In yesterday's post, I outlined some of the ideas about becoming a "content driven" marketer. But why is it important?
The function of digital marketing is in a crisis. The same technology that enabled us to become more efficient has now flattened our world to the point where every person with an internet connection manages web content and interacts with digital marketing. And, to that end, consumers are overwhelmed by information and are becoming inured to it. As digital marketers, we find ourselves struggling to keep up with the furious pace of technology; both the myriad ways to get our message out and the ways to manage the process. And, with margins shrinking, and the capability of measurement growing, we have to achieve more with less while we measure less of more.
From a technology standpoint - here is our challenge:
Existing Solutions Are Too Big, or Too Specialized:
Enterprise Marketing Suites Are Too Big For Most Of Us: These expensive marketing resource management (MRM) applications are large and intensive and usually require an extraordinary amount of IT Support. Additionally, they offer virtually no web content management capabilities, aside from managing digital assets and (in some cases) some landing page capabilities.
Content Management Solutions Lack Real Marketing Expertise: Most web content management solutions lack focus on web marketing. I mean let's be honest - we spend most of our time either fixing the CMS, trying to make it work with our newly designed web site, or just throwing up our hands and living with what we have.
Lead Management Solutions Lack Any Web Content Expertise: A number of lead management and lead nurturing applications are available to offer analytics on the "who" is visiting a web site offering the ability to tag qualitative content data on the visitor, their interests and campaign success. These solutions usually emanate from the e-mail space and focus their lead management capabilities there. Once integrated, these solutions can provide insight across the entire web content repository but again, without content management it means either no ability to make a change, or a large technology project to integrate a web CMS.
Analytics Vendors Approach The Solution Too Late: Analytics vendors have certainly become popular with online marketers over the years measuring web traffic from the aggregate level. Some even offer solutions to optimize content based on business rules or analytics. The challenge with Analytics Vendors is, like the Lead Management Solutions, they dont empower the online marketer to change the message holistically. And, unlike the Lead Management Solutions most don't add the qualitative who as an individual, rather than the who as an aggregate, is visiting the web site. They dont capture content or allow the marketer to manage content based on those analytics functions.
So in order to solve all of these challenges, online marketers must piece together solutions from all of these vendors. Typically, they choose a WCM (web content management) solution for managing their web site, and/or micro sites. Then, they choose an email and/or lead management vendor to handle their lead nurturing and conversion metrics solutions and they choose a web analytics vendor and/or an optimization vendor to handle global site analytics and content optimization. Since each of these solutions can be large technology projects integrating them together proves to be difficult and expensive. The result is that many marketers are simply doing the best they can with what they have.
Marketers need a new type of framework to close the loop on managing an online marketing engine. They need new, cost-efficient capabilities from a suite of tools that enable both a technology platform and the insight to fuel it.
In tomorrow's post (the last of this series), I'll try and outline what I think that framework looks like.
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