Aprimo on Measuring & Optimizing CX for Enterprises
Aprimo enables enterprises to optimize their brand experience and the resources they use to deliver those experiences. In addition to their service offerings, their most recent announcement unveiled new and exciting features to their solution platform, Aprimo Connect, that “offer tighter integrations, provide enhanced insights on content, productivity and campaigns, and improve overall marketing planning and outcomes.”
Kevin Souers, Chief Product Officer at Aprimo commented on the news to say: “we’re excited to provide several new product enhancements and integrations that not only enable organizations to better optimize their Aprimo solutions, but also gain increased visibility into their data for better decision making,”
The launch of Aprimo Connect will enable faster enterprise integrations, streamline budget and allocation planning processes, visibility into operational data and eliminate manual work with AI enhancements. To hear more about the platform offerings, I was able to connect with Anjali Yakkundi, Product Marketing Director at Aprimo to discuss why business intelligence is vital to a business’s success, how CMO’s can streamline and modernize their business process and why marketers are willing to eliminate the manual work that they are so accustomed to doing today. Follow along below as I share this highly insightful and exclusive interview.
Anjali Yakkundi, Product Marketing Director at Aprimo
In your press release it states “Aprimo offers new “out-of-the-box” dashboards, visualizations and reports, as well as a new services practice that offers Business Intelligence (BI) that will deliver customer-defined modifications or creation of additional interactive reports leveraging BI.” Why is business intelligence vital to a business’s success?
“Everywhere you look, organizations today are talking about data-driven marketing. With business intelligence, marketers can more easily visualize and gain insights into their data to make better, smarter, and faster decisions and deliver more relevant, personalized customer experiences that also 
significantly impact the bottom line.
At Aprimo, we believe that marketers have been so focused on data-driven decision making when it comes to performance: how many customers opened an email? What segments engaged with a certain piece of content? What is web traffic like? But to get a true understanding of marketing’s impact on the bottom line, organizations also need to gain insight into their behind-the-scenes data: how long did it take to create that email? How many resources were involved in the creation of the content? How much money was spent on producing that video? How much was spent on the agency that created that campaign?
The ability to measure and better visualize this data with business intelligence enables businesses to better calculate the ROI of experiences and campaigns, which can ultimately result in better, more informed decisions.”
Your press release states “Aprimo’s new Budget Allocation streamlines the planning process with what-if scenario planning, budget approval processes, YoY comparisons, and more.” What are some of the ways that CMO’s can streamline and modernize this business process today?
“As CMOs seek to streamline and modernize their planning processes for 2019 and vision for 2020, they should ensure they better plan for the unknowns by keeping abreast of industry fluctuations, emerging technologies, and consumer channels to evaluate how current and potential changes in these areas will affect their future spend and goals.
Most CMOs today do this in an ad hoc manner- think Excel docs or Google Sheets. Aprimo’s Budget Allocation digitizes this process, enabling more streamlined “what if” planning, by enabling organizations to run various scenarios for their budgets so they can come to the table prepared with solid answers of how cuts—or increases—will affect their marketing ROI.
Another way they can streamline and modernize their budgeting processes is by learning to share, as marketing departments are increasingly being chartered with taking on more of the customer experience (CX) responsibilities—and bearing the brunt of funding that new CX budget. Marketers not only must be able to understand how the CX operations and campaign dollars sit throughout their organization, but also be able to give up some of their allocations to that new CX team or department.
They also need to keep informed of best practices for how organizations in similar industries are handling CX budgeting, so they can be informed enough to weigh in on who will own the entire CX budget, where it’s going to come from, and advocate for how much say they have in it at their own organizations."
Also in your press release it states “Additionally, Aprimo’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) enhancements make it easier to tag and reuse content, and appropriately route tasks.” Do you think marketers are willing to eliminate the manual work that they are so accustomed to by the capabilities mentioned?
“According to Gartner, marketers’ budgets have slightly dipped again this year, and as a result they are again being challenged to do more with less, and prove that their department is more than just a cost center. Accordingly, marketing organizations must focus on work that proves their value and how it contributes to the bottom line. Automation is going to be critical here as it can take the rote work out of several marketing tasks. For example, smart tagging capabilities automate uploading and tagging assets into a central digital asset management system, so marketers and creatives no longer have to do that time-consuming manual work.
Automation, however, isn’t going to replace marketers’ work completely. There’s still a significant amount of innovation, creativity, and even common sense that it certainly cannot replace. Organizations still value these prized skills when hiring top-talent marketers who will drive their marketing to the next level. Automation instead allows marketers to focus on what really matters—delivering exceptional, innovative, and differentiating customer experiences.”
Ending Notes
Seems that Aprimo has been busy in Q4 of 2018. This month, KPMG LLP, a professional service company, announced it has formed an alliance with Aprimo to “help clients bring greater efficiency and effectiveness to their marketing and customer experiences.”
Mark Fera, Senior Vice President, Industry Solutions, at Aprimo says the “joint commitment to innovation that KPMG and Aprimo will bring to clients provides new ways for organizations to automate and gain additional transparency across marketing spend, workflow, content creation, and people.”
Will they keep the momentum going? I’m excited to see what 2019 has in store for Aprimo so be sure you check back for any other releases in the New Year!
Gabriella Pirrone
Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.