So, what is a marketing cloud platform? They’re an integrated set of platforms used by the business to execute multi-channel marketing campaigns and personalized user and customer experiences. It’s a collection of platforms, usually content management for managing website content without the need of IT, web analytics tool for measuring website traffic, decision orchestration platform, which is your personalization platform, a data management platform, which allows you to collect offline and online data for segmentation, [and] the fifth package is campaign management.
Why are companies investing millions on these packages? In the old days, people used to build [their] own solutions in the financial/manufacturing world. They used to also buy best-of-breed and integrate them. Everyone’s found out that it’s very expensive and time-consuming to build or integrate these solutions, so moving toward where these marketing cloud packages provide the same capabilities in terms of integration across all the different platforms, and you're not required to do these integrations.
What are some of the technical challenges with these platforms? A lot of customers don’t understand how these packages work together. IT, who’s responsible for implementing some of these platforms, understand only limited capabilities and don’t understand how to enable these integrations.
What are some of the business challenges with these platforms? As we know, each [of the] applications are typically used in silos, and since each of these groups are independent of each other, it’s important to have a governance committee that ties all the different groups together to orchestrate these cross-channel experiences. This way, they no longer act as independent solutions. They are now an integrated marketing cloud platform solution, which allows you to target off of all the different channels so that a customer's getting consistent content regardless of what channel they’re interacting with.
If you have any questions, please contact me at [email protected]. Thank you.
