why you need a Marketing Database Manager / Consultant

In the last post, I talked about the importance of a marketing database for your organization if you want to benefit from the advantages of direct marketing, direct response marketing, relationship marketing, integrated marketing or whatever you want to call it (pick any term and mix'em up salad style...i just stick with pRM because the patient or consumer is who the target is- oh, almost forgot another term - target marketing).

Anyway, the marketing service providers out there do a good job of hosting and delivering campaign management, email, and other operational services to marketing organizations. They work with pharmaceutical DTC marketers to attain customer segmentation and develop marketing data process business rules.

There is a gap here though. Marketers have very little time to work with the vendor and often don't understand how or what processes need to be implemented. Marketers just want thing to work. So what happens?

Marketers bring in others in their team to direct the vendor. These may be their creative agencies or internal areas such as IT. The problem with that is that they also have little time and they have their hands full already.

What is needed is a Marketing Database Manager /Consultant - this is the role that

• directs and manages the vendor
• serves as sort of the project manager when it comes to translating the marketing needs to processes such as campaigns, segmentation, and customer fulfillment
• understands and is a marketing expert in the integration of different response channels including marketing data from telemarketing, data entry, and web vendors and platforms
• understands and prepares data for marketing analytics experts

The key here is to see that this role is an expert in this field...he or she is not a generalist. When you need plumbing work, you dont call a general contractor, you call a plumber. Marketers who expect their IT folks to understand marketing campaigns and segmentation are kidding themselves and hurting their chances of success. IT folks are very important to an organization and they have play a key role here - they can work with this role in the backend to make sure things do work after all.