Marketing Platform

Marketing Organization is and needs to be seen as a part of an Enterprise’s fabric. Due to a set of solution vendors presentation on how marketing management as a subject should be looked at, a few marketers have decided to unplug marketing organization from the Organization’s fabric and strengthened another Silo within the Enterprise.

It is imperative Marketing is seen and worked on as part of the Organization fabric, and solutions that are considered to compete in today’s world, the vendors you are short listing should have the capability to see Marketing as part of the overall enterprise and not as a Silo, to achieve this an Enterprise Platform that integrates key components of Marketing Organization with rest of the Enterprise in a structured fashion.

Marketing Platform should ensure Data from various sections of the organization pertaining to Marketing is made accessible, be able to handle discrepancies in the data, derive intelligence out of it, provide rich data for Campaign Management, integrate Campaign Management output with communication channels and be able to fetch response from channels to measure performance of each and every campaign, disseminate such measurement to enterprise-wide audience and importantly centralize knowledge.

If any solution that you are evaluating does not cover the aforementioned areas, you are surely heading to a problem which you are not aware today.

Well, why would I say that?  Assumption is, as you might have not been engaged in a similar endeavor in enterprise-wide scale, it’s quite likely you start as an unsophisticated user, once you get your feet wet on Marketing Management Solution, you will not continue to be in “Unsophisticated” state for a long time. When you turn sophisticated (usually it happens in a few months after the solution goes live), you will feel terribly handicapped. Interested in avoiding this situation? Insist on platform when you talk to you vendor next time.