For most companies, marketing spend is one of the largest cost items on the financial statement. Yet the level of discipline placed upon that marketing spend is too often appalling. Habitual behavior over the years has resulted in marketing not being managed like the rest of the business.
Whereas it is unthinkable for a CFO to manage the financials of a company without a general ledger system, the CMO continues to run the marketing of a company in the absence of an analogous business application
This is despite that the fact that a company’s marketing efforts requires coordination among multiple internal functional areas, departments and business units; across much geography; and between external agencies, vendors and partners. Coupled this with the rate of marketplace change, the complexity becomes crushing. Today, it is just too hard to do marketing consistently well—and, it’s increasingly inefficient and unaffordable.
Forrester Research in its one its findings concluded that “Given the complexity of delivering consistent customer experiences, integrating marketing processes, and measuring marketing performance, we cannot afford to continue and rely on point solutions” because the consequences can be severe on both the company and its customers.
1. Companies Suffer - Inefficiencies lead to wasted resources, to campaigns that are misaligned with the brand strategy, to unacceptably long cycle times, to reduced accountability, and to clouded visibility to the landscape of programs that are underway or planned.
2. Customers Endure - The internal issues of marketing bubble up and spill over the walls of the company. These issues then manifest themselves to external customers as suboptimal brand experiences. Instead of “right person, right message, right time,” a customer may be dumbfounded by the inadequacy of a company’s understanding of them as an individual and by how poorly they use that insight to build a profitable relationship.
It is therefore time that senior marketers start re examining their practices, with the realization that the consequences of maintaining the status quo negatively impacts the company’s most valuable asset—namely, its customers and this in turn will certainly propel professionals to inquire how technologically enabled marketing may address the need.
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Change is on the horizon, however, with CMOs increasingly being required by the CEO and CFO to demonstrate management acumen—not only for result that drive the bottom line, but also for the expenditure of resources and for the practices and processes used in the design and deployment of programs.
To drive the productivity and efficiency that is now demanded, the CMOs need to holistically consider the entire Marketing Value Chain—namely, all of the business processes that connect corporate, brand and field marketing plus external marketing suppliers and agencies to customers.
Enhancing the efficiency of these processes will allow the marketing to become more effective in strengthening customer relationships.
Companies that have deployed automated marketing solutions have been found to deliver productivity gains between 15 - 40% across all components of the marketing production and roll out value chain including project management, artwork production, agency spends, campaign cycle time, campaign responses and in the process drive up customer response and retention rates by any where between 10 to 20 per cent.
So if you are one of those at the client or at the agency who constantly says that your simplest campaign takes several months to define and launch and that your resources spend most of their time in ferrying data, briefs, and creative across multiple agencies, then maybe it is time for you to ask your self “How can Automated Marketing make my marketing & business more efficient?”
(The author is Group COO & CEO (America) EBS Worldwide)