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The real ins and outs about Marketing and campaigning

After reading the article of Didier Gaultier on The 10 key points of predictive marketing I like to reply based on the experience I have working in the field of Business Intellegence and Marketing in special.

First point is Marketing departments are always looking for the black box, some call it Quick Analytical CRM others call it Smarter Solutions, but working with marketing departments and enhancing data I can confirm this search is futile. There is no one system that can do all. 

That's also the reason why CRM solutions never provide a correct solution for reporting, simply because no organization is the same and no IT department is the same. Even the biggest ERP solution - SAP - needs Business Objects or another tool to enhance reporting. So if your organization is not using SAP, but another ERP, your organization need to do something to do their intelligent reporting. 

The biggest problem most Marketing departments of large organizations face is actually getting data. Your Marketing department can have the wildest dreams about following campaigns but if the data comes in with a year delay, how active can you follow your campaign?

And that is actually where the shoe hurts: in order to decrease the amount of service calls and increase security until the level employees can only visit the companies web page, IT departments try to get a firm grip on their costs. The Marketing department needs to demand data from the IT department and it takes time. It needs to be explained, it needs to be budgeted, it needs to be authorized do before you know it it is X-mass and there goes your campaign. 

IT departments are sitting on a goldmine of valuable information for Marketing departments to harvest. The only thing is that if your IT department has to harvest it they are often too slow and to administrative. On the other hand Marketing departments are no IT specialists. They know often exactly what they want but they have no idea how to get there.

So looking at this goldmine of information and the two departments and all the tools in the world it is still about people. Of cause there are general rules for tools, like it should talk with everything and be able to grow beyond imagination. Megabytes become terabytes and terabytes petabytes and the tool your department have chosen should withstand this. And moving them around in the organisation becomes expensive.

In order to get the best Marketing campaign system, you need people who understand the business and the IT and who can make a bridge between the both of them. These people are called BI consultants and Data Analysts and if you find a good one make sure you reserve a place for him or her in your organization.

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