Fiction! In a world of absolutes you either have the monolithic borg-like entity that attempts to solve all issues, or the specialized entity that handles a particular task and attempts to do it perfectly.
In my experience, the massive solution that attempts to solve all your issues simply doesn’t work. How many times have you heard about the attempted integration of a human resources management tool that looks to “seamlessly” speak to accounting? There are plenty of projects like this in the works and three years from now they might have a version of the solution working, only to be scrapped for the latest technology or replaced by a “less-integrated approach". We also see this happen, time and time again, where a company acquires a complimentary (or competing) technology with the intent of integrating the solution into theirs. Many times this fails…both at the technology level and the human level.
Why We Fall for The Jack-of-all-Trades
Innovation in online marketing continues at a rapid pace. The cost to develop new solutions is decreasing, investment into the industry is increasing, and there’s plenty of room for improvement. This ecosystem is the “perfect storm” for independent companies providing strong value propositions. As a marketer, however, it’s overwhelming. Which direct marketing solution to use and why? None of them speak to each other! Where is the waste? How do I know if what I’m doing is really creating incremental value? I don’t even have the time to learn about what’s up and coming! This is where agencies and marketers become enamored with the soup-to-nuts vendor that’s integrated every direct marketing solution they could ever want into one, tidy package. They believe it mean less management on their part and greater value. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Date, But Don’t Get Married
The real opportunity is for limited but valuable integrations between market leaders that help ease the pain and frustration for marketers. This simply means we enable our technologies to talk to each other, be measured against each other, and viewed through analytics tools together. The intent of course is to create more value for marketers and reduce the time it takes them to manage multiple solutions. I would argue that the time-savings is one of the most important benefits we can provide as technology vendors. When we allow for this kind of integration, we give marketers the power of clarity to make better decisions in the way of marketing spend and management.
The Answer Lies in Attribution
If it’s true that the promise of fully integrated solutions provides the key benefits of time, elimination of waste and incremental conversions, then maybe we should be looking at the problem through a different lens. Instead of waiting for the pipe dream, I believe the most important step for marketers and agencies is to implement attribution management technology. Attribution management provides the value listed above.
If we’ve enabled our technologies to talk to each other, marketers can now run frequent tests on the campaigns they’re running, and determine their effects through analytics that show the entire picture. Did each campaign create incremental value? Did they increase brand engagement? Was there overlap between two or more technologies? These are now questions that can be answered quickly and something that you, as the marketer, control.
These types of analytics are imperative and available. There are few things that hit an industry that become must-haves and this is one of them. So, if it isn’t the ease you get by being able to see your entire marketing efforts working together, the ability to cut programs that don’t work, the promise of watching the offline effects, the ability to reallocate dollars currently being overspent on less effective efforts to ones that are underfunded -- then let fear be the driver. Agencies and marketers who embrace this integrated view of their marketing efforts will have a key competitive advantage.
So while the individual solutions are not “integrated,” your entire marketing efforts and, most importantly, the data about what’s working, are. Now we have powerful integration. And no one had to really “integrate” at all.
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