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.
The Three Prongs: People, Process & Technology
While they serve as an important hub for coordinating and managing campaign activity, marketing technologies by themselves are not a panacea. According to ITIL, an organization that documents best practices for IT Services Management, the interoperation of three strategic prongs is required for any successful technology rollout: Marketing technology deployments cannot be successful without defined roles for people and processes.
Research from Frost & Sullivan and Bulldog Solutions, reports the top three reasons why marketing automation solutions fail:
1.Don’t have the right or sufficient number of people (52%)
2.Don’t have the right processes (43%)
3.Don’t have sufficient content (32%)
The above factors echo our experience with Marketing Resource Management implementations. On several occasions, companies have come to us because they are struggling to manage their currently deployed solutions. What we have observed frequently with these companies is that – rather than empower their limited staff to manage more marketing initiatives more efficiently – the time and effort required to oversee the marketing technology solution is an extra burden on their already stretched resources.
The technology solution that promised to save you time and effort creates more complexity and requires more time to manage. As a result, marketing technology solutions are often abandoned before they begin to deliver results.
Do More with Less
The fact that marketing organizations face unprecedented time and resource constraints underscores further the importance of partnering with a full service marketing service provider whose solution includes not only the technology but services for implementation and on-going execution.
Consider, for example, marketing resource management systems. In addition to the technology, marketing service providers can provide the people and process know-how required for a successful deployment. They work beyond the technical process of installing the software to train users and to help configure the software for production on an on-going basis. Additionally, marketing technology solutions are ineffective without content. Marketing service providers can coordinate critical tasks such as uploading HTML, templates, and leads lists into the MRM system – serving as an agile extension of your in-house staff to help manage your technology and ensure your marketing technology solution is configured to empower, instead of burden, your team.
Go Lean
Marketing technology solutions can help you operate more efficiently, but it’s not enough to simply deploy the solution. Rather than a candidate who promises much and delivers little, smaller, more nimble marketing technology vendors can partner with your business to augment your staff and ensure that your marketing technology investment delivers as promised. After all, the political candidates who earn our trust are those who not only make promises, but go a step further by working in the trenches to ensure delivery against them. The best partners will integrate so seamlessly into your business processes that they act as a natural extension to your marketing department, helping you to proactively combat the number one challenge you’ll face in your marketing technology implementation – time.
Are you partnered with a full service marketing service provider who can help you realize the full benefits of your marketing technology deployment?
