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Everything on the Web today is becoming more distributed. Sales applications, human resource applications, even marketing applications. This works well for us, because it’s easier to implement functionally important applications without knocking on the CIO’s door to ask permission. And it’s great news for these aps from a speed and timing perspective.
But it opens up a whole new set of challenges. If Marketing has become, or is in the midst of becoming, more distributed, then we must prepare to become more distributed in areas like content and measurement.
Marketing needs to be ready to start measuring outside of its platform (i.e., its own website and sub domains). And the only way to do that is to have a very solid base of measurement to draw from.
By that, I don’t mean Google AdSense + WebTrends + email database history + various event attendance = measurement. I mean it needs to all be on one platform. Something like an Eloqua, Aprimo, Unica, Firstwave or Market2Lead. These are distributed apps that have a platform you can use to knock down the silos of data in your marketing organization.
Once you have that in place, it becomes much easier to measure activities off your website and in areas that you perhaps control, like a blog or a wiki.
Why even do that, you ask? Well, I believe we’re being bigheaded if we think we can keep content on a site and expect people to come get it. Publishers are getting this point, big time, by syndicating out their content as much as they can. As marketers, we also need to think bigger about syndicating our content.
Take widgets, for example. They will go on different social networks via opensocial or Facebook, and the very application will be distributed.
Where’s the Buzz? Marketers need to prepare for the content and measurement distribution systems of tomorrow, because tomorrow may be coming sooner than you think!
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Comments
Great post Paul. As content about a company and its product and services is distributed around the Internet on blogs and social networks - marketers need to not only actively contribute and participate in this explosion - they need to track its impact. And we are seeing a number of new software/Web companies emerge that will help marketers distribute content and measure what is said about their brands.
But in the end, particularly for B2B companies, marketing success usually requires that these content contributors/consumers (e.g., prospects) are driven back to the content that they control - their Web site. Which is where marketing platforms - such as the ones you mention and our Silverpop Vtrenz solution come in to play. Our marketing platform, for example, can actually track where a prospect came from - a specific blog for example, and then score the lead based on the assigned quality of that lead source combined with demographic and other information. Ultimately getting these leads from other content sites into the hands of sales people - or into lifecycle marketing programs is the real goal of this distributed marketing content.
So yes, marketers need to jump in and participate in this "distributed content" - but they also need to have a "closed-loop" system of engaging and converting the resulting prospects in to leads and customers.
Loren McDonald
VP, Industry Relations
Silverpop
Posted by: Loren McDonald | 02.07.08
Loren
Thanks for your response, I totally agree that you must have a closed loop system to accompany your distributed web applications.
It is really great to hear that your Vtrenz platform can track where the prospect came from. Marketers will need this type of system to help them evaluate the effectiveness of their content.
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