Turning the promise of integrating online marketing technology into a reality

Richard Mullins, director at Acceleration, looks at how companies can make sure that online marketing technology integration projects deliver on their promise.

The benefits of integrating online marketing systems seem obvious: better insight into prospect and customer data, more granular segmentation and improved targeting, along with more meaningful measurement and better results.

Integration of online marketing systems also helps put the user back in control of the process, so that campaigns can be quickly and easily adjusted in line with business goals. And for many marketers, the promise of being able to automate and run marketing programs across various communication channels is a compelling one.

Perhaps the most important promise of integration is unleashing the true power of the many technology tools marketers have at their disposal: sophisticated e-mail, ad serving, Web analytics and search marketing platforms. These systems are technically sound, yet often fail to live up to expectations, because users have often not been trained to use them to full effect together with their other business systems and processes.

However, integrating marketing technology systems creates a whole new set of challenges that marketers need to be aware of if they are to avoid disappointment.

The first of these is data overload. Marketers can be overwhelmed by the volume of information available. They may struggle with inconsistent reporting data that brings into question the usefulness of the new system. For example, data from a legacy system might provide the basis for management reports, while the new system provides data that cannot be correlated with the management reports. Which set of data is accurate? Which set can be trusted?

Managing these disparate systems is a key challenge: ways need to be found to understand the delta between the data coming from legacy systems and that of the new technology.

Equally challenging is driving internal adoption of the new system. The effect of people’s natural resistance to change cannot be underestimated, especially with the teething problems usually associated with a new system.

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