Community Marketing, Enterprise Marketing Management and Marketing Performance Management to transform marketing by orders of magnitude in the years to come

You may have come across a recent post I published about the latest Gartner “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” which actually represents the broadest aggregate of Gartner’s hype cycles. Let’s now focus on the Gartner's “CRM Marketing Applications Hype Cycle” in order to get a better understanding of the maturity, adoption rates and benefits of marketing technologies in particular.

According to Gartner Dataquest, by 2011, the marketing technology software market will be worth more than $3 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 17% for overall software revenue. This growth in marketing investment is driven by several factors:

CEOs' focus on organic growth, in which marketing is playing a central role in customer-centric businesses and CRM strategies,

Interest in collecting, analysing and leveraging customer insight into relevant and timely customer communications,

Need to align marketing with sales and customer service through improvements in the definition and automation of lead management processes,

Pressure from CFOs for marketing to improve accountability, financial management and operational processes,

Growing interest in online channels for prospecting, marketing and building online communities,

Emphasis on making the brand experience part of the customer experience, bridging the creative and scientific aspects of marketing to build customer loyalty,

Desire to make data-driven decisions, rather than rely on gut decisions, to improve overall marketing performance.

A growing number of solutions, applications and tools are available to support marketing; however, not all of them are at the same level of maturity or market adoption.

Emerging areas including Community Marketing, Dialogue Management, Marketing Mix Optimisation and Marketing Resource Management (MRM), provide areas for marketing innovation and can be competitive differentiators. Those capabilities are indeed providing opportunities for leading companies to take risks and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) and Marketing Performance Management are at the trigger phase, and the market is confused as to their definitions and their potential benefits. Overall MRM — corresponding to an integrated set of the MRM competencies — is still emerging as a strategic, integrated solution, rather than a set of tactical capabilities. Although it is garnering increasing interest, few companies have begun to explore MRM's full potential.

Alternative deployment models for campaign management, such as on demand, are beginning to appear, as midsize companies look to exploit the benefits of campaign management.

Technologies at the peak of the Hype Cycle, such as Multichannel Campaign Management, Customer Data Mining, Predictive Campaign Analytics, Campaign Optimisation, Search Marketing and Event-Triggered Marketing, have been overhyped in the market for years, but clients are beginning to derive tactical value from these capabilities to improve their targeted marketing efforts and grow revenue. Customer Data Integration (CDI) is gaining attention as a central customer profile that supports all customer interactions, providing consistency in the customer experience across the enterprise.

Companies are struggling to derive the expected value out of areas such as Customer Profitability, Brand Management and Lead Management while they are beginning to derive more value from Campaign Segmentation, E-Mail Marketing and Loyalty Marketing.

More mature applications, such as E-Marketing and Campaign Tracking & Measurement, which have received mainstream adoption, are becoming increasingly commoditised in the marketplace and are considered as competitive requirements while they are not market differentiators as such.

By the way, and while we are on the subject, for those of you that may be confused by the many marketing technology acronyms being bandied about, although EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management) sounds similar to MRM (Marketing Resource Management), it is worth clarifying that these have slightly different focuses since MRM is actually a piece of the overall EMM framework. In a nutshell, a complete EMM solution should consists of:

- Web and customer analytics for understanding and anticipating customer behaviour,
- Event-detection to easily track and quickly respond to customer behaviour patterns,
- Interaction and campaign management for implementing and executing timely, consistent communications across customer touch points (both online & offline),
- Lead management to ensure leads are delivered and acted upon in a timely manner,
- Marketing Resource Management (MRM) enabling Marketing Professionals to:

* Plan objectives & budgets,
* Schedule, traffic and coordinate work,
* Gather feedback, review & approve marketing materials,
* Track time & expenses,
* Measure results against plans,
* Publish digital assets and marketing materials.

Based on the above mentioned features, EMM should deliver the following benefits to Marketers:

- Automate and streamline key marketing processes,
- Manage activities more effectively with a common platform across brands and regions,
- Gain visibility into marketing performance and spending across the enterprise,
- Improve quality with best-practice processes,
- Optimize marketing investments with insight into past performances,
- Align global spending with corporate objectives and priorities.

 

Marketing is one of the last business functions to embrace technology, automation and strategic business process outsourcing.  Although there are many transformational benefits from marketing automation, companies will need to make some tactical investments that will deliver short-term benefits and enable them to work toward a broader more-strategic EMM vision.

Not surprisingly, Community Marketing will be a transformational area for marketing during the next two to three years. With an estimated 1.35 billion people having used the Internet by 2007, large numbers are using the Internet as part or all of their routine buying processes, as well as routinely contributing to the Internet with Web sites, blogs, podcasts, message boards and customer reviews.
In addition to using the Internet as a highly interactive, customer-aware channel for developing customer relationships, marketers are starting to "harness" communities for marketing purposes. Companies' ability to rapidly exploit community marketing will fundamentally change how they market to their customers and react to events that could potentially affect the company and its brand through social media.

Most of the transformation areas of marketing automation, such as MRM, EMM, Marketing Performance Management and Brand Management, are major initiatives. Because of the impact these initiatives will have on the marketing function, they will transform marketing and change it by orders of magnitude.