As announced in July, Marketingunity exhibited at mediaPro10 on November 2nd and 3rd. The company announced release 7.0 of its marketing and procurement suite, with a raft of new modules and features. 

Despite overall visitor numbers being reduced by the untimely tube strike, the launch generated significant levels of interest, especially in  multi-channel marketing.  

The rise in 'digital' marketing channels - email, Web, mobile/SMS and Social Media to name just a few - continues apace, and the race to get brands onto these channels and gain competitive edge is well under way.

But alongside the potential rewards of getting it right, comes the challenge of co-ordinating activities across these channels. Despite buzz-phrases like 'content is king', the customer is still king, as ultimately, he (or she) will decide what channels to use, and what messages to respond to.

When they make that choice, brand managers need to know about it and respond. As our MD Chris Hopwood observes -

"The delivery channels may have changed, but the way consumers react to marketing communications hasn't. Whether they're looking at a piece of direct mail, an SMS message, or an email subject line they will scan the content for a fraction of a second, and if it doesn't grab their attention, they'll bin it."

"It's all about relevance, and that can only be enhanced by understanding individual customers preferences. That in turn can only come from monitoring every touchpoint, and learning from it."

As well as the new Multi-channel Manager module, we also introduced Agency Manager. This module may not be quite so interesting or exciting as Multi-channel Manager, but in its own way, its equally important, because it reduces the internal administration that every Agency has to cope with. This in turn leaves more time and money available to get on with the creative processes that generate the output.

In their different ways, the two new modules both represent real progress towards our goal of streamlining the whole marketing supply chain, ensuring that every process is both efficient and effective. Agency Manager is about efficiency, about consistently-optimal performance of core busines tasks. Multi-channel Manager is about effectiveness, measuring the success of campaigns across all marketing channels and touchpoints, and harnassing that knowledge to create more meaningful customer dialogues.

Despite their differences, both the new modules,  and indeed the rest of the marketingunity suite, share a common goal - to improve marketing ROI.