The good news: business-to-business marketers are seeing the writing on the wall about a more business-minded and process-oriented approach. The Trends of 2005 survey of business marketers by the Institute of Business Marketers in the United States cited ‘achieving profitable growth’ as the number one challenge, with ‘organising and marketing the organisation internally’ as number two.
Chief executives are looking to marketing to take the reins and drive the customer relationship. Who better to do so? As marketers, we spend our careers trying to understand what motivates customer behaviour and how to excite and move our customers. Branding is more than pretty pictures – it’s the sum of all the experiences, good and bad that a customer has with a company. Marketing, as the steward of the brand, must become involved in every facet of the business to ensure the right experience is being delivered to each customer.
The bad news: marketing organisations around the globe spend upwards of £1.9 trillion each year. Yet most of us still manage the processes of budgeting, allocating, tracking and managing the initiatives on which this £1.9 trillion is spent via a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, word documents, email, digital asset repositories and a myriad of other disconnected applications.
The result: we have arrived at the perfect storm. As companies look to marketing to be more strategic, they are also scrutinising the enormous sums of money invested in attracting, retaining, and growing the value of customers. Is marketing effective? How is the money being spent? Could we be more efficient?
At the same time, marketers are desperate to escape constant execution mode. We need more time for strategy, and customer and business analysis – we need more time to think!
The solution: MRM
Enter marketing resource management or MRM as it is often called. MRM has emerged to answer the need for more efficient planning, budgeting, execution, tracking and measurement of marketing initiatives. In general, there are four key capabilities of MRM – strategic planning, budgeting and financial management, project management, and digital asset management.
MRM provides a collaborative framework around which marketers can establish their plans and make them visible to the entire team. It provides capability for planning project workflow, assigning tasks and resources and for tracking the project’s progress over time. It makes quick and repeatable processes for developing creative materials, routing them for needed approvals and maintaining audit trails. It standardises metrics and measures to allow marketers to evaluate their effectiveness and quantify their value to the organisation.
The results
What are the benefits? For one, greater visibility across the marketing team into project status and alignment. Are marketing groups working at cross-purposes or on overlapping initiatives? MRM can reveal this.
Secondly, MRM increases speed to market. By capturing best practices for project management, MRM saves time from wasted activity and missed deadlines.
Thirdly, it saves money – so often lost through rush fees, rework, compliance fines and duplication of effort. Finally, with template-based metrics, MRM lets marketers consistently measure the effectiveness of their efforts so that they can make better decisions in future.
Best of all, early adopters and industry analysts agree that MRM pays for itself. According to Gartner, a leading IT analyst firm, one company using MRM reduced creative approval processes from 14 to two weeks, while an FMCG corporation saved over £100,000 per brand through improved asset reuse.
Technology drives effectiveness
Marketing has been one of the only remaining corporate functions to date without its own suite of integrated software to drive greater efficiency, effectiveness and measurability. Companies around the world have invested in Enterprise Resource Planning software for finance (ERP), Sales Force Automation for the sales force (SFA), Call Centre Automation (CCA), Supply Chain and Manufacturing (SCM) software, and technology for nearly every other department.
But that is changing. MRM is just one component of the emerging enterprise marketing management software category and is increasingly purchased as part of a suite of software designed to increase the productivity, precision, and accountability of marketing. Gartner says that through 2010, enterprises that successfully deploy EMM will grow their businesses by more than 20 per cent (Garner, Redefine Marketing Processes to Drive Customer-Centricity, July 2004).