Marketing is a dynamic and fluid business that must anticipate and quickly react to changes in the market. The marketer today must manage increased competitive pressure along with economic fluctuations, industry trends and changes in customer behavior. The combination of rapid changes in the market place with increased competition necessitates a more agile marketer that reacts quickly to changes and can execute programs in less time than their competitors.
W H I T E P A P E R APRIMO TECHNOLOGY WHITE PAPER
JUNE 2007
Aprimo's Enterprise Marketing Backbone Delivering the Advantages of SOA to Marketing
The Marketing ChallengeMarketing is a dynamic and fluid business that must anticipate and quickly react to changes in the market. The marketer today must manage increased competitive pressure along with economic fluctuations, industry trends and changes in customer behavior. The hot product today, is the overstocked item of tomorrow. The combination of rapid changes in the market place with increased competition necessitates a more agile marketer that reacts quickly to changes and can execute programs in less time than their competitors. The increased demands on marketing performance come at the same time as marketing has transitioned from mass marketing to micro marketing. Marketing departments today have to manage more products, more promotions and more marketing channels in an effort to attract and retain smaller segments of consumers, even down to the individual. The proliferation of media and marketing channels has compounded the complexity of marketing. There are now over 300 hundred television channels and 80 million web sites. Marketing via the Internet did not exist ten years ago. Channels keep expanding and now include email, online search, blogs and even interactive gaming. The abundance of channels and products means the marketer must manage more messaging, more versions and a variety of media types often with the same number of staff members. Marketing departments can no longer keep up without processes and technology that ensure that best practices are built into the delivery cycle every time.IT departments and marketing software vendors have attempted to fill the needs of the modern marketing department with a number of point solutions to address this problem. These initial solutions narrowly focused on a part of the problem, like customer segmentation. This left most marketers working with spreadsheets, forms, routing slips and manual processes. Internal marketing process inefficiencies throttled significant performance gains, like Return on Investment (ROI) or reductions in cycle time, from these initial solutions.These initial point solutions are "closed" applications that supported little to no configuration without open integration points. These initial applications did not adapt to the marketer, the marketer had to adapt to the software. Marketing was isolated within its own "island of automation" instead of connecting to the rest of the enterprise. In the late 90's and early 2000's, financial, sales and purchasing departments enjoyed the productivity gains of applications configured to match business practices that integrated with external systems. In contrast, marketing departments had few options. The lack of open, configurable integration meant IT departments had to bolt on integrations to closed solutions or develop costly "home grown" applications. A few CRM and ERP software vendors that were successful developing configurable and integrated systems for sales, finance, purchasing and customer service have also tried adding marketing functions onto their own application suites. These enterprise solutions, though more customizable and integrated, are built around entirely foreign business processes to marketing. Trying to force a creative department to use software developed for a more structured business process such as customer care led to poor user adoption and failed implementations. The lack of availability of an open and configurable marketing solution flexible enough to address a range of marketing pains has left marketing departments unable to attain the increased operating efficiency from technology that other departments enjoy. The lack of an adequate technical solution has put marketing departments in a rather difficult position because marketing departments must do more - manage more channels, products, media and events - with fewer resources.W H I T E P A P E R
Aprimo's Enterprise Marketing BackboneAprimo Enterprise, a comprehensive Enterprise Marketing Management application, applies a flexible and open service oriented architecture (SOA) called the Enterprise Marketing Backbone (EMB) to meet the various and changing needs of the marketer. Aprimo's EMB consists of a number of loosely coupled and interoperable software components, each designed to satisfy a specific business function. These compon... [download for more]
