Just like a new political candidate on the campaign trail, marketing technology solutions make many promises and often don’t deliver. We want to believe in what the solution promises, but the reality is that the solution cannot be decoupled from its environment. If your marketing organization is already stretched thin, marketing technology alone won’t fix that, and you need to understand in advance all of the components required to manage a successful end-to-end marketing technology implementation. Here are some guidelines to help you make your marketing technology fly.

Just as in the Olympic Games, marketing technology implementations don’t always go as planned. A spectacular dive might be ruined by a big splash on entry, or a rough landing on a triple axis might compromise an otherwise perfect performance. Likewise, marketing technology solutions that seem great at first don’t always deliver. Your ROI could be negated if you end up growing your staff to support the technology or spend more than expected in incremental support costs. Whether searching for a marketing technology solution for the first time or looking to replace a solution that has fallen short, here is a checklist of considerations you need to address up front to avoid marketing technology pitfalls.

In part one of this series, we discussed how marketing resource management systems can be used to enable Sales to demonstrate thought leadership and help nurture leads through to close. In part two, we discuss strategies for getting your distributed sales channels engaged in using marketing technology systems to their full potential.

In marketing strategy, sometimes the difference between good and great marketing

This quote from a recent MarketingProfs article pretty much sums it up: "We are operating in an increasing social and real-time environment where things are happening faster and traditional approaches to marketing planning just can't keep up." —Frank Days, vice-president of marketing, Correlsense

As new marketing technologies proliferate, businesses face a dramatic shift in the traditional model of technology management, creating an emergent need to bridge the IT-Marketing gap with marketing technology champions. With this shift has come the advent of the Marketing Technology Office, which, according to a new report from Forrester Research, works to organize all customer data in a central framework for the adaptive enterprise.

Marketing professionals are called to deliver tactical marketing support while maintaining a big-picture, strategic view, and it can be hard to find balance between the two competing priorities. Tactical and strategic marketing functions can be especially hard to balance because they divide our focus between important, urgent and important, not urgent activities (think Stephen Covey’s Quadrant I & II activities). Tactical execution against strategic goals is critical for driving marketing results, but it’s important not to skew so far towards the tactical that focus on strategic activities wanes: Strategic marketing activities help to bolster marketing innovation. Here are some of our suggestions for helping to find and maintain balance.

It is important for marketing to be both tactical and strategic. As a deadline-driven and fast-paced function, however, marketers tend to juggle multiple high priority projects at various stages in the campaign management lifecycle, and it can be challenging to make time for strategic marketing planning and innovation – especially given today’s environment of staffing and budget constraints. Tactical execution without the strategy component will render marketing initiatives less effective, but strategy cannot exist in a vacuum either. Here are five simple approaches for making time to be innovative while gaining better command over tactical functions.