Marketing collateral materials are an important prospect touchpoint: In a matter of seconds, they create a brand impression, convey your product or service’s unique value proposition, and ideally capture the prospect’s interest. Marketers invest a significant amount of resources in developing marketing materials. However, all too often these materials go under-utilized or unused by Sales, and tons of outdated printed pieces end up being thrown out.
To optimize marketing ROI, you need to understand and manage your marketing materials costs and usage. Here are three ways marketing resource management (MRM) systems can help you take control.
- Leverage on demand printing.
Marketing resource management systems can help to reduce the costs of printing marketing materials by enabling on demand printing. Sales representatives (including distributed sales channel such as branches, dealers, franchisees, agents or other partners) can order printed materials from within the MRM system on an as-needed basis. This eliminates the need for closets filled with costly printed collateral. Not only does this reduce waste, it also reduces the possibility of outdated materials being distributed.
- Optimize usage.
If Sales isn’t using the marketing materials you create, then your Marketing department is wasting time and money. Marketing resource management systems are like a marketing hub – a central online location where Sales can easily find the materials Marketing has create. Furthermore, MRM systems enable you to track the usage of each piece. Such data can provide insights for helping you to refine your future content development and increase usage. With MRM systems you can also track usage by salesperson. Low usage by a subset of salespeople could indicate a need for training or improved communication.
- Enable customization.
Low usage by a subset of salespeople could also mean that the standard marketing materials are not relevant to a particular market segment. MRM systems enable you to empower sales - the people closest to the target audience - to customize pieces to resonate with the local market. Automated workflows allow marketing to review and approve customized pieces to ensure brand consistency.
Conclusion
As Mark Yeager said in a recent MarketingProfs article, “Companies are wasting massive amounts of time and resources on materials that are not exactly what sales teams need, or Sales simply doesn't know that they're there.” It can be expensive to develop, print, and manage marketing materials, which is why it’s so important to ensure materials are up-to-date, relevant and will be used. Marketing resource management systems can help you to take control of your marketing assets by enabling on demand printing, improved access and usage tracking, and local customization.
How do you ensure your marketing materials don’t get trashed?
