InsightIQ Blog

Marketing Operations 2.0

Jun 10 2010

Marketing Operations is a term that has been in common use for several years now. It has become synonymous with improving and automating direct marketing processes to achieve maximum throughput at minimum cost. Given the tough economic conditions that have prevailed over the last few years, the focus for work in the marketing operations area has naturally been on being more “efficient," meaning doing more with the same resources or less. As the economy slowly recovers however, marketers are beginning to think beyond the efficiency of the next campaign or branding initiative and are focusing in two related areas – (i) the changing nature of the marketing they are doing (or should be doing), and (ii) redefining or enhancing marketing operations to support those changes.

As far as the former is concerned, marketers are now able to resume thought processes that started before the economic downturn. Those thoughts were focused on shifting to a more interactive and multi-channel approach to engaging customers. The resurgence of this kind of thinking means that the days of the broad-based batch outbound campaigns are now definitely numbered.

The experience of Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) - as communicated in their excellent presentation at the recent 2010 Unica MIS conference – is typical. They admitted that, “we have been operating in batch mode while our customers are now working in real-time." Being able to make that shift represents a huge and positive change in strategy for them as it will for all companies who will eventually have to make improvements in their go-to-market approaches. However what it also meant for IHG was a very significant and new kind of investment in marketing operations in the areas of processes, technology and organizational alignment. The last area in particular – the alignment of all customer interaction channels under one leader and unified org structure – was the hardest thing they had to accomplish.

The IHG experience is representative of a new frontier for marketing operations – the ability and need to support a greatly increased number of more relevant and timely interactions which can be consistently executed in all customer-facing channels. The elements required include more advanced capabilities such as offer optimization rules and dynamic content presentation software – the kinds of assets that will soon be viewed as core elements of what we will be calling Marketing Operations 2.0!

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Niall Budds
Director, Client Management

Niall Budds is Client Manager for Quaero, a CSG Solution. In his role, he focuses on building and maintaining executive-level relationships with his clients, and helping them shift from traditional campaign-drive marketing to cross-channel…