The recent change in the weather has me concerned. I am concerned on a couple levels un-Aprimo related...is my house ready for fall? Does my daughter have warm clothes at school? Aprimo speaking - I am VERY concerned with the change of the weather because it forces me to wonder about the fall dress code? Jean shorts, black socks and sandals was the summer fashion, so what will fall bring?? I figured that out today!
I have spotted my first Gen Con shirt and I am confident that there will be more to follow. I need one of these! Anyone care to send me one? Fashion aside, fall is a great time to be working at Aprimo.
Our public launch of Aprimo Marketing Studio is right around the corner in November - an innovative, interactive marketing dashboard that all marketers can be thankful for! We also have a newer version of our cornerstone marketing automation software on the horizon.
As we hit our fourth quarter, we are also taking our budgeting in stride because our marketing finances are under control - huge difference from past marketing gigs where I would be scrambling at this time to balance and reallocate and stretch funds until year end. Check out Jeff Chamberlain's blog for more on marketing finances. And, in the meantime send me your Gen Con shirts!! I need to update my fall wardrobe!
I love Hannah Montana. The character, the show, the music. Miley Cyrus is one heck of a talented teenager. To be more accurate, I love all things Disney Channel. I get excited when yet another Disney child star hits it big on network television or the silver screen. I feel like I can say, "I knew them when."
Examples: Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff, Shia LaBeouf, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers. Amanda Bines (Hairspray), Michelle Trachtenberg (Gossip Girl) and Kenan Thompson (Saturday Night Live) got their start on Nickelodeon. Close enough.
My love of the Disney Channel reinforces that my inner child, or teeny-bopper, is alive and well. My inner marketer, which is far more "outer" than "inner" because of my day job, enjoys the Disney Channel, too, because they know exactly how to market and talk to their audience. There are no traditional commercials on the channel, but Disney advertises their shows, movies, environmental campaigns like Friends for Change, and highlights ordinary kids around the world doing extraordinary things.
Now there's a tangent for you. Focus, Kati.
The best of both worlds. That's what we, the marketing department at Aprimo, get. We can easily sympathize with marketers who are struggling with campaign planning and execution, attempting to track marketing finances and measure ROI. But we don't have to struggle with these campaign management issues. As a provider of marketing automation software, we feel a responsibility to lead by example. "You want to buy our software? Great! Good luck figuring it out." No. We want to showcase how global marketing organizations can solve their toughest issues. Understanding our customers' pain points, yet avoiding them ourselves? Definitely the best of both worlds.
Miley, let's do lunch.
September 30. Month end and quarter end. How is 2009 already 75% behind us? A second ago I was ringing in the new year on the ski slopes. Summer is officially over, too. Soon it will be dark when I wake up and dark when I get home. Minimal sunlight, as if I need another reason to be depressed while I endure a cold midwest winter.
Today, finance and marketing finance professionals everywhere will be busier than busy. It's time to close the books. How much did we spend this month? How much did we make? Are you sure? What about the quarter as a whole? And don't think tomorrow they'll wake up to a stress-free day. It's not all wrapped up by the time the clock strikes October.
Hopefully, marketing finance operations are a piece of cake for those marketing finance folks because they are using a marketing financial management software like Aprimo's to manage their budgets all month long. When forecasts are laid out, commitments entered and invoices approved against those commitments, you know exactly where your dinero went, when and why. Done and done.
Personally, there's nothing hitting me over the head when another month or quarter comes to an end. Most of the time, I don't even think about it, unless a sales manager is explaining that they didn't call me back right away because contracts this and signatures that. It doesn't bother me that Q3 is over. But summer... I'll be pouting about that until Easter.
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....
We discussed how Aprimo's marketing management software can do just that. It enables marketing management to view and control their budget based on their own marketing structure and incorporate their business rules. Within just a few minutes, he determined he wanted to learn more about our software and its other functions and said he would like to see a demonstration with additional team members present.
Where are your marketing dollars going? If you don't really know, let Aprimo help! Visit us at Aprimo.com and let me know how we can help.
About two years ago, my wife and I entered another phase of life - empty nest. Just to clarify, our second of two headed off to college and wasn't looking back. Our first was entering his senior year with grad school in his sights. So, we were staring a very quiet house in the face. Now, I don't want to say that my wife and I were celebrating this event. in fact, we really enjoy the company of our sons and were lamenting this loss.
Fastforward two years....during the first year and part of the second year we ended up welcoming a friend into our household that was going through some tough personal problems (a divorce). This was good for us and helped transition us to the actual quiet time. During the first summer, our sons returned home and we added two cats to the mix. During the second year, we experienced a fair amount of the empty nest so our jobs consumed much of the empty space. Now we have gone through another summer and one son stayed at school and the other graduated from an intense one-year business degree focused on Financial Management. Needless to say, the job market is decimated, so he is still with us and studying for actuarial exams.
So, what's my point (you should be asking)? Marketing is just like our life...hard to predict and full of unexpected surprises (some good and some not). For this reason, you need to be constantly tracking your marketing finances from an overall perspective so you know what money is spent, what is promised and what is forecast. How else can you know how to react to new opportunities (Social Media Marketing), new competitive moves (product launches), needs for the sales pipeline or economic changes? It's hard to find automation
that will help you deal with life's unexpected changes, but marketing automation software can definitely help a marketing operation stay swift on its feet.
ROI in Marketing. Perpetual Motion Machines. The Fountain of Youth. All seem to be very elusive concepts. I don't have much to say about the second two items (despite my engineering degree), but I can make some comments on the first - ROI in Marketing. Aprimo's Marketing Automation software, like a Marketing department, is based on activities. It's a simple concept...but it is a unique aspect of our product that makes the difference in allowing us to measure the effectiveness of a marketing activity. In case you're wondering, a marketing activity could be writing a white paper, developing a microsite, writing a blog, managing paid search or coordinating a major trade show. When it comes to managing marketing finance operations, the key is that marketing looks at the world from the perspective of these activities. We manage our plans in groups of related activities, we assess the value of various types of activities (should we do less trade show events and more online marketing?).
By allowing the money to be tracked within these activities, we allow you to manage your marketing spend the way you manage your marketing. I've seen many estimates of ROI in Marketing that only take into account the execution costs (placement for web advertising) and forget about the design and development costs that can be significant depending on the activity. The return on an activity can be somewhat elusive as well. There will always be an argument that multiple activities lead to a closed deal or the lift in product revenue. This will continue to be the realm of estimation and analytics. However, accurate tracking of the entire investment will bring more accuracy to the process.
Well, I've dwelled only on Marketing Finance Operations for my early posts. I'm ready to talk about another passion of mine -- process (yeah, I'm a blast a parties :)). Stay tuned!
I mentioned getting Marketing Finance Operations under control in my last post. We operated as a typical marketing organization with distributed authority for approving expenses and no real good central mechanism to track expected expenses. The complexity with managing marketing financial software is the various stages of marketing spending.
First, there is a forecast for a program (e.g. an online marketing campaign) that is planned in the future. This "earmarks" money from the budget somewhere out in time. Second, there is the point where you actually start to commit spending money for the online marketing campaign through a verbal or written contract (e.g. a PPC advertising campaign). Finally, there is the actual invoice when cash flow is impacted. These all need to be managed on three dimensions - a budget, an activity and alignment with your General Ledger accounts. Visibility to all these aspects allows me to react to budget increases (yes, it can happen), budget cuts (okay, this is more common) and the desire to change plans to react to market dynamics. The association with the General Ledger provides an alignment point between Marketing Operations and the company accounting system.
In the past, we would get invoices that we didn't realize we had not yet paid and be forced to adjust our future spend when it was almost too late. A good proportion of marketing spend is committed well in advance. When we had to adjust within a quarter, our options were limited on finding places to cut. Also, without the visibility of what was committed and what wasn't, we didn't really know what activities carried a large amount of sunk cost. The other side of the equation, measurement, is equally as important. Without knowing the cost of an activity (the Investment), it's pretty difficult to assess the Return on Investment or ROI in Marketing. But, that's a topic for my next post. Until then, may the marketing process be with you!
How do you get it all done, with so many initiatives on your plate?
Let's discuss the other end of the spectrum for a minute:
You are in charge of Online Marketing, or Marketing Lead Management, or Marketing Finance, in a department of hundreds of marketers. Or you are Creative Director of your in-house creative group, or Traffic Manager, or in charge of Marketing Events.
How do you get through the maze of approval levels?
Who signs off this week for last weeks expenditures?
How do you finalize who is going to what event, and what the expected deliverables are?
And, oh, what is the ROI???
How do you work through the organization to get your work done?
One way is to develop relationships with the appropriate people in the groups you must work with. This takes time, but always seems to work in the long run.
Another way is to learn the short-cuts in your organization. What is the best day to hit up Accounting to get the latest forecasts and sales figures? What can you do to help your sales team, so that they are more likely to help you when you need it?
What are some ways that you have learned to "work the system"?
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