Get SaaSy to Compete in Interactive Marketing
While most of us in marketing and advertising consider ourselves part of the fast-changing, celebrated, knowledge-based economy, we can learn a valuable lesson from those Rust Belt heavy-metal companies that managed to survive an upheaval of their own.
When globalization uprooted American industry, manufacturers and distributors rapidly turned to technology—and ultimately the Web—to reshape their processes and meet the shifting demands of the marketplace. They began to use software hosted online—where it was always up to date and available anytime, anywhere.
Today, companies can easily revamp their processes by pulling pre-built components off a virtual shelf to dynamically create new applications. Manufacturers are now able to quickly navigate through a fractured market landscape at top competitive speed by avoiding costly investments in conventional software, maintenance and service calls, and by not having to start every process modification from square one.
Similar capabilities are now available for marketers. Those of us who create digital campaign platforms are still often going back to our work stations and using offline techniques to re-invent each interactive campaign that we create. We traditionally develop individual campaigns from scratch and re-create all the elements that make the campaign work.
Most marketers probably feel that there has to be a better way. SaaS differs from traditional software in that it is used and lives on a Web browser, rather than a downloaded application that is dependent on an individual’s computer. This systematic approach to mass-producing interactive campaigns through proprietary software can guarantee quality, security and reliability—and open the doors to partnering with other agencies in a non-competitive environment.
Many companies such as ExactTarget and TargetX also are utilizing and leading this technology-innovation charge. ExactTarget recently announced its SaaS application called “ExactTarget Embedded,” which provides developers access to the company’s proprietary mass direct email and one-to-one messaging web service software. TargetX, a higher education marketing firm, released “Student Recruitment Manager,” an interactive prospective student portal, which allows college recruiters to develop student profiles, compile data and schedule campus appointments.
The Yankee Group recently urged advertisers and agencies “to invest in technology to automate manual internal processes and to integrate interactive budgets into mainstream planning and buying activities.” Yankee Senior Analyst Daniel Taylor affirmed, “This is a technology-driven marketplace and agencies should be using technology to manage it.”
Technological advancements in marketing are essential to the growth of our industry. As marketing and technology companies partner, it’s rare to receive an honest scope of the partnership’s capabilities without infringing on the “secret sauce” that gives one company an advantage over the other.
Agencies and marketing departments need to further explore the possibilities that Web-based technology can offer to expand the time and resources available to produce the creative elements that make online marketing magical.
Gerry Miller is chief operating officer at ePrize.
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