Picture credit: iStockPhoto
According to Gartner Group, marketers are spending more money than ever buying technology. And it’s causing the CIO’s office some concern. With the advent of cloud computing, the CMO’s team can avoid the IT team and deploy technology directly onto their websites.
Over the past decade, marketer demand for digital marketing technology has exploded to keep up with the rise of the connected consumer. Unlike the past, however, this growth in technology is coming from literally hundreds of cloud-based vendors. These companies are able to operate outside of the typical governance protocols of corporate data centres – no more having to ask permission from IT to get a tag on the site or mobile app.
To make matters worse, these vendors often partner with others that they then bring into a site, unbeknownst to the site owner. Our research has found that this happens up to 70% of the time. So today, companies no longer have a website. They have a Marketing Cloud.
These vendors are on the cutting edge of what’s next in marketing technology. When managed properly, the best of them are able to drive significant increases in revenues and market share. That’s the new business phenomenon we refer to as Marketing Cloud Management. When a company doesn’t manage its marketing cloud effectively, it gets messy and expensive. Here are a few of the big issues:
Site performance = lost revenues
When there is no process in place in deciding vendors, java script tags for sales and marketing end up being placed indiscriminately throughout a site by various departments. One single marketing tag to a site has been shown to increase the page latency by 9%, seriously impacting the user experience.
Data leakage = lost revenues
Since vendors have access to your site, they’re able to take data from consumer web behaviour, package it up, and sell it directly to your competitors. An average retailer shares 72% of the same digital vendors with its competitor, making it highly vulnerable to such customer data leakages.
Management inefficiency = increased costs
Without any process in place for who’s in charge of vendor management, pinpointing the root of any problem that arises within a marketing cloud becomes that much more difficult. Emails and spreadsheets are passed around, but nobody really knows what is going on. Furthermore, even if your company knows how it’s doing, there are no industry benchmarks or best practices to guide you.
Many companies are getting on top of this by embracing a technology solution called Marketing Cloud Management (MCM). MCM enables CIOs and their teams to take action that:
- Controls exactly who has access to the company’s data
- Identifies and fixes which vendors are impacting website performance
- Delivers guidance for benchmarks and best practices
Getting there can yield immediate return on investment. We recommend that CIOs start with:
1) Working with the CMO to audit all vendors
See which vendors are on each platform and any other companies they are bringing with them through redirect chains. Determine if you have redundancy, and assess the benefits and risks of working with each partner.
2) Implementing a vendor approval process
Decide which department will be in charge of vendor management and selection. As vendors change over time, they bring with them new partners, stop working, work more slowly after a code change, or change their data management practices overnight. This makes it that much more necessary to have constant proactive monitoring and evaluation.
3) Owning the contract
As long as you own the contract relationship with vendors, you hold the power to set the guidelines for removal. Consider including:
- SLAs for the latency that a tag causes
- Limits on the number of additional vendors a tag can bring into a website
- Data collection and resale restrictions to prevent vendors from reselling your data
Ultimately the real underlying solution to the Marketing Cloud problem is to keep everything under control. First and foremost, marketing and tech need to communicate with each other before partnering with just any vendor. Creating a process towards Marketing Cloud Management has been shown to yield positive results – both for enterprises and customers. As Nicole Keiter, Director of Strategy and Optimisation at Equifax said, “…keeping the promise to consumers that their data will not be passed on, utilized, or re-directed, that’s an unset rule. We’re working to keep that promise to consumers.”
Enterprises that adopt the new practice of marketing cloud management will not only optimise their marketing performance and decrease costs, but also gain trust from customers who know their data is secure and well managed.
