A recent Gartner report ventured that marketing budgets at many larger companies may have been cut by 20% or more in 2009. While the economy was certainly tightening at that time, one of the drivers of that reduction is the difficulty in measuring marketing effectiveness. It’s a high spend category with little clear proof of ROI, so that’s why marketing budgets get slashed, especially when times get a little tough. The danger here is that without accurate measurement, organizations don’t know where to trim and may end up cutting valuable programs. The right Marketing Operations solution can help by:

Giving you a complete marketing picture.
Get an end-to-end picture of precisely what is taking place in the marketing lifecycle, from origination through to fulfillment. In this way, bottlenecks can be quickly and efficiently identified and removed.

Protecting your brand.
Manage artwork and approvals using a structured system that ensures marketing and brand managers see and approve new marketing collateral before it goes to print or is released via online channels.

Providing better organization for your creative assets.
Assets can be organized by campaign, project, job number or any other reference and stored in a permanent web-based archive. And they can be quickly found by staff for revision or reuse, long after a marketing campaign has ended.

Improving team communication.
Marketing Operations programs have built-in options to notify managers as key events occur, such as the approval of artwork, or delivery of collateral to channel partners.

Accelerating delivery times.
Flexible workflows make it far easier for staff and suppliers, from one or many regions collaborating on a campaign or project, to share information and speed approvals.

Allowing you to refine marketing operations as you go.
Marketing Operations programs give managers the tools to analyze, revise and benchmark improvements to the marketing lifecycle in hours - not weeks, months or years.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of Marketing Operations solutions out there with hundreds of features, and you need to do your research to find the one that will optimize your own marketing efforts. Start with this report from Gartner (they call Marketing Ops MRM or Marketing Resource Management), “Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management.” It describes the strengths and attributes of today’s leading Marketing Operations software providers. Good luck!
 

Maybe you already "got milk," but that's not all you need in life. Experts say we need a balanced diet of dairy, protein, grains, fruits and vegetables. You wouldn't try to survive on only one of these. You'd run into all kinds of problems if you only ate ground beef or blueberries. You know better, so you try to include every food group.

I hope you also know better than to think you're set for life if you're using marketing software that addresses one, tiny area of your marketing organization. Yes, it may be improving your outbound marketing and lead distribution efforts, but what about your materials and inventory? You may have a microsite builder, but are you working on search engine optimization or PPC Advertising?

We do software, and if you do collateral we can help. If you and your team realize that much already, half the battle is behind you. Are you looking for collateral customization software? Collateral management software? Marketing collateral software? Marketing collateral management software? Digital asset management software? Brand content management software? (Phew.) No matter what you call it, we do it.

James Gilchrist, a Graphics Designer at Aprimo and one of my coworkers, may be talking about this functionality so check out his posts for more information.

One of my favorite classes in college was Principles of Advertising. The section I found the most interesting covered subliminal advertising. It was fascinating to study how logos were embedded into images, like the Disney reference below. I think its brilliant.


My friends and I spent a lot of time looking for others; pondering whether or not one of the first bottled waters, Evian was deliberately named to backwards spell Naive. Cool, right? I think so...perhaps that's where my geekiness comes in. Hey - maybe I DO fit at Aprimo!!

I love entertaining the idea that marketing can play with our subconscious...if only we listened to that subconscious more! I can't tell you how many times I knew I needed a better way to track projects and lead development or manage marketing finances...those nagging thoughts that aren't annoying enough to be conscious, but they bug the heck out of your subconscious. I knew I needed these things to prove my ROI in marketing to my boss and others and yet, I subconsciously fought against them.

Do you do this? Should I push my graphic designer to start creating subliminal marketing collateral that speaks to your subconscious instead of the conscious self that is fighting an internal battle? One more fun subliminal post for fun....

Ah, Marketing......
We are in the inviable position of creating the voice of our company to the world!
We are also here to serve a growing list of internal customers.  And, I would say, without reservation, that our most important customer is the Sales team.  They look to us to provide leads and to grow the sales funnel.  They look to us to provide and manage their collateral.  They ask for help with PowerPoint presentations, ask us to edit RFP's, and to remind them of upcoming events.
How can we better help our lonely comrades in the field? 
OK, let's talk about the sales funnel?  What can we do to grow it:
Leads.....good, strong, highly-qualified leads.
How do we find them?  By using search engine optimization, by utilizing and optimizing social media, by building connections with prospects.  
How do we get the leads to Sales in an efficient and effective manner?
By connecting directly to their salesforce automation system, so that we can funnel contacts and information quickly, efficiently, and to the right people.

Let's face it, a lot of us feel we are pretty smart and that we can pick up new tools on our own.  That search engine managment tool cannot be that different from Excel right?  Just point us in the right direction and we will figure it out.  I will admit to falling into this trap more than once.  Have you?

Need a hint?  Do you never read the manuals on our home appliances/electronics because you can figure it out by yourself.

But then a friend comes over one day and picks up the remote for your DVR, pushes a couple buttons and makes something happen you did not know was possible.  You are amazed and ask "How did you do that !?!" and your friend replies "I read about it in the manual."

Beware! I have seen how this bit of "ego" can cause real harm when it comes to using demand generation or marketing resource management software applications.  Especially in the more functionally rich features like email and microsite builders, web analytics tools, collateral customization, or marketing project management.

We all want to assume that once we are taught the basics, we can figure out the rest on our own.  So, rather than attend real training or read the help manual, we poke around on our own and see what we can figure out.  The real risk with this is that you probably will "figure out" how to make that content block in an email be a "rules based" dynamic content block. You feel pretty good and give yourself a pat on the back.  What you do not realize  is that there were four other ways to have approached that same problem and three of them were much simpler or better than the way you "figured out" how to do it. 

Even worse, you are proud of what you learned so you share it with others in your company.  Over time, these bad practices get passed on from one user to another and pretty soon your whole team is doing things inefficiently or even just plain wrong without realizing it.  Everyone thinks that is just the way you have to do it. 

Over the years, I have had many instances where a customer complained to me about how difficult it was do something in our software only to find out they doing it completely wrong and were unaware of the other much simpler options.

Enthusiam and a positive attitude are wonderful when working with software applications but you must be open to asking questions and getting help from the experts when its needed.

OK, you're in the middle of a new product launch.
You've got your launch plan and have developed your product positioning.
You've identified your target markets, ID'd your competitors, and you're creating all your supporting material.  Your strategic agency is developing your offline and online awareness and product brand campaigns.  Your PR agency is beating down the editorial doors, and getting your executives on speaking schedules.  Your ecommerce agency is creating banner ads and your product website pages.  Your local, tactical agency is creating sell sheets, product overviews, templates for white papers and research notes and training materials.  You have Sales kits, Product kits, Media kits.......It's a lot of stuff!
So, how do you keep track of all the collateral? 
Well, you can keep files, with sticky notes, that let you know location of the original files.
OR, you can look into marketing automation tools that can keep track of everything for you!
Yes, there is a whole category of tools out there to help you automate, track and manage your marketing collateral.  Look into Marketing Asset Management, to help aleve your "collateral damage".

It's inevitable. You have a meeting with your boss/a client/the hottest sales lead you've seen in months, and you've waited until the 11th hour to prepare. You're scrambling to compile the right PowerPoint presentation and handouts, and you can't seem to find the logo and piece of collateral that are crucial to your flawless execution.

Luckily, you're using Aprimo's brand content management solution, and can log in and navigate the familiar folder and sub-folder structure. You quickly type a keyword and download that 23-color logo in EPS format (with outlines created, of course, since your vendor doesn't own that obscure font). Your fingers fly to type another keyword, and in no time you download the high-res Australian rendition of your latest product slick.Aprimo's brand content management solution also allows you to set up expiration dates for your files. Upon expiration, the file will no longer be displayed in searches or in your digital library. With the right permissions, these files are still available as a historical view.

When adding new files to your library, you can easily notify your team (of two or 2,000) that new content is available. This may be a prompt to click through and download for immediate use, or a memo for future use of the file.

If you're interested in taking a look at the PDF overview of our brand content management (BCM) solution, comment on this post and let me know. I'll email it to you. And how will I find the PDF? I've already downloaded it from my digital library!

You know the drill.
You're in the middle of a product launch.  You've completed all the creative for the online ads.  The electronic and print collateral is done......

Sell sheets- check!
RFP templates- check!
Press release- check!
Press kit- check!
Email templates- check!
Campaign planning - check!

So, it's 11:00 p.m., you're still at the office, and you can't find the two-pager that you promised to send to your West-Coast rep for a client meeting in the morning.
You've looked in every folder, every file directory, and the piece has vanished!!!!!
So, what do you do?
Call the agency? (receptionist is long gone)
Check with your print vendor, to see if he kept the electronic file?

This is the time to look for solutions, as this problem is going to get bigger as time goes on.....
We're back to the brand asset management story.  It's here now, and it works. 
Have you tried it?
Got any feedback on how to make it work better?
Let's talk.....

It's the same old story we have been telling every week:
Your resources are shrinking every day, yet Sales is asking for more and better prospects in the sales funnel.  You're trying to stretch your collateral out to last through the end of the year, and you're trying desperately to show ROI in marketing post campaign. 
You have one more event this year, and are getting a lot of pressure to cancel, since ROI is so difficult to measure. 
So, do you go to the event, deplete your tiny budget even more, taking the chance that nothing good will come of it but the stories from Sales about late night escapades???

Turn to Aprimo Marketing Studio, silly!!

Stick a banner ad on the conference website, and watch the click-throughs to your landing page.  Push out those emails to the pre-conference attendee list, and watch them show up in real time to your site.  And, manage your conference activities and expenditures down to the penny by utilizing online management software.

Go ahead, go to the event.  Just be sure to manage your activities, your collateral, your campaigns and your demand generation efforts online, then go Twitter about it!!!