As many marketing professionals know, the marketing management process often gets bogged down in redundant, routine tasks. These tasks, such as tracking down approvals, locating collateral, managing budgets, do little to help you achieve corporate goals. To really make an impact on the business, marketers need to identify opportunities to automate insignificant tasks to free up time for strategic endeavors. Marketing resource management (MRM) systems are one example of a technology designed to optimize marketing workflow. Here’s your guide to opportunities for optimizing your marketing management process.

Corporate documents and templates can often be hard to locate. Given this challenge, Sales team members all too often create their own (sometimes redundant) materials, and these materials may be released into the public domain without a formal approval process – or if approvals are sought before release, the materials may not be routed to the correct person for approval. The lack of a formal process and structure for managing brand, regulatory compliance and materials customizations can create inefficiencies such as time wasted searching for approved materials, and even risks such as regulatory exposure or branding inconsistencies that can lead to brand erosion.

MRM systems can help to streamline the management of brand materials and approvals by providing a central location for accessing approved materials and by automating the process for approving customized marketing messages. MRM systems also enable distributed sales channels to create localized materials while streamlining the necessary review process to ensure brand consistency.

The way you keep materials up-to-date is another opportunity area for optimizing your marketing management process. Brand materials may need to be updated often. The quicker you can locate and update approved marketing materials, the better. In a typical environment, marketing materials may be saved in a number of locations, and distributed sales channels may even keep their go-to resources on their own hard drives, which can create challenges ensuring that partners have access to the most updated materials when product features, pricing or branding changes.

MRM systems can help by providing a searchable inventory of marketing materials – including the ability to search by string or keywords within branded materials – saving time on materials updates, and ensuring that materials needing changes aren’t overlooked. MRM systems empower corporate marketers to quickly locate and update all affected materials and serve as a central location for corporate marketing and distributed sales channels to access the most current marketing materials.

Joint campaigns with local sales channels such as distributors, agents, and partners can be challenging to coordinate and personalize. Many companies avoid co-marketing campaigns altogether or only provide generic marketing materials to their partners. Without the ability to localize marketing messages, distributed sales channels and partners may not be touching customers and prospects often enough with corporate branding messages. Additionally, there may not be an easy way to validate that co-marketing materials were actually distributed, while some partners may be unwilling to share customer or prospect lists for co-marketing purposes.

Managing local campaigns is another marketing process simplified by MRM systems. MRM can help by simplifying and automating the local marketing process. Marketing templates can be provided to distributed sales channels and partners, and the process of localizing marketing materials can be easily managed directly by partners. Sensitive customer and prospect lists can be hidden from corporate marketing, while campaign response rates can still be tracked for each partner.

Co-op marketing dollars are frequently distributed on an ad hoc basis and budgets can be challenging to manage, while funds for co-op marketing campaigns are often left on the table and spending cannot be tracked from a central location.

MRM systems enable corporate marketing to manage and track local marketing budgets by partner and campaign easily from one central location. MRM systems also serve as a quick and efficient means to distribute co-op marketing funds to each partner.

Conclusion

In today’s fast-paced marketing environment, streamlining the marketing management process is essential. Too often, there are necessary but inconsequential tasks that distract marketing from strategic initiatives which would make a real impact on the bottom line. Marketing resource management systems optimize processes, making it quicker and easier to manage branding and regulatory compliance and locate marketing materials when product features, pricing or branding changes. With MRM systems deployed as a hub for managing marketing materials customizations and approvals, the process of end-to-end campaign management is streamlined and agile, enabling cost and process efficiency gains for Sales and Marketing users alike.

How could you simplify your marketing management process with an MRM system?