Information Technology

When you think of Marketing and Technology, how would you correlate the two? Well Marketer's uses certain types of technology to improve an organization or business. One of the purposes of incorporating certain types of technologies when dealing with marketing is to: improve customer acquisition and retention, design loyalty programs, and initiate cross-selling and up-selling. Most organizations have a database that includes current and prospective customers. If they don't and outside company is hired to develop one as well as manage it. These companies come up with many types of marketing technologies consulting, which includes analytics, developing technical specifications, and campaign management.

One source of technology that Marketing companies use is called Customer Relationship Management Systems. For many corporate senior executives Customer Relationship Management has introduced itself in their boardroom meetings with mixed reviews-initially appearing to be a great opportunity to increase efficiency, revenues, and profitability, as well as providing a process for getting to know the customer better. Software companies and consultants have communicated with both large and small companies about using the CRM strategy. They have also made it clear that if they didn't jump on the bandwagon they would loose out a great deal to their competitors who are more open to new corporate practices. CRM is a great asset to use with business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationships. However while the systems are being purchased by companies they are wither not using it to the best of it's ability or the companies are not properly implementing the CRM system, which in turn is a waste of the company invested time, effort, and most important money.

Companies so often purchase CRM technology in the name of Customer Service but they tend to forget the customer, using the application for internal uses. They fail to realize that the focus must always remain on the customer. For a CRM to be effective long-time, an organization must believe in it's underlying proposition of improving customer relations and use it to it's full advantage.

Another form of technology that marketer's use is called E-commerce. It is defined as consisting primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services over an electronic systems such as the internet and other compute networks. The information technology sees it as an electronic business application aimed at commercial transactions. In most cases it involves electronic funds transfers, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, electronic data interchange and automated data collection systems just to name a few.

Some benefits companies look at when thinking about e-commerce are increased sales, decreasing cost, increased profits, it can expand the size of the market from regional to national, or national to international.