In The Economist’s February 2016 study of 500 CMOs and senior marketing executives, today’s forward-thinking marketers believe that the pace of technological evolution, mobile lifestyles and the explosion of potential marketing channels via the internet of things, will change the course of marketing by the year 2020.
At Centric Consulting, we believe it already has.
Today, most marketing leaders recognize that technology is playing a much larger role in how companies target, talk with and track customers. But too often, that technology becomes the core focus of the strategy.
To help companies leverage the cross-section of marketing and technology, and accelerate the impact of their investments, we’ve developed a Five-P framework for Next Gen Marketing:
- People: What are the relationships among the people you’re trying to engage? Customers, prospects, advocates and adversaries are all important, but so are the relationships they have with each other. Given the plethora of big data, we now have the ability to not just track audiences, but go beyond that to identify relationships among them and the degree of influence each has on the other.
- Purpose: For what purpose are you trying to engage them? The buyer’s journey helps delineate different needs, influences and actions. But unless you’re clear on their purpose in relation to your purpose, it’s hard to map needs to opportunities. 360 data views make this not only plausible, but actionable.
- Process: Many marketers get frustrated with the complexity of marketing automation tools, because they start with the tool rather than their own processes. At Centric, we flip it – starting first by understanding a client’s processes – between sales, marketing and IT – and then develop the solutions and platform recommendations to make those processes work seamlessly.
- Platform: As the top two enterprise leaders, Marketo and Sales Force’s Marketing Cloud have the most powerful marketing automation platforms in the industry. They continue to work at reducing complexity, but many companies need help implementing and running programs at scale. Have you selected a platform that pushes past your team’s capacity for complexity? Do you have the right support team? Do they have capacity to scale up and down, according to customer demand? Addressing these types of questions up front will help ensure the right-sizing of your platform investments.
- Price to Performance Ratio: Investing in a marketing automation system is not cheap. Fortune 500 companies can easily spend north of $1M for basic performance and enterprise-wide integration. To truly maximize ROI, consider all the investments – from training to major organization structure changes – required to meet the promise of a next-generation marketing engine.
Over the past few years, we’ve worked with a lot of enterprises to optimize their marketing operations modernization process. The most common mistake: a myopic focus on technology. That approach misconstrues the complexity of the process. By leveraging the 5P framework, we help clients focus on each of the critical elements so that they can structure an approach that will propel their company forward.
