We have watched with interest as companies such as Marketo and Eloqua have gone from strength to strength, but it seems there are a few other companies muscling their way into the Marketing Cloud. A recent announcement from Adobe has confirmed they have completed their acquisition of campaign management technology, Neolane. This recent union now brings their solution tally up to six in their quest to build their own Marketing Cloud to stay ahead of the likes of Salesforce.com, Oracle, Google and IBM.
Senior Vice President of Adobe, Brad Rencher, was recently reported to have said “With the completion of the Neolane acquisition, Adobe’s lead in digital marketing is extended further, bringing critical cross-channel campaign management capabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud”.
So what are the challenges facing today’s marketing experts?
Certainly the interaction with buyers using multi-cross-channel campaigns plays a major part. The likes of Eloqua recently announced the addition of AdFocus, to specifically address the ability to create and automate campaigns across email, social media, the web and display advertising, which comes at a time when internet and mobile spend hits a record high of £2.59 billion.
Then we have to consider how to process feedback and data management. A survey by Gartner found that more than 50% of data analytics are still based around internal sources, continuing to view and analyse data in a very traditional manner.
Then there is consistency. Marketing departments may be full of great ideas and good intentions, but many organisations will admit that they have come a cropper and even the best made plans have resulted in disastrous consequences. Particularly when it came to feeding the campaign management tools with content, finding that they vastly underestimated the resources needed, which ended up spiraling out of control.
So before you dive in at the deep end and pick your marketing solution tool, planning and execution are going to be key to your campaign success. Here are our top tips for your marketing success:
- Set clear and measurable objectives
- Start small, but start!
- Find a way to measure online and offline behaviour
- Create good content that deliver the right message for your business
- Put enough resources in place before you begin and expect to keep adding to it
- Test, Test and Test again, to find out what really works
- Continue to question your objectives
- Be flexible and make changes as you go