Enterprise marketing management (EMM) has a vital role in multichannel marketing today. It is the engine behind effective marketing and offers the potential of true customer-focused, knowledge-based marketing and operations.
EMM can mean many things to many marketers, but it typically consists of strategic and marketing planning, financial management, marketing resource management, data integration, information storage, campaign management, customer analytics, Web analytics, personalization, interaction management, channel management, and marketing performance.
When executed properly, EMM pulls the entire marketing chain together into an integrated process that provides an unparalleled customer view across channels, new capabilities for one-to-one marketing, and an efficient way for marketers to get a handle on the relationship between resources and return on investment.
For EMM to boost marketing performance, however, five factors are critical:
- Integration of data at every touchpoint. Information is critical in the marketing decision process and as such it must flow freely at every point in the process.
- Collaboration—not just within the internal marketing value chain but also with the external value chains of suppliers and vendors.
- Availability of data, resources, materials, and documents. It is important that marketing resources are available to all when needed to complete their job.
- Proactive tracking and management of marketing strategies, tactics, campaigns, and initiatives. You need to know where everything is; what is on time and what is late; who has too much work and who doesn’t have enough; what has worked and what hasn’t.
- Key marketing performance indicators defined within a balanced framework available to all. This entails a disciplined approach to defining objectives and facilities to allow team members to understand cause and effect. It also entails providing managers with information on performance through either lead or lag measures.
These key elements combine to deliver true business benefits: building strong brands to sustain the customer experience; understanding and predicting customer belief and behavior while optimizing communications to them; and managing consistent communications across all channels.
If EMM is properly focused on these business needs and implemented with care, it can create a sustainable and profitable competitive advantage for today’s multichannel marketer. Bill Marjot is chief marketing officer for SmartFocus, a Boston-based marketing management software provider for direct and database marketing.