As a company, Aprimo spent many years in a software category (marketing resource management) that most marketers knew little about.  This category focused on the "back office" of marketing, helping the marketer manage their projects, their budget, and their marketing assets.  However, most marketing organizations 10 years ago did this with spreadsheets and file systems (and many of them still do today!  p.s. we still would like to talk to you!).

When you live in a category for a long time that does not have general awareness, you get addicted to outbound marketing.  This is because you are constantly having to "reach out" to educate someone about what you do, why it is important, and why they should care.

Times have changed at Aprimo, and now we are serving many markets that have ready, willing buyers looking to solve the problems they have today with software we offer.  However, it is interesting that our marketing was slow to change.  We became addicted to outbound.  Even though there are many marketers now looking to solve problems like email marketing, search engine marketing, campaign management, and more, we have built an engine that tries to "call everyone" asking if they want to solve the problem vs. putting up a sign saying "we solve this" and letting them find us.

Ok, a sign is a simplistic example.  However, effective PPC campaigns are just not something we think first about.  For instance, there were 700,000 people looking for "email marketing software" this month.  However, we never seriously tried to win that search term.  Instead, we will place millions into channels calling people about email marketing hoping they happen to be one of the 700,000 that already told us they were looking via search.

Times are changing at Aprimo and so is our marketing approach.  In the coming months, we are going to be investing more and more on inbound channels.  However, habits are hard to break and this change does not come easily.  I imagine we are not the only company struggling to break such habits!

 

If you're like me, you are constantly wanting improve your ROI in marketing. Paid search is one of the many tools interactive marketers use to stay a few steps ahead of the search engine management circus.

But, what does one do when conversion rates start to slip? No matter how well you have your paid search ads crafted, regardless of how well you use all of the technology for marketing tools offered by Google, sooner or later, your ROI will start to lose some of its luster.

Search marketing is a larger-than life project, one that requires major planning and insight. But sometimes, it's the smallest of strategy shifts that produce big results. And, with everyone trying to do more with less, these small optimizing ideas can be golden.

As any PPC guru is well aware, Google Adwords offers a plethora of tools to manage your paid search efforts. Two that are often overlooked are ad scheduling and IP restriction.

Ad scheduling will help search marketers fine tune their paid search campaigns by limiting when their ads appear within Google searches. If, you know that your prospects are going to be searching for you during business hours, does it make sense to run paid search ads on the weekends?  You can dictate when your paid search ads appear from the campaign management tab. 

Another tip would be to restrict your ads based on IP address. This tool can make your paid search budget go even farther and increase your marketing ROI. This easy to use tool is also found in the Tools section. By excluding IP addresses that have low conversions rates, you can focus your precious search engine marketing budget on more lucrative site visitors.

I mentioned getting Marketing Finance Operations under control in my last post.  We operated as a typical marketing organization with distributed authority for approving expenses and no real good central mechanism to track expected expenses.  The complexity with managing marketing financial software is the various stages of marketing spending. 

First, there is a forecast for a program (e.g. an online marketing campaign)  that is planned in the future.  This "earmarks" money from the budget somewhere out in time.  Second, there is the point where you actually start to commit spending money for the online marketing campaign through a verbal or written contract (e.g. a PPC advertising campaign).  Finally, there is the actual invoice when cash flow is impacted. These all need to be managed on three dimensions - a budget, an activity and alignment with your General Ledger accounts.  Visibility to all these aspects allows me to react to budget increases (yes, it can happen), budget cuts (okay, this is more common) and the desire to change plans to react to market dynamics.  The association with the General Ledger provides an alignment point between Marketing Operations and the company accounting system.

In the past, we would get invoices that we didn't realize we had not yet paid and be forced to adjust our future spend when it was almost too late.  A good proportion of marketing spend is committed well in advance. When we had to adjust within a quarter, our options were limited on finding places to cut.  Also, without the visibility of what was committed and what wasn't, we didn't really know what activities carried a large amount of sunk cost.  The other side of the equation, measurement, is equally as important. Without knowing the cost of an activity (the Investment), it's pretty difficult to assess the Return on Investment or ROI in Marketing.  But, that's a topic for my next post.  Until then, may the marketing process be with you!

• Integrated marketing communications
• Integrated marketing planning
• Integrated marketing operations
• Integrated online marketing

• Cultivation of customer loyalty and success
• Commitment to the highest standards of integrity and ethics
• Dedication to teamwork and the focused pursuit of excellence
• Creation of career passions and professional growth
• Respect for the individual and the importance of a balanced life
• Responsibility for service and philanthropy in our communities

It’s been just a little more than three months since I decided to shut down my marketing services company, jump back into my pumps and back into the proverbial hot seat of a high-tech CMO.  It’s been just a little over a month since joining my new company, Aprimo.

What is going on in the Marketing Automation space, let alone here at Aprimo, is just too exciting not to jump in.  Name it. Budgets are slashed so B2B and B2C marketers are flocking to improve pay per click management, organic search, social media and blogging to reach new prospects and consumers at a fraction of the cost.

Guess what happens when marketers flock?  Innovation occurs. And as B2B marketers try to scale and B2C marketers try to entice...CMOs like myself are looking to automate not populate to get more personal and more relevant with their marketing strategies and tactics.

Enter Aprimo. Our flagship product, Aprimo 8.5, automates the hard work of marketing -- budgets and financial planning, mass amounts of digital assets as well as integrated, multi-campaign management.  Our new product line, Aprimo Marketing Studio, offers a suite of software as a service applications for interactive marketing -- including the blog I'm writing...as well as microsite tools, pay per click management and social media optimization.

So as Aprimo's CMO -- my team and I get to innovate our own marketing efforts -- and those of some of the most savvy marketers on the planet.

Can you blame me for jumping back in? Come join me -- let's talk about how we can innovate together.