Marketing is becoming an area for engineers

Companies who are seeking to improve their marketing and sales effectiveness should have a look at marketing optimization technologies. Obviously, technology itself won't make marketing more effective. But, combined with analytics and process improvements companies can nowadays importantly improve their marketing ROI and reduce waste.

Traditionally, marketing departments of major corporations have been seduced to develop creative TV or billboard campaigns, without having to justify the return of such bulk and product centric campaigns. Marketing effectiveness can be obtained by shifting towards customer centric precision campaigns. Using data mining software (for example SPSS Clementine or SAS Enterprise Miner), marketing departments are able to predict which (potential) customers are most likely to purchase and hence improve response rates and reduce campaign expenses.

However, data mining is not enough. Companies seeking marketing optimization need to be prepared for organizational change and to review the marketing processes. When companies have re-designed their marketing processes, they can consider acquiring campaign management and marketing resource management tools.

Campaign management tools not only automated part of marketing workflow and campaign execution), but they also help formalizing approvals and roles and responsibilities, tracking campaign performance near real-time, and standardizing campaign KPIs. Software firms such as Unica and SAS offer such tools.

Marketing resource management software (vendors include Aprimo and Unica) contribute to marketing optimization by automating, tracking, and managing budgets, marketing assets and projects within the marketing process.

The area of marketing optimization technology is moving fast. Other areas marketing managers should pay attention to include:

• Contact optimization
• Search engine optimization
• Web site optimization
• Behavioral targeting of online visitors
• Interaction management
• Web interaction optimization

Although, marketing is indeed becoming increasingly an area where engineers can shine, companies need to prevent that creativity does not get lost. Without creativity, companies won't be able to create the desired emotional bond between their brands and its customers.

Also more established information solutions company are moving gradually towards marketing optimization technology. Early April of this year Acxiom acquired web interaction optimizer Kefta. Yesterday, by the way, Acxiom itself was acquired by Silver Lake and Value Act Capital.