C4 or “4 Cs” for Marketing Automation
USS Vincennes (CG-49) Combat Information Center / CC by divemasterking2000
This is the seventh in a series of excerpts from Allinio’s white paper Net-Centric Marketing & Information Superiority.
The C4 Portion: Command, Control, Communication & Computing
C4 responsibilities require up-to-date equipment, robust networks, and comprehensive business rules to be followed by a Marketing executive in planning, directing, and executing in order to achieve marketing objectives.
Command & Control
Command & Control denotes the capability to act upon an opportunity. For this to occur, the Marketer must be given the right information and must possess access to decision support mechanisms. Popular thought now says that the Internet is turning businesses “upside down” and that the customer “controls” the brand or message and hence the success of a product, so the thought of Command & Control may sound counter-intuitive and passé; however, in the context of current Marketing thinking, this presentation of Command & Control is certainly not about controlling the content of conversations- it is about controlling the flow of data within and from the enterprise.
For Command & Control to work properly, business rules must be defined in order to create the proper routing of information so as not to overwhelm any level within the Marketing hierarchy, especially as one goes higher up the pyramid. Even in a flatter organizational structure, the relevant KPIs must be limited as much as possible and other actionable intelligence must be prioritized and relevant to firm objectives. Given that objectives may be changed or amended, the supporting data sources used to attain those objectives must be re-evaluated and replaced when necessary.
The innovative tools that support Command & Control help create consistency in the flow of data and its content. Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) is probably the most comprehensive platform for the purposes of “command.” Marketing Resource Management (MRM) or Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools facilitate consolidating, tagging, annotating, storing, and retrieving of digital assets such as photographs, designs, videos, animations, sounds, music, and content. They will also help foster consistency of digital assets and speed the process to get these assets reformatted for sales materials or other communications to a particular audience.
Command & Control tools such as CRM, email management, and lead nurturing/scoring platforms are proving their value by enabling visibility of customer buying behavior in the form of executive dashboards that graphically present developing situations from which to make decisions; both successes and threats can be quickly determined based on established business rules. These tools are also a growing data repository from which other trends, when tied with previously offline data, can be extracted for decision makers.
This is the seventh in a series of excerpts from Allinio’s white paper Net-Centric Marketing & Information Superiority. Click here to read the previous excerpt online. Stay tuned to this blog for the next excerpt.