Top Eight Processes for Integrated Marketing Management in 2016

Top Eight Processes for Integrated

Marketing Management in 2016

Summary

IT application leaders must work with marketing leaders to deliver greater business value by selecting and implementing appropriate technologies to support the top eight processes for integrated marketing management. Finding the appropriate technology to automate each marketing process is critical.

Overview

Key Challenges

 IT application leaders have difficulty supporting marketing leaders via technology and applications because of the disconnect between the CIO's agenda for IT standards and the CMO's agenda for competitive differentiation, innovation and agility.

 Both IT application leaders and CMOs have trouble defining processes for

automation because marketing isn't process-oriented. Defining processes is critical to selecting the right applications for marketing organizations and is key to bridging the IT leader and CMO technology gap.

 No single integrated marketing management (IMM) application suite addresses all of these processes equally, so instead marketing organizations are buying multiple best-of-breed applications and rarely pay attention to issues like common

architectures, integration or companywide processes.

Recommendations

 Identify processes for automation that will enable marketing organizations to increase effectiveness, improve efficiency, generate improved customer insight, improve the customer experience and deliver higher return on marketing

investment (ROMI).

 Prioritize appropriate processes for automation, building a three- to five-year technology roadmap that delivers a balance of effectiveness and efficiency and short-term versus long-term impact.

 Use Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Strategy to align IT with marketing in order to select the best technologies and vendors for process automation.

 Choose those processes for automation listed below that will best support

marketing's business objectives, identifying the relative roles of IT versus marketing for each one.

Introduction

IT application leaders often are challenged to effectively support marketing leaders via technology and applications. Frequently, there is a disconnect between the CIO's agenda for technology standards and marketing's agenda for competitive differentiation and innovation in marketing processes.

With the advent of digital business and the Internet of Things (IoT), marketing is rapidly adopting new technologies to improve customer engagement and increase agility (see "Customers Alter Your Business Model, Become Competitors, Transform Into Things" and "CIOs Can Unlock the Power of a Great IT-Marketing Relationship" ). Even large vendors don't have a fully integrated solution across marketing capabilities

(see "The Impact of Market Consolidation on Integrated Marketing Management

Applications" ), making investments in marketing technologies quite complex to manage (see "Four Technology Design and Deployment Options for Architecting an IMM

Solution" ) .

Another major factor is the rapid move to SaaS marketing applications, which often don't require the involvement of IT — at least until a problem occurs or integration points need to be developed. Large marketing organizations can end up with 50 to 100

applications, with IT involved in only about 50% of these. With investments in marketing technology rapidly increasing, IT and marketing must be better aligned to develop a more integrated marketing application strategy (see "CIOs Can Unlock the Power of a Great IT-Marketing Relationship" ).

By working with marketing leaders to identify, prioritize and define key marketing processes for automation, IT application leaders can better collaborate with marketing and help select applications and vendors that will best support marketing's business objectives while maintaining IT standards for architecture and security. Marketing technology investment areas will vary by industry, business model — B2B, B2C, business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C), and business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B) — and from one company to the next. Top processes for consideration in 2016 will also depend on which marketing processes companies have previously automated and what new areas will most help them achieve their marketing business objectives. What follows is our top eight countdown of the hottest marketing processes that IT application leaders should work with marketing on for automation in 2016. These best practices will enable marketing to drive revenue, cut costs, measure marketing

performance and boost ROMI. We've chosen these eight and their order based on Gartner client interactions over the past year, and observations of marketing trends based on these interactions with midsize to large end-user companies across many B2C, B2B and B2B2C industries. These areas are often mentioned in end-user client inquiries, are technology-intensive (so gain from the use of technologies and tools), and have the most potential for improvement via automation.

From hot to hottest, the issues are:

8. Marketing planning and financial management 7. Marketing performance management

6. Lead management

5. Inbound and event-triggered marketing 4. People and project management 3. Mobile marketing

2. Multichannel marketing and customer engagement 1. Marketing analytics

These eight have been re-ordered from last year based on our interactions with end users and the subsequent growth and investment in the associated vendor markets. We deleted a few areas around content marketing where we saw more vendor hype than we saw end-user interest and investment. There are many vendors in these

content-related areas of the market, but most are maintaining a flat rate of growth at $10 million or less in the market.

IT application leaders must realize that the makeup of each marketing department is unique. Many smaller organizations won't support all these processes and may choose instead to focus on one or two (such as lead management in a B2B marketing

organization or multichannel marketing in a small B2C organization). If you are a medium to large marketing function with more than 30 to 40 employees and are strategically focused on marketing initiatives (not just in support of the sales organization), then all of these marketing processes may be applicable.

Evaluate the types of marketing processes IT leaders can support in the marketing organization, and understand how important they are to your customer and marketing initiatives. Then look at marketing and IT resourcing and effort that goes into automating and supporting each process, and prioritize where to invest in technology to make improvements.

Analysis

IT Application Leaders Must Understand the Top Eight Marketing

Processes for Automation

Process No. 8: Marketing Planning and Financial Management

Once finance allocates the marketing budget, marketing typically creates budgets from the top down, and then manages them in individual spreadsheets that make it difficult to reconcile and aggregate costs. Analysis can take months to perform, with results

typically providing insight into what was spent. However, marketing does not normally have the ability to manage the budget as it's being spent.

Gartner is seeing an increasing number of inquiries from clients that want to improve budgeting and financial management in marketing with a more robust software solution. According to the reference survey for the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management, 24% of references were using budgeting and financial management capabilities. Although it is likely to be a lower percentage across the entire population of midsize and large companies, Gartner believes this percentage will close to double over the next three to five years.

There are two main drivers behind this growing interest:

2. Marketers are becoming more agile in making real-time decisions around where to stop spending money, and where to reallocate funding and optimize the marketing spend for business value.

Due to the complexity of this process, IT application leaders are often needed to help with implementation, data integration, and integration with other business applications like finance, corporate performance management (CPM) and procurement (see "IT and Marketing Need to Work Together to Support Marketing Planning and Financial

Management" ).

The process for managing marketing financials involves:

 Budget planning and optimization within marketing

 The ability to send a request for a quote and select an agency or third-party supplier

 Reviews and approvals of marketing budgets

 Tracking of spending (committed versus actual)

 Alerts and notifications for overspending

 Reallocation of funds based on performance or in response to competitive threats and new opportunities

 Real-time decisioning for channels, media and different types of campaigns to maximize business value

 Reporting on finances and the effectiveness of spending

Industries: All industries with substantial marketing budgets, or where marketing is one of the biggest budgets in the organization.

Technology solutions: Invest in marketing resource management (MRM) modules for budgeting and financial management. Consider the complexity you need to support, as some solutions can be very complicated to implement if you are only looking for a simple solution. MRM solutions vary from extremely robust to more lightweight and simple to use in this area.

Recommendations:

 Work with marketing to create a standard set of planning, budgeting and financial management processes for the marketing organization.

 Engage the finance department for the selection and implementation of an appropriate MRM module.

 Integrate the MRM solution with the finance solution, CPM solution and procurement.

Process No. 7: Marketing Performance Management

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) and marketing leaders are under pressure to measure the results of marketing campaigns and demonstrate ROMI. Targeted marketing

campaigns, particularly digital campaigns, have been highly measured, but areas of marketing around creative advertising and traditional media have not been well measured, if at all. CMOs must apply measurement discipline across the entire marketing mix. However, the siloed nature of marketing applications — with

performance data spread across marketing applications, agencies, marketing services providers and spreadsheets — makes this an extremely difficult task.

IT application leaders will need to help with data integration across internal and external data sources, building effective dashboards, analyzing data and selecting more robust software-based solutions. Ultimately, clients want to integrate planning and financial management with performance management to move to a more bottom-up or data-driven decision making in marketing. Gartner continues to see growing interest in defining marketing metrics and measuring marketing performance.

Process steps include:

 Identifying and prioritizing leading key performance indicators (KPIs) for marketing based on corporate objectives

 Developing metrics for different marketing activities, programs and campaigns that can be tied to KPIs and objectives

 Identifying data and sources for relevant information and analysis

 Conducting a multidimensional analysis of campaigns, segments and channels

 Providing insights via a CMO dashboard and alerts and notifications

 Using predictive analytics to support scenario planning

 Applying optimization algorithms to help marketing determine the optimal marketing mix

Industries: All industries where marketing has well-defined business goals and objectives for driving growth, retaining customers or cutting administrative costs.

Technology solutions: Invest in solutions for marketing performance analysis, visualization and dashboards, and marketing mix optimization. Be aware that some solutions are very project- or consultative-based, which may not give you real-time insights or the ability to support agile planning cycles. Ensure you evaluate the software to ensure it is scalable and provides data integration, dashboards, visualization and advanced analytics.

Recommendations:

 Work with marketing and the business intelligence team to identify and measure three to five top KPIs.

 Determine the relevant analysis dimensions (for example, campaign, channel, segment, customer, geography, and product and brand).

 Understand that no single marketing vendor or technology will enable access to all insights, and all data may not be available internally. Some data may need to be sourced from agencies or marketing services providers.

 Expect to spend money on services for a complete solution, but evaluate the data integration, and analytical and visualization capabilities of vendors.

Process No. 6: Lead Management

Lead management is a process that aligns marketing and sales from lead generation to lead execution. By expanding the marketing team's role in the sales process,

companies can improve lead quality and ensure higher conversion rates by sales. Gartner continues to receive a high volume of calls from B2B marketing organizations and B2C organizations with considered purchase products (such as cars, luxury goods and season athletic tickets/box seats). IT application leaders will need to help define the complex lead process and integrate marketing and sales applications.

Process steps for marketing to handle leads include:

 Generating leads

 Collecting leads

 Qualifying and scoring leads

 Nurturing leads

 Enriching leads with personalized content, product information or with appropriate collateral

 Distributing leads

 Conducting closed-loop measurement via sales integration with opportunity management systems

Industries: Primarily B2B, B2B2C or B2B2B industries, but also B2C industries with a "considered purchase."

Technology solutions: Consider investing in process-oriented lead management solutions with robust business rules and workflow engines, as well as robust lead scoring and predictive analytics. Integrate these with an opportunity management system (OMS) for closed-loop feedback from sales.

Recommendations:

 Work with marketing and sales to define the lead management process.

 Identify the insights from marketing that will improve lead qualification and support advanced lead scoring.

 Identify marketing data (for example, profitability, churn information), customer information, product information and collateral that will augment leads sent to sales.

 Automate workflows based on the defined process.

 Integrate marketing applications with sales applications, such as OMS, to close the loop.

Process No. 5: Inbound and Event-Triggered Marketing

Inbound and event-triggered marketing generates timelier and more relevant messages than traditional outbound campaigns. Inbound marketing provides offers to the customer when the customer chooses to interact with the company, typically via a contact center or website but increasingly via social, mobile and point of sale channels.

Event-triggered marketing identifies opportunities by monitoring incoming customer data streams for early indicators of cross-selling opportunities or churn risk so that the

company can make a timely offer or convey a message. Gartner continues to see increased interest in this area driven by the need to improve campaign response rates and leverage the increasing amount of available consumer data for more timely and relevant offers. Digital marketing is driving higher interest in online personalization to

capture the customer at an optimal time with a more contextually derived offer. Data and channel integration require the support of IT application leaders.

For inbound marketing (next-best offer engines):

 Analyze data offline or in real time to determine offers, and build predictive buying models, if required.

 Determine the customer's potential receptivity to offers.

 Decide whether to make the offer when the customer initiates the interaction via the contact center or the Web.

 Augment the offer with personalized content.

Industries: Primarily B2C industries like retail, financial services, or telecommunications. For event-triggered marketing:

 Determine the objectives (for example, cross-selling or churn reduction).

 Identify early indicators (for example, declining/increasing account balances).

 Monitor data streams for early indicators.

 Determine the appropriate action and channel for communication when an early indicator is recognized.

 Execute triggered campaigns through the most relevant channel.

Technology solutions: Invest in advanced campaign management capabilities for next-best-action (real-time offer management) and event-triggered marketing. Digital

commerce solutions are also supporting personalization of offers on websites or via mobile.

Recommendations:

 Determine whether inbound and/or event-triggered marketing makes sense for marketing.

 Work with marketing to determine the data analysis required to support and

develop workflows for the appropriate execution plans across distribution channels.

Process No. 4: People and Project Management

MRM applications increase marketing productivity. They enable marketing organizations to better manage their people resources and allocate work effectively to different

projects. Marketing project management, also known as creative production

management, is the No. 1 inquiry related to MRM capabilities at Gartner. Interest in creative production management is driven by the need to reduce cycle times, manage reviews and approvals, facilitate collaboration and knowledge management, perform mark-ups and annotations, better manage and allocate resources to projects, and provide audit trails of reviews and approvals in compliant-oriented industries. The

complexity of process and project management requirements often dictates the need for IT application leader involvement (see "The 12 Key Functional Capabilities for

Marketing Creative Production Management" ).

Process steps for managing people resources in marketing include:

 Aligning creative ideas with marketing objectives

 Approving the ideas

 Approving the budget

 Establishing a skills database that includes primary and secondary skills for all marketing employees

 Identifying and defining tasks for the projects, including the amount of time required to complete each task

 Using project management to identify available resources

 Assigning people to projects based on skills, competencies and availability

 Managing the project, including reviews and approvals of content and campaigns, using workflow tools

 Reviewing and approving the creative work

 Reviewing, approving and creating an audit trail for regulatory compliance

 Using analytics to identify resource issues (overcommitment or undercommitment)

 Measuring performance and feedback of skills and tasks definitions

Industries: All industries in which creative marketing departments manage numerous projects and agency relationships. This process is also a required component for industries with regulated marketing such as pharmaceuticals, healthcare, financial services, and alcohol and tobacco.

Technology solutions: Invest in MRM solutions with people and project management capabilities for managing people, teams, projects and tasks with dashboards for

resource planning. Look for solutions with project management, workflow, scheduling and calendaring, and collaborative capabilities.

Recommendations:

 Evaluate workflow tools to ensure they support marketing processes, and offer flexibility for marketing to modify workflows as needed through visual drag-and-drop capabilities.

 Identify any gaps in MRM solutions, as some may not have all the capabilities to effectively manage people and projects.

 Develop a governance plan for managing and implementing workflow changes.

Process No. 3: Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing remains a fast-growing interest area for marketers. It is rapidly

expanding beyond basic SMS capabilities to include the development and use of mobile applications for customers. Examples include while customers are in the store to locate items or furnish a room, augmented reality, location- and microlocation-based marketing (such as, respectively, geofences and beacons), and mobile commerce. Consumer use of smartphones and tablets is having a major impact on marketing and its users.

Gartner is seeing growing interest in mobile marketing for both internal and external use cases.

Mobile can be used to support internal marketing processes to enable marketers to collaborate with each other as well as with sales, partners, merchandisers, and agencies and suppliers concerning:

 Remote application accessibility

 Reviews and approvals for budgets or creative work

 Access to marketing content, collateral and digital assets

 CMO dashboards

 Displays and promotion planning

Mobile can be a great way to promote products, engage customers and provide opportunities for a rich customer experience based on context. External mobile marketing processes include:

 SMS

 Contextual marketing (for example, in-store and while traveling)

 Local marketing or promotions

 Sales support, including use of content and video, for client interaction

 Use of consumer mobile applications to gain insight and generate cross-sell and upsell capabilities

Industries: For external marketing — B2C-focused industries, particularly retail. For consumer mobile applications — financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG). For internal marketing — any industry with an MRM implementation. Technology solutions: Invest in solutions that support internal and/or external mobile marketing. Consider campaign management vendors that support external mobile processes and consumer applications, as well as specialized mobile engagement platforms, and look to MRM vendors that offer mobile access for internal marketing processes. Vendors like Salesforce are now offering rapid mobile app development (RMAD) tools. Therefore, also consider tools from vendors that allow for custom development. Consider leveraging the IoT for use here too.

Recommendations:

 Work with marketing to identify and prioritize two internal mobile marketing

initiatives and two external mobile marketing processes based on business value and potential ROI.

 Understand data privacy requirements and best practices for mobile contact. For example, double opt-in is the generally accepted convention for most mobile marketers.

 Reject processes that customers deem invasive.

 Monitor and measure performance, making adjustments as necessary.

 Integrate external mobile marketing with other marketing techniques.

 Help select the appropriate mobile application development platform. Favor tools that allow for rapid application development via declarative, drag-and-drop tools, so business owners can build simple applications.

Process No. 2: Multichannel Marketing and Customer

Engagement

Over the past few years, many companies have adopted Web, email and social marketing solutions and, more recently, mobile marketing solutions to drive digital marketing campaigns. These solutions have not replaced, and often have not been integrated with, traditional campaign management applications that leverage offline channels, such as direct mail and the contact center. This has led to an increased number of marketing campaigns to customers, along with diluted and potentially conflicting marketing messages.

To be more relevant and effective, online and offline campaigns must be better aligned and integrated across all channels and campaign types (outbound, inbound and event-triggered). This has become increasingly important due to the proliferation of customer touchpoints and the overlap of channel types across marketing, sales, customer service and digital commerce. Marketing is now tasked with dealing more effectively with

customer engagement and, hence, customer experience management across the growing and overlapping points of customer interaction. Gartner is seeing a lot of hype around customer engagement and customer journey mapping solutions to manage customer interactions throughout the customer life cycle. Given the complexity and number of CRM applications that will require integration to support customer

engagement, IT application leaders will need to invest a significant amount of time in this process area. IT leaders need to put themselves in the customer's shoes either through sales calls, by being a customer of the company's products or services, or by observing customer behavior.

Campaign process workflows can be used to orchestrate multistep, multichannel campaigns across online and offline channels, creating a dialogue with the customer that can run in a lights-out environment. Campaign optimization can be used to determine the best channels and customer segments for any campaign. Campaign measurement and attribution analyses should be used to measure channel

effectiveness and close the loop on campaign performance. Customer engagement hubs can be used on a broader level to orchestrate customer interactions beyond campaigns in marketing to support any customer interaction for sales, marketing, customer service or digital commerce.

Process steps include:

 Establishing audience personas and map-buying journeys

 Planning and optimizing channels and sequencing

 Establishing campaign or customer interaction workflows

 Executing campaigns or customer journey maps

 Tracking and measuring campaigns and customer interactions

 Feeding the results back into campaign management and, where appropriate, other CRM applications (for example, customer support or sales) for customer journey planning and optimization

Industries: Primarily B2C industries that use multiple marketing channels and those that can differentiate between various customer journeys.

Technology solutions: Invest in multichannel campaign management that supports offline and online channels, campaign optimization, campaign tracking and

measurement, and attribution analysis. Although some vendors provide all capabilities, marketing requirements may dictate a best-of-breed approach across multiple vendors. Consider expanding these capabilities to customer engagement hubs that will support ongoing customer interactions through the customer life cycle, regardless of interaction type (marketing, sales, customer service or digital commerce). Evaluate digital

marketing and customer engagement hubs based on data integration, analytics and workflow capabilities, as well as the ease with which they allow you to leverage and integrate with existing CRM technology investments, such as campaign management, customer engagement center, sales force automation (SFA), and digital commerce. Recommendations:

 Inventory the current online and offline campaign tools.

 Consider migrating to one tool that supports online and offline channels, if multiple tools are used, or integrate solutions if having one solution is not feasible.

 Optimize channels, measure and attribute results, and feed the results back into campaign optimization.

 Evaluate and consider the implications of expanding integrated campaign management to integrated customer engagement using customer engagement hubs.

 Integrate marketing applications with SFA, customer engagement center and digital commerce applications.

Digital channels, in particular social and mobile, are not only channels for campaign execution; they have also become sources of data and information regarding

customers, including behavioral and attitudinal data and contextual information, such as location. As a result, the volume, velocity and variety of data are increasing at a rapid rate. Gartner has seen a lot of hype around big data in marketing organizations, but many organizations remain paralyzed by the sheer volume of data, its accessibility and privacy issues. IT application leaders need to work with marketing to help marketers identify and derive value from big data in marketing (see "How to Derive Value From Big Data for CRM" ).

Customer information is also attained through other channels, transactional systems and third-party data suppliers. Ample data is available for marketers to gather customer insight for finer levels of segmentation and targeting than ever before, enabling a

customer experience that is closer to one-to-one marketing. Marketing organizations should consider how they leverage the new types of data to support microsegmentation and targeting.

Process steps include:

 Identifying the types of data required for microsegmentation and targeting

 Identifying the best sources of that information and the frequency with which it changes

 Applying analytics to develop deeper insights

 Defining campaign strategies around the microsegments

 Creating campaign workflows using the appropriate channel(s)

 Executing the campaign

 Tracking and measuring the results

Industries: All industries in which organizations have invested in marketing applications. Technology solutions: Invest in analytics for segmentation, targeting, and campaign and offer management. Consider vendors with more advanced capabilities around predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Recommendations:

 Work with marketing to determine what types of microsegmentation or targeting make sense for the company based on its customers and on the types of products

and services that are promoted and sold, or based on the customer's decision journey or path to purchase.

 Identify the relevant data and data sources.

 Provide data analysts and data architects who will assist with the work.

 Evaluate solutions that support varied data analysis, and integrate these with campaign management and digital marketing applications for execution.

 Consider the privacy implications related to how the data is obtained, analyzed and used.

There are many use cases for using different types of data in marketing, including microsegmentation, targeting, social listening, event-triggered marketing, real-time offer management, voice of customer, scenario planning, campaign optimization, and

marketing mix optimization.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

B2B2B business-to-business-to-business

B2B2C business-to-business-to-consumer

CMO chief marketing officer

CPG consumer packaged goods

CPM corporate performance management

CRM customer relationship management

IMM integrated marketing management

KPI key performance indicator

MRM marketing resource management

OMS opportunity management system

RMAD rapid mobile app development

ROMI return on marketing investment

SFA sales force automation

SMS Short Message Service

© 2016 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior written permission. If you are authorized to access this publication, your use of it is subject to the Usage Guidelines for Gartner Services posted on gartner.com. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Gartner provides information technology research and advisory services to a wide range of technology consumers, manufacturers and sellers, and may have client relationships with, and derive revenues from, companies discussed herein. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner's Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity."