marketingIO’s Outsourcing delivers the vetted talent you need under your complete management and control. 

• Lead process change by organizing around the customer. Marketing ops often thinks of their “customer” as internal stakeholders. Yes, however, the fastest way to impact the top and bottom line is to discover, engage, create, serve and delight new and existing external customers.

Step back and look at your current marketing plan, processes, technology and resources — are they aligned with and focused on winning and making advocates out of your customers? If not, lead this effort by re-imagining and re-prioritizing the focus and resources.

• Drive decisions based on governed data. With customer and prospect data — a company’s most valuable asset and the lifeblood of today’s revenue-driven marketing mission — this means apply data governance to improve quality and moving beyond data management and reporting to analytics and insights.

While normalized data formats and developing dashboards aren’t exciting, they are essential to delivering higher-quality data so all marketers can gain insights, take action, and achieve better results.

• Shape the marketing technology infrastructure. Another growing area of responsibility for marketing ops lies in identifying tech providers and implementing the right systems.

MarTech requires constant optimization to continually squeeze ever improving performance. No time for continual CRO? Contact us.

1)      Core vs. non-core skills:   Successful marketing leaders realise that marketing expertise are finite and not universally available inside most organisations.  There is a need to define what’s core to an organisation (in-house) vs those skills that are “non-core” and could be available for “hire, rent or buy.”

2)      Technology as the great equaliser:  New, increasingly cloud-based marketing tools are available, easy to use and often run by third parties. Think of cost efficient alternatives to traditional models, highly automated and increasingly operated outside of your firewall!

3)      “Buy vs. Own” your Marketing infrastructure:  With marketing teams being overworked and understaffed, bleeding-edge marketing leaders are creating scenario’s where they “assemble” marketing components on demand – fast, efficient and designed to deliver new customer experiences quickly and effectively!



Does this imply that all of marketing or the entire marketing function can or should be operated “as-a-Service?” No – far from it.  However, the operational backbone of effective marketing will increasingly move towards marketing-as-a-service.

The answer(s) to these questions do not necessarily have to be “building (all of) those capabilities in-house.”  Of course, every business is different, but leading-edge marketers will have to choose the “core” vs “non-core” nature of their respective marketing function(s).  However, make no mistake, marketers are looking into “CRM and marketing automation as-a service, content-as-a-service, data & analytics-as-a service, even community as-a-service” – TODAY!

iNeoMarketing executes your revenue-generating efforts with the right metrics and the appropriate reports. Contact us to learn more.

Forrester characterizes buyers as primarily seeking integration above all else. Good integration options make best-of-breed capabilities considerably more attractive.

The good news is that most of marketing cloud providers are galloping in this direction. Many of them have made huge strides forward in providing more open APIs and expanding their official ISV ecosystems. And from some of the R&D work that a few of these vendors have shared with me, I can confidently predict that the ease and power of these plug-and-play integrations will be pretty astounding over the next year.

That will permanently change the dynamics of this space. It won’t be about who has the best of everything built-in — simply an impossible quest in a world of such rampant innovation and change in marketing — but who has the best platform ecosystem upon which a marketer can craft an integrated stack that is ideally suited to their specific needs.

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Digest...

You shouldn’t have to navigate the buying or implementation process alone. If you’ve identified a need, done your homework, and are ready to move forward with a purchase, one major question to ask yourself is, who will help you get your software up and running and ensure it is a success?

When it comes to implementing new software throughout your company, you need someone fluent in the product to guide your team and tailor processes to fit your company’s unique needs. This is where a product services team can come to the rescue.

Here are the four main qualities of the very best customer services teams out there:

>> They Focus on People, Process, and Needs

>> They Include You

>> They Foster Learning

>> They Provide Support

Once your tool is up and running the work doesn’t necessarily end there. As you use the tool more and as your process or organization evolves, you will have new ideas and changes to incorporate. Your services team should be there to help you adjust your process. While you’ll want to take ownership and leverage internal resources where you can, you also don’t want to be left completely on your own. A plan that includes ongoing technical support, consistent check-ins, and clear communication will help you get the most out of your purchase.

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Excerpt...

Full-service solution providers offer a variety of services designed to help businesses run more efficiently. To distinguish themselves from one another, they often partner with specific brands that focus on a particular facet of the business process. There’s no end to the variety of services these types of vendors can represent, including:

-- >  Customer acquisition and customer relationship management (CRM)

-- >  Web design and development

-- >  Email marketing

-- >  Social media marketing

-- >  Mobile application development

Such solution providers offer marketing automation support, and often provide training and consultation for their service areas as well, so businesses can focus on their own industry rather than having to develop expertise in entirely new areas. The full-service provider can have many other distinguishing factors in addition to their choice of partners. Some serve niche markets like open source, and many choose to distinguish themselves through outside activities, like offering business advice to new clients or by targeting specific audiences, like VCs.

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Get Your Head into the Cloud - Cloud Adoption

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Advanced/ Digest...

This nascent category, called Marketing as a Service (MaaS), is an extension of the marketing automation software provided by technology vendors like Eloqua, Aprimo, Neolane, Silverpop, Sitecore, Pardot and Unica. Like Eloqua, Aprimo and the rest, Marketing as a Service vendors help companies plan and manage marketing-intensive activities such landing page creation, campaigns design, nurture marketing, lead scoring, lead distribution and marketing analytics.

Marketing as a Service providers operate in the cloud, hosting the application, making sure it integrates well with whatever CRM system you’re using, and providing other systems integration or consulting services as needed.

It’s the system integration and visibility to the complete demand generation cycle that’s key.

So what kind of companies should consider a cloud-based marketing automation solution? Small and mid-sized companies are often more open to the idea, mostly because they often don’t have the human or technical resources to deal with heavy implementations, ongoing system administration and time consuming marketing programs. But don’t count out larger companies, which are often overwhelmed with the information systems they already have, don’t want to take on another one and already have a high propensity to adopt software as a service solutions where they make sense.

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