The Marketing Technology Explosion: A Blessing or a Curse?
I wasn’t sure if I should share this article, because it is such an obvious attempt to grab readers with a headline, while the body of the article is kind of BLAH…”Put the customer needs first” and other such stuff. However, on page two he finally makes THE point. And it’s in a big font so we don’t miss it.
Build a Connected Ecosystem Instead of Isolated Channels
This all goes to the point that I keep trying to make. We need to focus on Horizontally Integrated Marketing that can tell us real the value of our marketing spend and effort across all of our activities. You want to make every effort to capture all the data from prospect acquisition, through their decision journey, into the CRM system onto the close, where they actually spend money. Marketing will not own every process on this journey, but we have to capture all the data and close the loop. That way we know where to increase our spends and efforts on those things that are actually bringing in business, and decrease our spends or change tactics on those things that don’t create real customers.
We can generate all the positive Marketing KPIs that we want, but if sales go flat and you can’t show exactly how Marketing is contributing to the top line, you may be the first one sent home.