Marketers are under an increasing amount of pressure to prove ROI while crafting relevant and timely messaging via a proliferation of channels. Industry experts offer advice on how to perform this balancing act.
Heightened customer expectations, continuously emerging channels, and economic urgency to produce ROI have placed an unusually high strain on marketers. Trapped in a tug-of-war between various divergent responsibilities, more and more marketers are wearing multiple hats, including that of an analyst, technologist, and creative designer.
Kristin Hambelton, vice president of marketing for Neolane, says that limited human resources, tight budgets, a generation gap, and a void in college curriculum around today's marketing responsibilities, add to the complexity of the situation. "There's a lot going on and add to that the everyday, 'I need to show that I'm driving revenue for the organization,' and it's incredibly hard and frustrating for B2B and B2C marketers," she says.
Although many marketers are responsible for branding, analytics, and daily marketing operations, Hambelton adds that most people excel in one or possibly two areas, but companies typically are challenged to find a marketer who can perform all three functions well. "For marketers, it's always been a balancing act, but what they are balancing has changed," she says. "If it's not one set of things, it's another."
What is a marketer to do? How do they balance their responsibilities of delivering relevant, timely messaging with drilling for KPIs and managing IT complexities?
To help marketers find common ground, Hambelton and other industry experts cite several critical measures marketers should take, including hiring analytically minded employees, assigning cross-functional responsibilities including ownership of the customer experience, and adopting technologies and platforms to automate the analytical processes.
Toni Schottenhammer, Xerox market development manager, says that most marketers also need help conducting the analysis of their marketing data??"especially consider the volumes of information coming from myriad, disparate sources. "There are so many different ways to look at that data, and it's a matter of looking at all of it and figuring out exactly what kind of conclusions you can come to," she says. Now that we're in this new world…its' really going to become more difficult to figure out which approach made [customers] do something."
Kristy Burton, associate director of the honors program at Miami University, has partnered with Xerox to help segment and deliver variable data print and digital campaigns to high school prospects. Burton says that in the past budget constraints had prevented her department from sending multichannel communications to a granular level of segments. Instead they sent static brochures. Now she realizes how time consuming multichannel, data-driven marketing efforts can be. "Without this [technology]," she says, "it would be really difficult not only to maintain the segmentation, but to even do a campaign at all."
According to Jeff Erramouspe, president of Manticore, the challenge requires a meeting of the IT and marketing minds. Organizations, he says, need people in their marketing departments who think analytically and systematically??"but one person may not possess both skill sets. "One of the areas that companies need to include in campaign initiatives is software development. You have to pull those folks over to marketing," he says.
Some organization are creating positions to bridge the IT and marketing chasm. Hambelton has heard murmurs, for example, of the chief marketing technology officer position being formed within some organizations. A CMTO generally possess the skill sets to better manage the intricacies of data, helping to alleviate some of marketing's burdens. "There's this recognition that it might make sense to have a person who has the underpinning and the tools to focus on what marketers do, which is marketing," Hambelton says.
Another bridge between marketing and IT, Hambelton adds, will be greater adoption of technologies to help automate marketing initiatives and eliminate the "heavy lifting" required of marketers to deliver the promised customer experience. "At the end of the day, marketers want the same thing as customers," she says. "They want to drive that customer experience through consistent conversations."
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Marketers are under an increasing amount of pressure to prove ROI while crafting relevant and timely messaging via a proliferation of channels. Industry experts offer advice on how to perform this balancing act.
Courtesy of 1to1media.com
Heightened customer expectations, continuously emerging channels, and economic urgency to produce ROI have placed an unusually high strain on marketers. Trapped in a tug-of-war between various divergent responsibilities, more and more marketers are wearing multiple hats, including that of an analyst, technologist, and creative designer.
Kristin Hambelton, vice president of marketing for Neolane, says that limited human resources, tight budgets, a generation gap, and a void in college curriculum around today's marketing responsibilities, add to the complexity of the situation. "There's a lot going on and add to that the everyday, 'I need to show that I'm driving revenue for the organization,' and it's incredibly hard and frustrating for B2B and B2C marketers," she says.
Although many marketers are responsible for branding, analytics, and daily marketing operations, Hambelton adds that most people excel in one or possibly two areas, but companies typically are challenged to find a marketer who can perform all three functions well. "For marketers, it's always been a balancing act, but what they are balancing has changed," she says. "If it's not one set of things, it's another."
What is a marketer to do? How do they balance their responsibilities of delivering relevant, timely messaging with drilling for KPIs and managing IT complexities?
To help marketers find common ground, Hambelton and other industry experts cite several critical measures marketers should take, including hiring analytically minded employees, assigning cross-functional responsibilities including ownership of the customer experience, and adopting technologies and platforms to automate the analytical processes.
Toni Schottenhammer, Xerox market development manager, says that most marketers also need help conducting the analysis of their marketing data??"especially consider the volumes of information coming from myriad, disparate sources. "There are so many different ways to look at that data, and it's a matter of looking at all of it and figuring out exactly what kind of conclusions you can come to," she says. Now that we're in this new world…its' really going to become more difficult to figure out which approach made [customers] do something."
Kristy Burton, associate director of the honors program at Miami University, has partnered with Xerox to help segment and deliver variable data print and digital campaigns to high school prospects. Burton says that in the past budget constraints had prevented her department from sending multichannel communications to a granular level of segments. Instead they sent static brochures. Now she realizes how time consuming multichannel, data-driven marketing efforts can be. "Without this [technology]," she says, "it would be really difficult not only to maintain the segmentation, but to even do a campaign at all."
According to Jeff Erramouspe, president of Manticore, the challenge requires a meeting of the IT and marketing minds. Organizations, he says, need people in their marketing departments who think analytically and systematically??"but one person may not possess both skill sets. "One of the areas that companies need to include in campaign initiatives is software development. You have to pull those folks over to marketing," he says.
Some organization are creating positions to bridge the IT and marketing chasm. Hambelton has heard murmurs, for example, of the chief marketing technology officer position being formed within some organizations. A CMTO generally possess the skill sets to better manage the intricacies of data, helping to alleviate some of marketing's burdens. "There's this recognition that it might make sense to have a person who has the underpinning and the tools to focus on what marketers do, which is marketing," Hambelton says.
Another bridge between marketing and IT, Hambelton adds, will be greater adoption of technologies to help automate marketing initiatives and eliminate the "heavy lifting" required of marketers to deliver the promised customer experience. "At the end of the day, marketers want the same thing as customers," she says. "They want to drive that customer experience through consistent conversations."
Courtesy of 1to1media.com