End-to-End Visibility in Marketing
Do you have all the information you need to support your marketing decisions?
Liam Royes – General Manager Asia Pacific – Orbis Global
Today, the most valued currency in business is ‘information’, but only if it is timely, accurate and cost-effective to access. In this paper we will discuss how marketers can significantly boost their operational efficiency and gain greater visibility across all their marketing activities.
The Structure of Marketing
It is typical for many companies to:
1. Have a complex internal marketing network consisting of multiple divisions, regional and global marketing and product teams;
2. Have a vast array of marketing supply chain vendors, including agencies, printers, call centres and mail houses;
3. Have an intricate external partnership network including distributors, retailers and alliances;
4. Be engaged in a vast number of marketing campaigns and activities at any time involving numerous stakeholders;
5. Use manual processes to plan, coordinate, manage, gather and report marketing information.
It is clearly difficult for companies to achieve optimal results across marketing without a centralised system to keep track of everything that is going on.
Marketing Automation
Automation is the key to operational efficiency and control in marketing. Through the implementation of marketing automation comes streamlined workflows, embedded best practices, incorporation of all stakeholder activity and, as a result, greater visibility.
But what does greater marketing visibility bring in practical terms?
• Ability to make on-the-fly changes to current campaign activityto improve performance
• Real time tracking of activity including: budget versus actual spend; type of activity in-market and planned
• Identification and removal of bottlenecks, improving overall speed to market
• Reduction of market “clutter” – ie. multiple divisions running campaigns concurrently
• Marketers can easily exchange and leverage knowledge and assets gathered from other areas and activities, for example:
- re-purposing of X-campaign brief and templates for Y-product type;
- developing a cross-promotional program for greater market impact;
- scheduling X-campaign before/after Z-campaign for maximum result
These are just some of the benefits that can be immediately realised through complete end-to-end visibility across marketing.
Achieving End-to-End Visibility
More and more companies are adopting technologies to help them automate marketing to improve their operational efficiency. Through a centralized system bringing together valuable data from all marketing activity, companies can extract, aggregate and present information clearly and simply. A high level, valuable layer of “visibility” is achieved.
The diagram below demonstrates the relationship between the enabling system technology, automation of key marketing functions and the presentation of top level information in a meaningful format.
Tools of the Visibility Trade
Two powerful tools that provide executives and marketers with a high level layer of visibility are marketing calendars and marketing dashboards. We will discuss the functionality and benefits of these tools in greater detail below.
Marketing Calendar
Marketers may have their own version of a “marketing calendar” or event schedule. These tend to be typically displayed in a spreadsheet (or multiple spreadsheets), drawn on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper attached to a wall. Activities are manually plotted and sporadically updated. There is limited access and visibility to this information, and typically minimal synchronicity between owners, activities, events, resources and planning across the year. The benefits a dynamic marketing calendar can provide include:
• Up to the second live data across all activities, regions and countries
• High level views of status, progress and results across all marketing activity throughout the year
• Ability to plan and schedule activities that will complement and not coincide with other initiatives
• Flexibility to adjust marketing strategy, budgets and re-allocate marketing spend
• Faster identification and removal of process bottlenecks
• Better capacity planning and optimisation of marketing resources
• Assurance of synchronicity and collaboration between marketing stakeholders and divisions
• Ease of drill-through to granular activity detail from a feature rich interface
A marketing calendar provides both high level visibility and information drill-through into campaigns, activities and events. It enables stakeholders to see at-a-glance activities and strategies that have been planned across any period and the level of involvement required from various functional areas.
Marketing Dashboard
An equally valuable visibility tool is a marketing dashboard. A dashboard provides a graphical selection of clear metrics that highlight important data pertaining to specific marketing milestones and targets. Key marketing stakeholders have instant access to summarised information represented in concise visual charts, extracted from real time system data.
The dynamic interface draws upon specific information that allows marketers to assess the current situation, identify any bottlenecks or inconsistencies and make any necessary adjustments to plans, activities, budgets and resources with greater speed and agility.
Common examples of dashboard reporting include:
• Overall budget position (ie. planned versus actual)
• Campaign and activity spend by department or cost centre
• List of top campaigns by size of budget
• Number and status of campaigns in development and in market
• Volume of active sign-offs and status
Conclusion
Marketing environments are more complex than ever before, and keeping a firm grasp across all activities, events, communications, expenditure and resources can be challenging and time consuming. By understanding your key marketing processes and business drivers, and bringing efficiency and best practice through centralised automation – a solid foundation for all marketing eff orts and activities across the enterprise will be achieved. Dynamic tools such as marketing calendars and dashboards improve visibility and allow constant refinement of marketing strategy based on access to real time information.
