As 2020 rolls on, I’m thrilled to see companies invest in customer experience. And the investment’s paying off: 84% of companies that have focused on improving customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
Brands are quickly retooling their technology stacks to compete on differentiated customer experience. While many brands have focused their tech stack on how to deliver that experience across channels, it’s great to see that more and more brands are starting to think about technology that supports all the ‘behind the scenes’ work it takes to get customer experiences into market. As a marketer myself, I know first-hand the amount of coordination, work, time, and money it takes to get even a single campaign into market!
Forrester, an influential research and advisory firm, defines these technologies as Marketing Resource Management (MRM). Forrester defines MRM as “an expansive category” that ”spans the behind-the-scenes tools that help marketers plan, coordinate, and track activities.” MRM solves four main issues that marketing teams have today:
- People – How to effectively manage work and marketers’ time with an ever-growing number of customer experience initiatives.
- Money – How to prioritize and manage marketing investments
- Brand – How to ensure the most impactful, on-brand experiences are getting to market
- Content – How to keep up with the growing customer experience content needs
In Forrester’s latest MRM Wave report, they acknowledge and uncover some key trends in the MRM space. I’m particularly thrilled to see a focus on marketing performance as an emerging part of MRM. As marketing budgets continue to come under scrutiny, it’s critical to understand the “I” (investment in people, budget, and time) in marketing ROI. Aprimo’s best-of-breed work management modules give firms an in-depth but clear view of their marketing investments and allow them to better see how their campaigns perform.
It’s also fantastic to see Forrester acknowledge the importance of integration. Afterall, the average organization has approximately 91 MarTech tools! Which, to be clear, is far too many tools. At Aprimo, we whole-heartedly believe that MRM has to fit seamlessly into the technology investments you’ve already made. And we think that integrations shouldn’t take several months or years to implement—we’ve invested in low-code integration platforms and productized connectors to ensure our customers can integrate the tech they use every day into Aprimo faster.
In their latest MRM Wave, Forrester examines the top twelve vendors in the MRM space and how those vendors meet the current needs of the space. Forrester evaluates them on 32 criteria, including current offering, strategy, and market presence.
Take a look at the report (on us!) to see more details about Marketing Resource Management and why Forrester named Aprimo a Leader in the evaluation.