Last week, we shared 7 signs that could mean your marketing technology vendor isn’t measuring up. If you’re facing any of those challenges you may have decided it’s time to roll up your sleeves and change marketing resource management technology vendors. Here are some guidelines to help ensure a successful transition.

Many companies are finding more progressive ways to bring customers to them. Integrating QR Codes into advertisements are a great opportunity to enable a deeper customer engagement. In order to make this work, the QR scan must provide convenience and show value. This QR Code Workshop Series presents examples to emulate to help you improve the effectiveness of your QR Code and the resources it offers.

In our previous blog, The #1 Reason Marketing Technology Implementations Fail, we discussed how marketing service providers can stand in the gap between your marketing technology solution and your biggest challenge – finding time and resources to manage the solution you deployed. However, if your marketing technology vendor isn’t able to go the extra mile in the trenches to help you realize the full benefits of your marketing technology solution, then it may be time to change vendors. Here are 7 warning signs that something is amiss.

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.

Despite press criticism, QR codes have arguably emerged from Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment and could reach a broader audience with the release of Apple’s iOS 6, according to Business Week:

With the start of fall in September, the summer heat is finally winding down (we hope!). From Labor Day gatherings to the 2012 NFL season kickoff, changing leaves and fall outdoor projects, the beginning of fall provides many themes for creative QR code campaign ideas.

The insurance vertical faces several industry-specific challenges such as long sales cycles as consumers use the Internet to evaluate multiple vendors during pre-purchase, customers typically only buying one or two products from the total portfolio, and agent turnover. Marketing technology systems can help to combat these challenges by simplifying the process of coordinating insurance marketing initiatives with dedicated or independent agents.

With more consumers conducting pre-purchase research online, lead nurturing remains an important strategy in maintaining prospect interest during the early stages of the consumer decision journey, while content has gained momentum as an important sales support resource. This new environment creates a new model of collaboration between Sales and Marketing.

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.

With nearly 50 percent of mobile phone users in the U.S. carrying smartphones, and 25 percent of this sample also carrying tablets, connected devices and tablets have gone mainstream and are leading the shift towards a mobile-driven consumer decision journey. Accordingly, the IBM State of Marketing 2012 report found that 41% of marketers worldwide cite the growth of channel and device choices as the top challenge to their company over the next 5 years, while adoption of mobile websites and mobile applications grows.