With the proliferation of marketing technology comes the build or buy decision. Through our discussions with marketers, we often encounter departments that have built their own systems in-house, and these systems often mimic the functionality of marketing resource managment (MRM) systems. Many companies put these proprietary systems in place before the widespread availability of the numerous marketing technology solutions available today and are considering whether it’s time to buy a new solution from a third party vendor. Here are some thoughts to help guide your marketing technology decision journey.

In parts one and two of this three-part series, we discussed key digital marketing trends that need to be on your marketing radar for 2013. If you’ve decided it’s time for a digital marketing makeover, implementing your marketing technology solution is just the first step. With increasing scrutiny of marketing ROI by Senior Leadership, once your digital programs are rolling, you’ll need to be prepared to refocus your marketing efforts around driving digital value. Here’s how.

In part one of this three-part series on digital marketing, we reviewed four key trends reported in the CMO Council’s
The State of Marketing 2012 Report: Given that the digital marketing makeover is a ‘key transformational mandate’ for marketers in 2013, below we offer a roadmap and ideas for undertaking your own digital marketing makeover this year.

Marketers have many new technologies at their disposal that increase efficiency, agility and productivity, including marketing resource management
systems, but building the business case for investing in these resources can be difficult. When evaluating any new tool, marketers and business leaders need to look at ROI, but they should also consider the cost of inaction (COI), as reported recently by B2C. Measuring the cost of inaction involves quantifying the opportunity costs of continuing in the status quo, as well as engaging with internal stakeholders to gather the information you will need to create urgency for the proposed change. Here are three steps for making the case for change – and succeeding.

Today’s marketing environment can be frenetic to say the least, and effective marketing management is all about strategy. Your budget and resource constraints limit the number of activities your team can reasonably support in any given week or month, and making time to accomplish the most important activities demands expert prioritization. Here are four steps for boosting marketing productivity.

In Part 1 of our series on Building Brand Trust, we discussed strategies for building trust through social media and customer communities. While companies should always strive for a proactive approach to building brand trust, however, there are times when trust has been broken and needs to be restored. Here we discuss strategies for repairing broken trust – even when it may seem like an impossible task.

During Cincinnati’s recent BrandHUB launch, we had the opportunity to hear Guy Kawasaki speak. His second pillar of enchantment, trustworthiness, struck a chord of relevance with us, especially to building brand trust. Whether you’re an individual or a business, trust is integral to success. To build trust, you first need to extend trust; then, follow it up by modeling trust through authentic and transparent customer communications. Here are three guidelines:

As marketers embrace growing volumes of customer data, variable data printing (VDP) is a way to make that data come to life and to help prospects and customers make an emotional connection with your brand. While it may sound complex, campaign personalization via VDP is within reach and can be executed at varying levels of sophistication with your Big Data efforts. Whether you are just beginning to put structure around your customer data for the first time or are further down the path, variable data printing can be an effective approach to personalizing marketing campaigns. Here’s your quick guide to making big data connect – no matter the sophistication of your customer data.

A recent study sponsored by the Columbia Business School and the New York American Marketing Association reports that 70% of marketers surveyed* say that marketing efforts are under greater scrutiny than ever before, and many marketers still don’t have a consistent understanding of what marketing ROI is: When asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization, 37% of respondents did not mention financial effects.

Changes in the consumer buying cycle have completely transformed Marketing’s approach, and the biggest harbinger of this change is that consumers might move on before you ever knew they were customers. Competing successfully in this new environment requires three foundational building blocks: