Aprimo is currently touring Australia presenting to marketers far and wide about “The Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution“.
I attended the 29 March 2011 event in Sydney (disclosure Genroe is an Aprimo Field Partner) at which Aprimo CMO Lisa Arthur presented the organisation’s “10 Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution”. Overall a good presentation and interesting content.
Also interesting were the results from the impromptu polls that Lisa performed on the assembled marketers. Using hand held response devices, Lisa asked questions and gathered live data for review by the audience.
So what did we learn from an audience of 80 or so Australian marketers, albeit with a few vendors and consultants thrown in?
Australian marketers are most concerned about process.
When asked “What do you think is your weakest area” the results were:
More than 50% considered that their weakest area was “process” dwarfing Technology and People. Unfortunately Lisa did not gather additional feedback on exactly which aspect of process was of most concern. I suspect that it was less about the marketing process in general and more about driving repeatability and automation from their technology solutions and business.
The response did leave me wondering what marketers were doing to actively drive process deeper into their day to day operating models.
Channel / Campaign integration competes with Data and Analytics and Process for marketing integration focus.
When asked about the key areas of marketing integration this year, those in the room called it a close race between Channel/Campaign, Data and Analytics and Process.
We see the process area raise its head but there are two other big issues in marketing integration.
With the proliferation of channels and the desire to create integrated campaigns I think marketers are having trouble converting technology capabilities into real world implementation. The idea of integrated channels and campaigns is a good one. The technology (like Aprimo) can support it. The issue is that designing the strategy and implementing the strategy are difficult.
Data and Analytics suffers from similar issues. The ability for the technology to capture and report on what is happening is outstripping the ability for most companies to interpret and act on the information.
Doing more with less is still a key marketing driver.
Yes, the perennial drive to reduce costs is still there but competing for equal second place are Accountability/Measurement and Driving Usable Insight. I suggest that Driving Usable Instight is the same topic as Data and Analytics above – we have access to plenty of data but lack the skills and time to drive actionable insight from that data.
Potentially the need for Accountability/measurement is being driven from doing more with less. Generally if you can prove a good ROI from a project (be it in Marketing, Operations or any other area of the business) then management will give you more budget to invest.
Marketing’s key metric is … Customer Satisfaction
Now this was a real surprise. A good surprise but a surprise none the less. Almost as shocking was the drop of Brand and Brand recall to third place behind Lead Related Metrics.
It is generally difficult for marketers to act directly on Customer Satisfaction becuase they are not, in general, a direct part of the supply chain. This results implies a substantial shift in organisations to focus on customer satisfaction. This can only be a good thing if it is true.
