What technology makes sense for you and your current marketing strategy? Over the past two weeks, we’ve taken a deep dive into the marketing technology needs of small businesses and mid-market companies. This week we want to look at the marketing technology fit for large enterprises.
To explore this question let’s take a look at the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud, which has the ambition to serve many different types of marketing technologies. By looking at what Teradata offers large enterprises, we can understand your marketing technology fit.
Bigger Company, Bigger Headache
At large enterprises, a new challenge emerges: the scale of your organization and its marketing technologies. Marketing technologies may require new provisioning or upgrades that allow you to send and track millions of interactions, not tens of thousands. Analytics systems may need to be upgraded for the same reason.
Handling the increased scale and complexity of a marketing organization is a different, daunting challenge. Marketers are required to work together in a distributed model across brands and locations. While these marketers want to try newer digital channels, they also need to own the key systems of differentiation and record. The large enterprise marketing playbook is about creating and supporting communication and integration across an organization, not just about running sophisticated campaigns. The following activities are crucial:
- Carrying out sophisticated programs at scale
- Managing and enforcing brand identity policies
- Capturing a 360 view of all customer and marketing interactions across channels
- Allocating and optimizing marketing spend across channels
- Supporting collaboration and data sharing across departments
- Supporting short, medium, and long term planning across departments
- Enforcing privacy and implementing marketing data policies
To support modern, distributed organizations, the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud adds capabilities for:
- Marketing Planning – plan marketing initiatives against objectives, budget and goals
- Spend Management – manage marketing spend across brands and markets
- Workflow and Collaboration – manage operations across a variety of channels
- Compliance Approvals – Gather feedback from the right people, on the right version
- Marketing Calendar – provide a comprehensive view of the calendar for all operations
- Marketing Asset Management – provide a library of assets
Enterprises also have a need for hybrid deployment options. Some systems run better in the cloud. Others may need to be on premise because of the nature of the data stored (e.g. customer data in a regulated industry) or the type of integration required.
Why You Need a Good Marketing Fit
Taking a look at the evolution of marketing technology from SMBs to large enterprises provides a clear understanding of the different needs marketers have at different stages. It is important to keep this evolution in mind to avoid problems such as:
- Using consumer-grade technology for sending to overgrown email lists
- Spending time assembling data from many channels rather than from an integrated system
- Creating ad hoc analytics rather than systematizing your analytics process
- Using systems that are too large or too expensive for simple needs
This blog series summarized a generic view of different marketing technologies for organizations of different sizes. The key to making the best use of technology is to have a good fit between the work you need to do and the technology you have chosen to support it. Often companies shift gears from SMB systems when such systems break under the scale of large lists or after marketers realize they can’t run advanced campaigns. The opposite is true as well. Systems designed for large enterprises may be overkill when your needs are smaller.
It is far better to spend time understanding your needs and create a plan for an orderly evolution from one type of system to the next. In other words, by understanding how your marketing technology will evolve and change as your business grows, you can make the journey smooth and enjoyable, rather than an exercise in putting out fires.
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