If you’re living it, you know the cruel reality well: the practice of marketing has simply become far too cumbersome. It is not unusual for a company’s marketing efforts to require coordination among multiple internal functional areas, departments and business units; across many geographies; and between external agencies, vendors and partners. Couple this with the increased rate of Marketplace change, and the complexity becomes crushing. Today, it is just too hard to do marketing consistently well—and, it’s increasingly unaffordable.

Companies suffer. Inefficiencies lead to wasted resources, to campaigns that are misaligned with the brand strategy, to unacceptably long cycle times, to reduced accountability, and to clouded visibility to the landscape of programs that are underway or planned.

Customers endure. The internal issues of marketing bubble up and spill over the walls of the company. These issues then manifest themselves to external customers as suboptimal brand experiences. Instead of “right person, right message, right time,” a customer may be dumbfounded by the inadequacy of a company’s understanding of them as an individual and by how poorly they use that insight to build a profitable relationship.

If the opportunities for doing marketing more capably were not enough to cause senior marketers to reexamine their practices, then the realization that the consequences of maintaining the status quo negatively impact a company’s most valuable asset—namely, its customers—will certainly propel professionals to question how technologically enabled marketing may address the need. The thought is top of mind for a majority (83 percent) of marketers who agree that a comprehensive and integrated application suite is required in order for marketing to become more effective.1 If you’re one of them, then this white paper will be of interest. The problem will be explored in depth, the concept of the Marketing Value Chain introduced, and practical advice shared on how automating marketing can help companies overcome the obstacles that are hindering both efficiency as well as effectiveness.

Bekijk de whitepaper van Roger & Peppers