In two previous posts, we have investigated the terms customer intelligence and customer analytics in more detail. We continue on our journey today by defining our third of four terms – that of integrated marketing management (IMM). Each of these four terms are different and distinct, so let’s jump right into our third term: Integrated Marketing Management.

Integrated Marketing Management refers to the end-to-end marketing process, from marketing strategy to implementation and customer experience measurement. Once that customer experience is measured, results are returned to the marketing department – thus completing the “closed loop marketing process.” The IMM process is initiated and driven by the marketing department.

Integrated Marketing Management supports the closed loop marketing process by integrating operational, executional, and analytical marketing processes. That view of marketing aligns underlies the vision behind the SAS suite of marketing software solutions, which addresses the operational (SAS Marketing Operations Management), executional (SAS Marketing Automation among others), and analytical (SAS Social Media Analytics, adaptive customer experience, etc.) needs of the enterprise marketing function.

The SAS view of Integrated Marketing Management has four main components. I liken these categories to the four wheels on a car. All are equally important, are part of a greater good, and must all be present for the vehicle known as IMM to function properly. Accordingly, we use these four product categories to present our suite of products on our external web site:

1. Strategy and planning  These tools include ways for you to manage workflow and resource allocation, your marketing mix and specialized message delivery platforms.
2. Information and analytics These tools enable you to derive insight from your organizational data and form the foundation for some of your more sophisticated analytical techniques.
3. Orchestration and Interaction These campaign execution and optimization tools provide the means to manage your interactions with customers across multiple channels, achieve real-time relevance and find the best actions to take.
4. Customer Experience These solutions help you monitor and measure customer value and provide your customers the best possible experience.

Integrated Marketing Management is a term that resonates heavily with marketing strategists and classic technology marketers – as they see the importance of all four of these categories and know that (like a car) in order to have a truly functioning integrated marketing platform, you must have all four wheels in place and operational on the car.

There are some impediments to performing true IMM, which is not surprising considering how achieving it may entail centralizing marketing management, control, coordination, and communication. Integrating multiple marketing-centric processes often requires reworking culture, processes, and technology, but is well worth the effort considering the potential impacts of doing it. Vivid examples of how it pays off include:

• Loyalty New Zealand is driving loyalty using campaign management and optimization solutions as well as data management and customer analytic technologies from SAS.
• A large dutch retail bank is overhauling its current marketing processes to become more customer and online centric by implementing strategy and planning solutions, orchestration and interaction solutions, and customer experience solutions from SAS.
• A major American insurer and a long time SAS customer is using SAS strategy and planning, information and analytics, orchestration and interaction, and customer experience solutions to complete and market in a more real time fashion.
• A United Kingdom Telecom joint venture has built a highly scalable marketing analytics and service platform to analyze and serve 65 million customers using SAS solutions – including SAS Orchestration and Interaction solutions, SAS Text Miner, SAS Sentiment Analysis, and SAS Visual Analytics.

Up next, I will present my final post in this series about the marketing analytics term! In the meantime, please comment with your experiences around integrated marketing management! Thank you for following!