Starting out on a marketing technology transformation mission is a lot like renovating an old home that has been in the family for generations. You never know what you will encounter until you start opening walls. And I do not mean to indicate that the home is in a decrepit state. More than likely, it appears up to date, neat, tidy, and well-functioning from the outside. It is only when you start to introduce changes that the existing footprint was not designed to accommodate that you run into challenges.

At SAS we have been incredibly fortunate to start with a very well-maintained home. At the same time, we have set an aggressive marketing transformation vision that feels just like a full-scale home renovation.

Our renovation has 3 main phases:

Phase 1: Analytics and the Omnichannel Marketing Hub

The first phase was creating an omnichannel marketing hub that kept the customer at its center. SAS is well known for its best-in-class analytics, and we have been leveraging this with marketing for years. However, with this phase we moved from our internally developed technology to SAS’s own commercially available software for marketing: SAS Customer Intelligence 360.

• SAS 360 Discover is the baseline that helps us understand digital behavior to ensure we can personalize and track the customer experience. As we execute social, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and digital advertising campaigns, through advanced analytics we can understand the behaviors of people that have engaged with our web properties. And (based on consent), customer behavior is tracked so that we can personalize the digital experience we deliver to customers.
• SAS 360 Engage is our execution hub. This is where we have worked to re-imagine the customer journey. Not only do we execute campaigns that target specific segments and audiences based on business rules and/or model scores we have generated through our analytics, but we also look holistically at all email campaigns, paid social ads and promotional spots on our web property to ensure that we deliver phenomenal customer experiences at scale.
• SAS 360 Plan is our planning hub. SAS is a large, global organization, and with that comes additional complexity when orchestrating marketing activities. We have an in-house agency, as well as use external agencies (locally and globally). Marketing plans, functions and budgets can be executed globally and centrally, or at the regional level. Streamlining our plans and budgets on the same platform as our execution engine makes it easier to plan our upcoming activities and makes it easier to track and react to marketing’s effectiveness.

Phase 2: Scaling creativity through workflow and resource management

Creative workflow management is an effort to manage and optimize creative processes so that they are as effective and efficient as possible without limiting creativity. Why is creativity so important? According to Nielsen in a WARC article on creative effectiveness, creativity provides 47% of the total sales impact, then reach, brand, targeting, recency and context.

Our in-house agency at SAS was using technology that relied heavily on human intervention to keep creative projects moving along to completion. As our workloads started to rise, we quickly identified that this approach was not sustainable, and even more concerning, was stealing time that our creative teams needed for building better creative effectiveness.

In 2022, we embarked on a search for a new creative workflow solution. We asked our partners at Cella to help us gather and summarize requirements, develop a score card for evaluating those requirements and match us to 3 vendors for demo, along with a final selection recommendation. Once we made our final selection: Adobe Workfront, we started the process of rolling out the technology and integrating it into our CI (Customer Intelligence) 360 Omnichannel marketing hub. Our implementation should be complete by mid-year and will deliver on our goals of more effective resource management and tracking of our creative processes.

Phase 3: Enterprise-wide Digital Asset Management System

Prior to starting Phase 3, our stack of Digital Asset Management platforms included a mixture of various 3rd party SaaS (Software as a Service) and homegrown DAM (Digital Asset Management) solutions. The sheer volume of disparate tools resulted in an overly complex environment that drove inefficiency. ​After partnering successfully with Cella to determine our creative workflow approach, we tapped them again to help us with our DAM selection. We took a similar approach to both system selections. We have selected a vendor and are moving forward with implementation, with the goal to have completed implementation in 2023.

Conclusion

It is easy to think that renovating your home is as easy as calling the builder, and that changing technology is as simple as selecting a vendor. To ensure that we did not fall into the same trap with our technology journey we first grounded our teams in the belief that people and process are what make technology a success. We have worked through process and operational modernizations to ensure our technology keeps up with future needs. On the flipside, our modernized MarTech stack challenges and enables us to rethink the "how" - how we plan, design, and execute marketing. New best-of-breed technology allows us to streamline our teams and their processes to move a campaign from idea to launch and performance evaluation faster. And in doing so, we are building our MarTech house to support the next generations of marketing.