a friend comes over one day and picks up the remote for your DVR, pushes a couple buttons and makes something happen you did not know was possible.  You are amazed and ask "How did you do that !?!" and your friend replies "I read about it in the manual."

Beware! I have seen how this bit of "ego" can cause real harm when it comes to using demand generation or marketing resource management software applications.  Especially in the more functionally rich features like email and microsite builders, web analytics tools, collateral customization, or marketing project management.

We all want to assume that once we are taught the basics, we can figure out the rest on our own.  So, rather than attend real training or read the help manual, we poke around on our own and see what we can figure out.  The real risk with this is that you probably will "figure out" how to make that content block in an email be a "rules based" dynamic content block. You feel pretty good and give yourself a pat on the back.  What you do not realize  is that there were four other ways to have approached that same problem and three of them were much simpler or better than the way you "figured out" how to do it. 

Even worse, you are proud of what you learned so you share it with others in your company.  Over time, these bad practices get passed on from one user to another and pretty soon your whole team is doing things inefficiently or even just plain wrong without realizing it.  Everyone thinks that is just the way you have to do it. 

Over the years, I have had many instances where a customer complained to me about how difficult it was do something in our software only to find out they doing it completely wrong and were unaware of the other much simpler options.

Enthusiam and a positive attitude are wonderful when working with software applications but you must be open to asking questions and getting help from the experts when its needed.
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