Align Digital Technology with your Marketing Strategy: By David Raab

And now to the last article with which our Digital Marketing Strategy series for the CMO will come to closure.

David Raab’s article on technology strategy to align with your digital marketing strategy is a gem and highly quotable throughout.

“There are warning signs that your company’s core marketing technology may itself need replacement. These include fragmented data, uncoordinated responses to customer needs, and difficulty in making changes to keep up with new business requirements.”

Now, if David’s recommendation was for companies to fix such a situation by dashing off to buy more marketing software, I’d be happy (as a vendor guy) but the article would have been crappy.

Far from such short sighted silliness, David however writes:

“[But …: ] The appropriate response to these symptoms will depend on your company’s technology strategy.”

Huh, technology strategy?

If you are in the situation of buying technology, I don’t envy you. You face tough choices for technology selection.

• Are you going with a best of breed approach by buying separate systems for each channel?
• Or are you going with a suite approach to drive to a common or integrated system across channels?

Similarly are you going for the cloud or in-house systems?

The article doesn’t provide an exhaustive answer as to what will be the best fit for you. But it is a good place to start mapping your options and putting them into context.

The business case

As vendors we all work hard to document the successes that our customers are achieving with the technology we serve them with, as far as clients are willing to share publicly.

But David sets the bar higher vs. typical vendor case study quotes and asks you to think through the business case further for your company.

“For example, a $500,000 marketing mix optimization project might result in a 20% improvement in advertising efficiency – but whether that’s worthwhile depends on the advertising budget: on a $1million budget, that $500,000 returns just $200,000, for a $300,000 loss; but on a $10 million budget, it returns $2 million, for a $1.5 million profit.”

No wonder the article got as many reads as it did.

 

David Raab is, by the way, a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis. Check out for example his B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool and many archived articles (from DM Reviews, etc.) on his site: www.archive.raabassociatesinc.com.