What is the marketing stack?
Or, how about…what is in the marketing stack?
Some thoughts…
Financial management: Fiscal management allows CMOs to track and manage investment by region, segment, business unit, product line, and campaign. Professional Services Automation software allows consulting organizations to measure effort against dollars. What functions are marketing departments using to measure the effectiveness of personnel as well as budget spend?
Customer Asset Management: sales force automation or contact management, activity management, opportunity management, call reporting, lead tracking, order entry and support, customer contact and telemarketing. What about sales force productivity tools such as dashboards that allow sales to check orders, enter expenses, check inventory, manage distributors, track leads and accounts. In addition, mobile sales people can reduce sales lead times by requesting product specifications, sending product samples and updating forecasts directly from their laptop computers. Online customer service and support. with account management, maintenance/help desk services and field service applications. Market intelligence. This includes competitor intelligence, trend analysis and supplier management. Performance analysis, marketing planning, sales forecasting and human resource management.
Response processing, literature fulfillment and tracking sales campaigns’ effectiveness.
Marketing Management. Traditional metrics don’t work for measuring marketing across multiple channels. Diverse distribution channels and constantly changing pricing schemes create extra complexity. Automation of these functions improves the ability of marketing to contribute to the value of the organziation.
Web analytics: or should it just be analytics?
Business intelligence:
Content management and digital asset managment:
Database management, email and campaign management
Search
Process Improvement: Complex marketing processes that lend themselves to automation include: lead management, sales material enablement (savogroup.com), channel marketing, co-op funds management, co-op materials and ad management (brandflex.com), dealer management, project management (basecamphq.com), process design, email management (swiftpage.com), campaign management, measurement, analytics, product management, measurement, etc.
All the stuff behind the scenes – dashboards, metrics, BI and the glue that binds and connects all these silos into useful information — this is the “not sexy” IT stuff — this is the foundation of the stack. Everything in the stack is critical for making better decisions and create a learning marketing department.
Here’s a good IDC report on the marketing operations function:
http://unicashare.typepad.com/share/files/the_marketing_operations_function_idc_dec_06.pdf
Help me out here…what else belongs to the marketing stack? How should the stack be organized? Is it a stack?
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