Saturday, August 18, 2007

A Marketing Geek's Fantasy - the be all, do all Marketing Engine

Do a search on Google for "marketing software" and you will get about 385,000,000 results; "marketing saas" gets over 2,000,000. With all these results, I still can't find my ideal "Marketing Engine". Let me explain this be-all-does-all "application": put simply, it is an application that ties all of my team's strategic and tactical marketing information together in one place, across products, projects and processes. The underlying value proposition is that it can help repeatably drive our marketing activities from start to finish with lower costs and higher success rates.

The requirements list isn't that long or difficult to deliver on:
  1. the engine must support the sequential steps of marketing strategy creation through tactical execution: Plan > Segment > Revise Plan > Create > Execute > Measure > Improve > Plan


  2. it should be possible to manage individual segments, mediums and product lines - or roll them up for consolidated management


  3. Processes (planning, budgeting, SEO, lead scoring, etc.) and Projects (product launches, events, individual campaigns, etc.) must both be supported


  4. real-time with reporting, dashboards and decision support from 50,000 feet down to ground level


  5. a pro-active recommendation and optimization capability that can statistically evaluate all campaigns, segments and outcomes to provide the optimal future spend structure with what-if decision making


  6. Lead scoring before hand offs to sales



  7. 100% web based


  8. able to integrate with CRM tools (gotta bring the sales team to the party)

It's not asking too much is it? As a consumer it would be Nirvana. As a marketing team responsible for defining and rolling it out, it would be pretty awesome as well. You could create some really interesting UI, logos, collateral and revenue generation campaigns ? As far as I know there is nothing out there that does what I want my Marketing Engine to do. Until one comes to market, I will have to make do with the five or six stand-alone applications that I have come to rely on: IQ's project / process automation platform, planning spreadsheets, our CRM package (SugarCRM), website analytics reports, adword reports and finances budgeting reports. If anybody knows of something like the Marketing Engine that I have described, let me know - I would love to check it out.