Technology now sits at the core of every Brand’s marketing activities.
Point solutions prevail for those brands that are still finding their way in the digital world (Microsite Software, Search Marketing Software, Marketing Communication Software etc).
As the level of sophistication grows, however, marketers find it increasingly difficult to hold all the moving parts together. At this stage, marketers are faced with 3 options:
1. Work longer hours
2. Grow the team
3. Find a smarter way of working
Work smarter, not harder – Coordinate your efforts!
If your marketing sophistication is in the ascendancy and you’re wondering when you’ll find time to sleep in your efforts to stay on top of the complexity that this generates, you need a platform that pulls it all together (Marketing Professional Software).
If you can link your Capture, Engage and Convert activities in one place, you can not only streamline your processes (Marketing Workflow), you will also surface the crucial Marketing ROI that CFOs now rightly demand to justify budgets. Clear collaboration with Sales (B2B & B2C) and open visibility of Marketing's contribution to the bottom line shouldn't be aspirational - they are pre-requisites.
If your day revolves around making things happen at the last minute, juggling all the moving pieces and shouting as you go, there'll never be time to think.
Know where you are, how you got there, what’s working (and what isn’t) and – crucially – ensure you have enough time to apply your marketing genius to the rapidly changing environment.
Marketing platforms like Aprimo Marketing Studio enable Marketers to shine.
Here we go - my first blog post. I hope you enjoy reading my musings on marketing automation software. And yes, I'm naturally a little nervous about freely sharing my thoughts and ideas, but hey, I'm excited to learn from your feedback and dialogue, so don't be shy.
For those who don't know me or my company, I co-founded Aprimo, Inc. with Rob McLaughlin in 1998. Time flies when you're having fun! Despite all the nay-sayers chirping "are you out of your mind -- marketing can't be automated, doesn't want to be automated ... marketing is an art, not a science ... don't waste my time," we followed our intuition and passion to build a company to fundamentally transform the way companies would manage marketing in the 21st century. Looking back, our decision to start Aprimo has been an immensely exciting and fulfilling professional journey that I wouldn't trade for anything.
Since this is the point of origin for my blog, it probably makes sense to start with sharing my vision for Aprimo. Aprimo's vision is to provide innovative software solutions for companies to automate their marketing value chain; accelerating their marketing productivity and optimizing their marketing return on investment. It's simple, yet comprehensive. It's unique, yet relevant. It's revolutionary, yet overdue. It's bold, yet achievable. Our vision and execution over the past decade has created many new categories of marketing automation software - such as Marketing Resource Management and Enterprise Marketing Management, and yet our vision remains an integrated super set of all these sub-categories. We are still growing into our shoes. Aprimo's mission is to build a world-class marketing software company whose products become the defacto-standard application platform used by every marketing professional to 'manage the business of marketing.'
Fast forward to today. Aprimo has hundreds of customers with over 100,000 marketing professionals using our applications in more than 40 countries world-wide. Did someone say this type of solution was overdue? We're having a blast teaming with our customers to solve some of their most pressing marketing challenges - encompassing interactive marketing, multi-channel campaign management, lead management, production workflow, marketing planning and financial management.
I look forward to sharing these experiences with you in my future blogs.
I have a confession: Back in my early days in marketing, I was doing a national tour for sales training with a large multi-national high tech company. It was one of those "If this is Tuesday, it must be Raleigh" tours with a different city and the same presentation each day. To say the least, it got a little old delivering the same presentation. To stave off the boredom, we challenged each other to weave in some nonsense phrases in our presentations (purple aardvarks for example).
What's my point, you may ask? Marketers don't become marketers to do the same thing over and over again. They join marketing to tap into a desire to be creative. However, much of marketing is about doing the same or similar tasks very well. Just like robotics in a manufacturing facility, marketing operations management software can address the repetitive side and enable the creative side for a marketer. Automating the marketing workflow takes some of the marketing project management load off of the marketing team. If you're not sitting here worrying about who has to review this item next and whether you have the most recent version of the creative, you have more time to be creative.
So, why should you look at marketing operations management software? It will give you time to find your purple aardvarks!
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