How to Successfully Complete a Marketing Technology Initiative
Corporate marketers excel at a lot of things; They know their brand positioning, audience, market space campaign strategies and mobilizing messages well. Getting an enterprise-class marketing software initiative through an organization, however, is far from making this list.
In fairness, marketers simply have never had to deal with such decisions. Most technology buys by marketers have been focused on point solutions – what email provider to use, which social monitoring tool to select. But with the growing complexity in marketing today, and the need to move from a collection of point solutions to marketing platform technology, marketers face two options; get smarter or get IT involved. Anyone ready for a quick lesson?
While every initiative has its nuances, there are two basic steps a marketer needs to understand to successfully get a marketing technology initiative completed. First, one must fully understand what is needed and second, one needs to understand how to move an enterprise software initiative through an organization.
Know what you need
Knowing what you need isn’t rocket science. But it’s not about intuition either. Here are five quick suggestions (with more detail offered in our Roadmap white paper):
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Know your problem. Do your homework.
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Learn from others.
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Create a features/functionality checklist.
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Think platform not point solution.
How to get an initiative completed
Once you know your need and solution options, next you’ll need to focus your attention on moving an initiative through an organization. This is where many corporate marketers struggle and initiatives die. Understanding and following these four steps can help you see your initiative through to implementation:
Saepio’s white paper, Getting a Distributed Marketing Management Platform Initiative Launched at Your Organization, provides a succinct, helpful overview of these four steps.
Ask for Directions
Most marketing platform technology providers offer a wide range of resources to help corporate marketers shepherd an initiative through an organization. Don’t hesitate to ask for these resources. Using them does not lock you into selecting that provider and the resources will provide valuable insight into the questions you should be asking of all marketing platform providers.