My first post in this series provided an integrated marketing management visual of the full customer intelligence process. Admittedly, marketing is big and complex, so I thought I would help to take a section at a time to highlight what's important. In that colorful disk-shaped schematic, there are three sections that “float” on top of the “blue ocean of information and analytics” – these being strategy and planning, orchestration and interaction, and customer experience.
Today we will focus on strategy and planning (which I liken to "strategery"), and the capabilities that are represented below:
As we all know, managing the marketing lifecycle is a complex endeavor that involves many activities – and the fact of the matter is - not all organizations excel at managing all the processes in the lifecycle. My hope is that this holistic view and analyzing the piece-parts can help you. Let’s talk a bit about the capabilities that make up this section of the visual:
Strategy Creation – I’m a big fan of strategy – defined as a plan, method, or series of maneuvers for obtaining a specific goal or result. Does your marketing organization look at the programs they run with the end result in mind? If so, have them check out SAS Marketing Operations Management – where they can create their maneuvers ahead of time – so that they don’t plan to fail by failing to plan.
Campaign and Financial Planning – Once that strategy has been created, we have to design what and how will be contained in our marketing campaign. We also need to allocate and track how we plan to fund marketing campaigns – and we can do that down to the individual trade show squeeze ball!
Workflow and Approvals – Visually set up your marketing project workflows and manage them end-to-end via automated approval processes. Custom workflow configuration allows for even the most granular tasks to be accounted for.
Operations Management – Managing marketing operations really comes down to tracking – tracking effectiveness, efficiency, and ROI among other things. Being able to manage this across your marketing universe – while understanding how one marketing initiative correlates to another from a cost, resource, and time perspective is critical to success.
Creative Materials – Marketing asset management is all the rage right now – due partly to the need to create more and more efficiencies inside of marketing because of stagnant program budgets. SAS can help manage and organize all marketing assets – while providing easy versioning, control, and distribution of those assets.
Marketing Attribution – Accounting for and attributing customer conversions to a certain marketing initiative, channel or time frame is essential to understand marketing effectiveness. Using analytics, SAS can help create and manage marketing mix models to do just that. Performing correct marketing attribution leads to efficient marketing budget optimization – which is what all marketing departments could use with global economies as they are.
Marketing Performance & Reporting – SAS provides analytically derived tactical and strategic insights for marketing performance. Scorecards and strategy maps allow marketers to start high level and drill exactly into what is affecting overall marketing performance – from predictive analytics, to correlation analysis, to time series forecasting and trending – all in an easy to use visual solution.
From initial strategy creation and planning, to the production and approval of marketing collateral, to cost and resource tracking, to providing insightful marketing analytics both inside and outside the organization, SAS marketing solutions provide the strategy and planning capabilities you need to effectively manage your enterprise marketing programs from beginning to end, as well as assisting organizations in attributing those marketing activities to real revenue.
Please stay with us for future posts on integrated marketing management with focus on orchestration and interaction, and customer experience! As always, thank you for following!
