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....

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.

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!!!