Tools: Managing Marketing

As companies adopt increasingly complex multichannel ad and in formation strategies, getting results and customer feedback from all of those efforts becomes a management headache. Vendors such as SAS Institute, Teradata, and Unica are marketing tools designed to make sense of the data coming from multiple channels.

"When I think about marketing effectiveness, I think about integration across channels, and I don't think anyone's nailed it yet," says Forrester Research analyst Elana Anderson.

Unica, in particular, has pinned its future on a category known as enterprise marketing management, trying to sell its system as an end-to-end, integrated-marketing infrastructure. "There's over a trillion dollars a year spent on marketing, and yet there are very few technologies designed specifically to solve those problems," says Todd Piett, senior segment manager at Unica.

Teradata's strength is its ability to layer the marketing tools in its customer-relationship-management application over its widely used data-warehousing technology. But while campaign management and some analytics capabilities are embedded in the software, it lacks the marketing-resource-management capabilities needed to integrate marketing processes in a significant way, Forrester says, and SAS is in a similar situation, offering data-management, marketing-automation, and business-intelligence capabilities. That's why the analyst firm says one of the companies would be well-served to buy a marketing-resource-management vendor such as Aprimo Inc.

Illustration by William Rieser

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