Case
Sanoma – Assessing marketing automation for strategic growth
Sanoma and Avaus have collaborated for several years within Marketing Automation. We decided it was time to take a thorough look at our mutual journey.
The main questions, asked of Avaus by Mikael Liljedahl, Director, Development and Sales Support at Sanoma, were:
What is the maturity, today, of our Marketing Automation?
What can be achieved if we maximise its potential?
What is the role of Marketing Automation in our technology landscape?
What are the quick wins?
Liljedahl lays out the main motivation for this project: “We have built a comprehensive marketing technology stack to serve our customers in many channels. Data gathering and processing capabilities are in a constant state of development, so it was natural for us to now think about the role of marketing automation in our tech landscape as a whole”.
Our mutual project looked at the entire landscape of marketing automation within Sanoma Media Finland. The main objectives were to understand:
- how the system is used today – current state
- what has and can be achieved – maturity
- what the multi-year objective should be – target state
- and which choices to make along the way to reach that target – roadmap
“During the project, discussions even touched upon the question ‘What is the philosophy that guides our usage and development of marketing automation?’”, adds Liljedahl.
The project – running one workshop a week for five weeks – looked at both operational and technical aspects of the current marketing automation system.
“Sanoma has created one of the largest consumer data assets in the Nordics. Utilising it for activation, personalisation and analysis represents a huge opportunity to further develop a more always-on customer experience that acts upon identified behavioural patterns and triggers these across several digital channels. Consumers’ expectations regarding service and experience will keep growing and Sanoma is equipped to meet this demand”, adds Teemu Relander, Business Lead of Data & Analytics at Avaus.
The defined roadmap describes both smaller point solutions and larger, new functionalities. Some quick wins regarding operational usage of the platform can be implemented right away; other development items are projected years into the future.
“The project was successful in the sense that it identified around thirty development items, all of which bring us toward the identified target state. We can now put these on a timeline and start working”, states Petri Heinonen, Product Owner, B2C Data & Marketing Technology at Sanoma.
“Now that we have a clear view of the role and maturity of marketing automation, we are able to better plan the overall development of our martech stack in line with our business objectives”, comments Mikael Liljedahl.
“This is a good milestone in our multi-year collaboration with Sanoma. We look to the future with open eyes and want to strengthen our strategic collaboration further”, notes Teemu Relander.
“The project outcomes equip us with good tools for enhancing process efficiency, continuous platform maturity assessment and the direction for our development. A job well done”, Liljedahl wraps up.
