You can’t build a marketing mansion around an offer outhouse

The cycle is completing…the circle closing. We’ve moved from IT deciding what defines meaningful data for the enterprise to Marketing deciding what performance, audience and CRM data really looks like.

How do we know we’re there? It becomes clear when marketing software is no longer a niche play like a contact manager or offer engine and instead is served by the same enterprise software vendors that only recently ‘owned’ the integration play.

It had to happen. You can’t build a marketing mansion around an offer outhouse. 

It takes a platform

Marketing data was recently a combination of the contact database and offers. Segmentation was the method to marry the two, but no more. Integration technology that pulls together location-based services, transactional history, sensor data (like weather), inventory, and a host of other data that makes marketing a contextual, in-the-moment affair.

Instead of spray-and-pray where low single digits are a great response rate, targeted messages delivered across any device, anywhere and anytime can be measured and constantly approved.  We’ve finally reached the point where marketing can have visibility into what’s working right now. Once we know what’s working, we can make microchanges and see the effects of each change. Marketing starts to look like operations.

Platforms can scale

We know marketing has reached the level of enterprise play when it can be scaled out the way finance, CRM, and logistics have been for the past two decades. Technology drives marketing today in a way that it never has before and that’s going to reshape the marketplace from the outside (where, when and why people buy) to the inside (who is being reached, when and how). 24 x 7, location-aware, contextual marketing is an enormous opportunity for those who understand technology brings to the table and how to put it together.