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.

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!

 

• http://www.aprimo.com/marketingstudio/splash/splash.html (a 3D Marketing Studio splash introduction)

Purpose of Marketing Studio Splash Page

• Blender 3D (blender.org) - create Box Animation: Output Targa
• Adobe After Effects  - import TARGA & animate icons; output FLV
• Adobe Flash - used to embed FLV and actionscript was used for the lights in the background

Challenge

• Web Design (all graphical elements behind a website)
• Interactive Flash (interactive objects created using Adobe's Flash)
• Interactive Video (using Canon A1 + Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Flash, Encore, etc)
• Web Programming (everyone loves making forms!)
• Print Media (brochures, booths, flyers. etc)
• Web Analytics, Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
• How we use our Aprimo Marketing Software to fit our Microsite and Email Needs

There is a debate raging (well, at least in my head - which happens more then I care to admit!) on whether the web will turn out to be a channel or "the" channel within marketing across the majority of business types.  Understanding how the web has influenced buyer behavior for your business has serious implications for the modern marketer and the marketing software they will require.  This understanding will change the way we view the role of search engine management, organic search, social media, landing pages, email, and more in the context of our overall marketing mix.

The most dramatic difference causing a change in buyer behavior, in my opinion, is the radical reduction in the cost of research the web has facilitated.  What would have taken a staff of researchers months to pull together 20 years ago, can now be done by the average buyer in less than 10 minutes using search and the web.  This simple fact has caused a sea change in buying behavior.  The modern reality is that virtually nothing is too small or too inexpensive not to be researched.  If it takes me a few minutes to make a better decision, why not spend those few minutes on the web and research that decision?  Today's buyer is much more educated about their purchases because the barrier to that education has been radically reduced via the web.

For marketing, we must go where our buyers are present.  Our buyers, in mass across the globe, are going to the web because the instant, global, and diverse information it provides has given them the power to educate themselves at extremely low costs.  For many of us, that means we must meet the majority of our future buyers on the web or we risk never meeting them at all as they climb the education curve around our products and offerings.  That, to me, provides the basic recipe for why the web will become (or has become) "the" critical channel for many of our businesses regardless if we sell our products directly on the web or not.
 

• Bing needs a better news feed.  One column just does not cut it.  Back to Google for news.
• Bing, several times, did a dreaded "awkward pause" after hitting enter in the search box.  As a marketing software provider, I have some sympathy.  However, in search, you simply cannot, I mean cannot, have 20+ second delays in your search results (ever). 
• The Bing search results (once received), in general, were very good.  I believe they do have some noise to make around their search approach and I believe that is already influencing Google.

ROI in Marketing. Perpetual Motion Machines. The Fountain of Youth. All seem to be very elusive concepts. I don't have much to say about the second two items (despite my engineering degree), but I can make some comments on the first - ROI in Marketing. Aprimo's Marketing Automation software, like a Marketing department, is based on activities.  It's a simple concept...but it is a unique aspect of our product that makes the difference in allowing us to measure the effectiveness of a marketing activity.  In case you're wondering, a marketing activity could be writing a white paper, developing a microsite, writing a blog, managing paid search or coordinating a major trade show.  When it comes to managing marketing finance operations, the key is that marketing looks at the world from the perspective of these activities.  We manage our plans in groups of related activities, we assess the value of various types of activities (should we do less trade show events and more online marketing?).

By allowing the money to be tracked within these activities, we allow you to manage your marketing spend the way you manage your marketing. I've seen many estimates of ROI in Marketing that only take into account the execution costs (placement for web advertising) and forget about the design and development costs that can be significant depending on the activity.  The return on an activity can be somewhat elusive as well. There will always be an argument that multiple activities lead to a closed deal or the lift in product revenue. This will continue to be the realm of estimation and analytics.  However, accurate tracking of the entire investment will bring more accuracy to the process. 

Well, I've dwelled only on Marketing Finance Operations for my early posts.  I'm ready to talk about another passion of mine -- process (yeah, I'm a blast a parties :)).  Stay tuned!