As many of you already know, our annual customer conference is always informational, motivational . . . and fun! But this year, the 2012 Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo was bigger, more exciting and more inspiring than ever.
Sure, the backdrop of Washington, DC and the concert by Foreigner helped.
But the real pop came from the hundreds of business and technical sessions, the world-class exhibits and sponsors and the countless networking opportunities.
Here are a few of my top take-aways:
There is infinite value in the vast resource of exponential data. We all realize that today’s digital devices generate enormous amounts of data. But, that data can only lead to business value if it is harnessed. Once marketers harness data, they gain insight into what matters most to the success of their brands.
Teradata’s CMO Darryl McDonald used this simple formula to drive home the point:
In other words, data leads to insights, and insights lead to business value.
Marketers win when they make sense of digital chaos. It’s time for digital marketers to look beyond “say and spray emails,” last click attribution and other tired, traditional marketing tactics. More and more marketers recognize they need to look at the entire customer experience and not only the ROI for individual channels, but the ROI across all channels.
The cloud is the platform of choice for most marketing applications. Today’s marketers want cloud-deployed marketing applications to help them optimize performance and integrate both internal and external processes, and during the Partners Conference, Aprimo announced the expansion of the Aprimo Global Cloud, which will ensure rapidly scalable, integrated and global coverage for the 1,500+ customers currently running Aprimo solutions in the cloud.
According to Gartner, Inc. Research Vice President for CRM Kimberly Collins, the integration of people, processes and technology to drive Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) is the true value proposition underlying an Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) framework. By 2014, companies that develop an IMM strategy will deliver a 50 percent higher ROMI.
Social is going to the next level. Consumers have come to expect personalization and integration with social media sites, and –no surprise, here –they now increasingly expect that same kind of individualized, integrated attention from brands, as well. At the Partners Conference, Aprimo also announced that the newest release of Aprimo’s Multi -Channel Campaign Management (MCCM) solution, Aprimo Relationship Manager 6.6, will be available in mid-December. This new version offers the ability to capture customer preferences from social outlets and will personalize the user experience.
Digital marketing is here to stay. While digital marketing has been on the radar for quite some time, many marketers are still learning how they can most effectively use it. I have noticed a distinct shift, however, and these days, questions like “What is that?” and “Will it really make a difference?” have been replaced with “How can I better understand digital marketing?” and “How can I put digital marketing to work for my brand?”
Several customers discussed how Aprimo’s Digital Messaging Center provides the ability to attain the analytics-driven insights and advanced segmentation that enables, among other things, more timely offers that help to increase customer loyalty. This next-generation cloud-based digital marketing capability serves as a data hub and a centralized “cockpit” for managing virtually all aspects of digital messaging. It builds on our existing solution and extends those capabilities with eCircle’s technologies to glean insights from analytics across all channels, providing real-time access to customer preferences and behavioral data.
Wow! As I’m sure you can tell, the 2012 Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo covered lots of ground, and although I could go on and on, I’m only able to capture a small fraction of the material here. Fortunately, it’s easy to find out more because all of the headlines surrounding the Partners event, including product, customer and partner news, the EPIC Awards summary announcement and a video of the international media briefing, are available on the Partners on-line news room. You can also listen to free podcasts of session information here.
And while I realize it has only been a few days since we were together in DC, I have to admit, there’s a part of me that’s already looking forward to the 2013 Partners Conference. See you next year in Dallas!
Categories: Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media ROI
Tags: B2B socialmedia, B2C, B2C social media, consumers, digital marketing, marketing, social media, social media marketing, social media strategy, social media trends, socialmedia
