Do you know about the Online Marketing Suite?

Last week, Omniture invited me to speak at their Summit 08 in Salt Lake City.  As it turns out, I was given the chance to address an audience of over 2,000 interactive marketers about what's going on in the industry.

When it comes to interactive marketing technologies, all signs point in one direction:  The Online Marketing Suite.  My Forrester colleagues Suresh Vittal and Shar VanBoskirk have written on this idea that you should become familiar with:

"Forrester believes that the time is right for the online marketing suite to emerge. This suite, underpinned by a central hub, is the eventual destiny for all online marketing technology and will enable a single view of the customer across channels, provide process tools to support collaboration, centralize optimization, and support a partner ecosystem."

The Online Marketing Suite may not be as sexy as social media, but it's how business gets done...if you haven't heard about this concept, you may want to keep an eye out for it in the future.

Comments

[Jay, writer Memberspeed.com]

I have to admit that this might be my first time hearing or reading about the online marketing suite. Of course, social media has been around for quite some time now, generating a lot of buzz and appearing at almost all blogs I've visited. If this is the future of online marketing, then it should be pretty interesting.

[Max Kalehoff]

Pete, you are correct. We're building one of these now at Clickable. Thank god we're a new company without too much technology or departmental legacy, because even with some of the smartest project managers, developers and PhDs in data mining, it's quite a feat top build a truly end to end dashboard which tracks prospects the moment they touch you for the first time, all the way to the end of their customer life cycle -- even including the forum the came from, or the very keyword that acquired them via search. Talk to me in two months -- it should be killer.
- Max

[John Kottcamp]

I fully agree that the time has come for marketer's to embrance the idea of an online marketing suite. However I think it is a mistake to represent it's value as being primarily around collaboration and optimization. Marketing organizations are being pushed harder and harder by the rest of the enterprise to integrate marketing with sales, operations and particularly finance. There are two values of what your colleague Suresh calls the enterprise marketing platform.

First, by integrating various technology tools like analytics, campaign management and CRM, marketing organizations can begin to track relationships, capture real behavior and preferences and engage customers with meaningful dialogue.

Secondly, my integrating all these various applications, marketing will be able to elevate its reporting and analysis from campaign reporting to real business metrics that can mesaure ROI or ROMI from prospect (think adserving) to conversion (think ecommerce) and most importantly loyalty (CRM).

While the first will bring the most immediate benefit to members of marketing organizations, it is the second that will gain them the success and respect from the c-suite.