Enterprise Marketing Management, or EMM, is a software technology solution for marketing organizations that provides a comprehensive marketing platform for managing customer and prospect interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
The practice of marketing is challenging these days because of the rise of the “empowered customer.” Today’s customers are well-informed, use other people as their primary information source, interact with companies through multiple channels, touch points and media, and want (but rarely get) a superior customer experience—and have outlets for venting frustration when they don’t get what they want.
Your customers are truly empowered. To serve these empowered customers, marketers must—now more than ever—put customers at the center of everything they do. In the whitepaper Today’s empowered customer puts businesses to the test—Enterprise Marketing Management empowers marketers IBM tells you how to do so.
The results of IBM’s groundbreaking Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) study, released in 2011, reinforce the observation that marketing is a challenging practice these days. IBM interviewed over 1,700 CMOs from around the world to create this study. The data reveals some of the most important challenges facing CMO’s and their marketing organizations today.
The top four challenges are data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics. It’s easy to see why CMOs are facing a “complexity gap,” because all of these challenges make marketing much more complicated today that it has ever been before. And it’s only going to get more complicated in the future.
You might think this “underpreparedness” exists only at companies that are underperforming, in terms of their overall business performance. But in fact, the problem is universal. Even marketers who work for the most successful organizations—the “outperformers”—are struggling. IBM’s CMO study shows that outperforming organizations are slightly better prepared to manage the most critical challenges—but only slightly. And less than half of these outperformers feel completely ready. Those in underperforming organizations are even more uncertain of their ability to cope.
Marketers need to respond to all these challenges by better integrating all their marketing efforts, across all media types, into one cohesive, coordinated marketing program. Marketing effectively to empowered customers requires building one relationship between customers and the companies that serve them, no matter what media, communication channel or touch point the customers are using at a given moment to interact with that company.
The problem is that most marketing organizations still have their marketing efforts siloed by media type. Some groups manage “paid” media—the advertising that is bought externally. Other groups manage “owned” media—that is, the company’s own website, emails, direct mails and other owned touch points such as call centers, stores, and branches. Yet other groups manage “earned media,” which today is thought of mostly as social media, that powerful force which is impacting all marketing, but which also includes things such as PR.
In addition to organizational siloes, marketers lack two things:
- They lack a platform to manage all of marketing, to help them coordinate and integrate everything that is going on in
- Most marketing organizations can’t even get close to creating a complete profile of their customers that captures each customer’s interactions with all marketing efforts across all media types.
EMM serves as the marketing optimization platform marketers need to unite marketing across paid, earned and owned media. EMM does this by supporting five key marketing processes across all media types: collect, analyze, decide, deliver and manage.
EMM works. Many have realized significant improvements in the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, including an increase in online marketing ROI by a factor of 15-20, a 15-30% increase in campaign ROI, and a 10-50% increase in response rates. Customers also report impressive efficiency improvements, including the ability to execute 2-5 times more campaigns with the same resources, a 20-40% reduction in marketing costs, and a 25-75% reduction in customer acquisition costs.
Read the full whitepaper here
