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Corporate Portal For Marketers Across DivisionsPremium Member
Posted By: A-Lux on 8/28/2006 10:00 AM (CST) 250 Points
I am trying to build an internal portal for marketers across divisions and was looking for some guidance or lessons learned.

The goal is to provide the marketers with tools and samples so they can create effective campaigns for their respective products and services. Mostly "how to's" and samples of winning campaigns. I was also going to post benchmarks so they see where they stand.

So basically I used the HBS Note on Marketing sections to categorize the information and tools and dumped it all in 3 buckets (Creating, Delivering and Sustaining Value):
CREATING VALUE
•Marketing Analysis (The 5 C’s)
Customer
Company
Competitors
Collaborators
•Target Market Selection
Market Segmentation
Product and Service Positioning

DELIVERING & CAPTURING VALUE
•Marketing Programs (The 4 P’s)
•Product & Service
•Place (Channels of distribution)
•Promotions (Communications Strategy – The 6 M’s)
Market
Mission
Message
Media
Money
Measurement
•Pricing

SUSTAINING VALUE (Analysis)
•Customer Acquisition
•Customer Retention

Then, I was thinking of building an internal forum where marketers can ask questions and exchange notes.

Has anyone done this internally? Any thoughts or lessons learned?

Thank you in advance, Ani

Posted by: D4Demand Accepted Answer
8/28/2006 12:17 PM (CST)
I just spend a few months analysing Intranet Portal Products. There are three that will make your life easier.
ReadyPortal from RedDogSoftware.com (hosted solution for about $150 a month) will give you all the horsepower you need and is easy to learn.

FoxSuite Groupware 5.8 DCASOFT.com. More than you need but great, nonetheless, for $999.

IntranetDashboard.com $3435. Great apps and maybe more horsepower than you want.

And there are a bunch of PHP forum software packages for $189 that might suit your needs just fine.

It takes a lot of planning to do it right. I know because I am playing catch-up right now. Once I got into posting items I started realizing how many graphics and help I wish I had at my disposal.

D4
 
Posted by: A-Lux Author Response
8/28/2006 12:55 PM (CST)
Hi D4,

Thank you for your response. My question though is related to the marketing aspect. I want to have the right content posted and I wanted it to be easy to understand. Am I thinking the marketing categories/buckets right?

The intranet will be build by our internal IT team and I hope I will not have problems there but I will save your suggestions in case I hit any roadblocks.

Thank you, Ani
 
Posted by: darcy.moen Accepted Answer
8/28/2006 1:12 PM (CST)
I think you have some good information in the right categories. It might be a lot of reading...which is something many folks are loathe to do these days.

Check out some of the opensource content managment systems out there too. As good, and perhaps even better, than the commercial products.

Darcy Moen
Open Source Software advocate.
 
Posted by: Frank Hurtte Accepted Answer
8/28/2006 1:59 PM (CST)
why not ask the fine folks at marketingprofs if they could set up a private intra-net for you. Then you could load questions from the forum onto your site with specific comments aimed at your own products...

You get the input from thousands of others with side comments read only by your people...
 
Posted by: rbauman* Accepted Answer
8/28/2006 2:11 PM (CST)
Try surveying the intended audience and asking them for the items they would find useful. It really doesn't matter what MarketingProf members feel is appropriate content since we won't be using the portal.
 
Posted by: A-Lux Author Response
8/28/2006 2:46 PM (CST)
Thanks rbauman,

The thing is that the audience doesn't quite know what they want. I am trying to build up the knowledge level of the marketers and I was thinking that creating an intranet with tools would be useful.

I am also thinking that there has to be someone out there who has gone through the same steps that might help.

Thank you for your reply.
Ani
 
Posted by: panfred* Accepted Answer
8/29/2006 4:09 AM (CST)
Hi,

I've just run up our information's panel for marketers, but we enlarge this to all office employees and sales persons.. We only make category for new messages and not always addressing to all.
But form marketers category we have open forum with daily updates about questions and post about different topics / we are in different places and we work with marketing projects - so we put the board, who participating which project, objectives, deadline etc. We added base of past projects what is useful for new people. There is a lot of our reports and contact information's.. people can order stuff through panel, what is great, because now I don't have so many emails..

We are at the beginning of developing this tool, but I see now that forum is the most visited place where we can post msg and comment it and after all You can step back and look on each story..

Good things are statistics who, how many times visited panel ;-)

Good luck, and greetings
 
Posted by: john* Accepted Answer
8/30/2006 10:57 AM (CST)
A client of mine Be the brand experience produce a technology know as MRM or MOM. Looking at your posting you are describing the functionality of their software that has been developed to manage marketing resources and opperations.

This is a web based solution that enables marketing to centralise assets and share resources and ideas.

Check out their site www.be-thebrand.com I think this will be of use to you.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

John
 
Posted by: ExchangeSynergism.com* Accepted Answer
8/30/2006 7:10 PM (CST)
Lots of good discussion and ideas here. We have some experience with doing a public site that parallels what you want to do. It contains a forum for discussion, a knowledge base for articles (including a peer review section for drafts) and a directory for relevant links as the main structural components.

We built all this using open source code for zero dollars, and it seems to be getting favourable response from users. A full list of the programs and modifications is located in this post: http://www.mscforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=1669

The content is the key, not the format. Make sure you have a core of people to keep it intellectually stimulating and alive.

Good luck with the venture. It is a very good idea.
 
Posted by: kathleen* Accepted Answer
9/1/2006 3:02 PM (CST)
Have you considered utilizing the Corporate Services that MarketingProfs.com offers? Services and products range from customized web seminars to licensed content, all available for your intranet or extranet. MarketingProfs can also build a community for your marketers, similar to that of the Know-How Exchange. These services and products will help generate ideas, discussions and ultimately make your marketers better at producing original ideas that have valuable market results.

Contact marketingprofs.com for more information!
 
Posted by: stevea Accepted Answer
9/6/2006 5:15 AM (CST)
I usually try to refrain from advertising here, but as everyone else is at it (!) and all our solutions in this area utilise Maximizer Enterprise eCRM platforms with their built-in portal structures, I can’t really avoid it!

We’ve implemented a number of intranet based sales and marketing portals for use by internal staff, business partners such as distribution channels and even customers.

The bullet points you mentioned in your posting all draw on information which should reside in your CRM system. That way, at least the numeric information and any subsequent analysis or reporting can be handled from the CRM system itself and more importantly it can be generated and updated automatically.

Value or opinion based forum discussions can then be handled by using a thread based architecture which will either be already inherent in your CRM software or can be easily integrated into to a portal from suppliers such as those already mentioned.

Getting your IT team to design one from scratch is about as sensible as getting them to come up with a new spreadsheet software or a new word processor. It’s reinventing the wheel.

The greatest levels of success which we have observed are where the numbers which are recorded as part of the day to day activities associated with the CRM system are made available to the users in the form of structured and occasionally ad-hoc reports and of course a Dashboard. Forum discussions based on the actual numbers which are driving your business then tend to shift from the waffle end of the spectrum to something much more focussed and useful.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

 
Posted by: carrie77 Moderator Response
9/11/2006 6:18 AM (CST)
Hello Everyone,

I am closing this question since it's more than 2 weeks old. We do this to reward the contributions of participants in a timely manner + to give increased visibility to the newer questions.

Thanks for participating!
Carrie (Production Editor)
 


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