Marketing Operations

The great news about blogging is that you'll already be interested in what I have to say or else you wouldn't have found me! (Keyword Response Attribution in practice ....)

Recognising that shouting about Aprimo's new SaaS offering - Aprimo Marketing Studio - in the UKI market isn't an effective way to reach my target market, I am opting for some "active listening" - which I guess you could label as a form of Influencer Marketing.

My name is Robin Collyer and I am responsible for Aprimo's Sales and Marketing Operations in the UK & Ireland. I have worked around Marketing Professional Software for the last 10 years and am looking forward to sharing my experiences in this blog as I experiment with all the new ways to influence a market and maximise sales.


When we talk about Marketing Communication Software, we instantly think of all the messages we want to send to the market - but who is really listening?


I have recognised that the power lies firmly with my customers and prospects - not me - so I need to help them find me (Capture) - making Aprimo easy and fun (Engage) to buy from (Convert) as I go.

Should I even introduce myself in terms of "Sales and Marketing"? I guess I view my role as more of a facilitator or Head of Engagement, where the line between Marketing and Sales is all but non-existent. e.g. Is this blog a marketing initiative or a sales tactic?

How does this resonate with you? What are your thoughts on shouting vs active listening and how to influence a market?

(Loving Twitter's 140 character limit - follow me @AprimoUKI).

Well, change is in the air.  I've just moved to a new role at Aprimo and I am extremely energized.  I started my life in Product Marketing and now find myself getting the opportunity to head back there.  After a three year stint learning the ropes in traditional corporate marketing and marketing operations, I now get the opportunity to run Product Marketing for an exciting new on-demand version of our product that is optimized for online marketing - Aprimo Marketing Studio.  I'm like a kid in a candy store!!

It's really almost too good.  I've been driving our move to online marketing internally (with the help of some really great and experienced people, of course).  Honestly, three years ago I didn't know about Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click or Campaign Workflow to any level of detail.  Now I've been through it and it has really opened my eyes.  With this recent economic challenge, the move to Online Marketing has accelerated and it's clear there is no looking back. So, the tune of my blogs will change moving forward.  I'll be sharing our thoughts about product direction and the challenges I'm hearing from our customers and prospects.  I would love to hear from you.  What are your challenges with online marketing?  Are you using social media and getting value from it?  Is your email marketing generating the response and return you expect?  Are you able to build a profile of your prospects, customers and partners so you can communicate the way you want?

I often hear things like, I need help with my (pick one) marketing budget, project managment/workflow, creative reviews, job requests, campaign planning, asset management, etc.  As we get into discussions around other processes like online marketing, people are surprised that Aprimo offers one solution that manages all of their marketing processes and it is easy to use.

Aprimo Marketing Studio is new to the marketplace but the demand is not new at all.  I'm hearing people talk about their company having lots of different vendors and technologies trying to do what Aprimo Marketing Studio already does.  They're still looking for a better solution because....all the different things they have in place right now aren't working for them.  They say they don't know how effective their email campaigns are because they have no way to measure them.  They have no idea how much they're spending on each campaign, they need visibility into their proejcts, etc.  Their stories go on and on. 

If you are looking for ONE solution to handle your marketing needs, call me at 317.860.2424.  I would love to speak with you about your specific needs and share how Aprimo Marketing Studio can help.  You can also reach me via Live Chat at our Web site, aprimo.com.

Recently, someone came to us saying they were looking for a tool with a "dashboard" that would give them visibility into their marketing operations.  They particularly specified a dashboard and further explained that their operations are global and so they needed visibility into all of their marketing operations, globally.  I shared with her how our Aprimo Marketing Automation Software handles that and more.

Whatever your marketing management needs are and wherever your organization may be located on the map, we can help. We can assist you in streamlining your marketing operations while giving you visibility into those processes, globally.  And we can do so much more!

Call us at 317-803-4300 or visit us at www.aprimo.com.  We would love to speak with you about your marketing needs and discuss how Aprimo can help.

Marketing is hard work, and it's getting harder.  If you're in marketing, you already know how hard it has been in the past.  Today's economic challenges often make our difficult yesterdays look like a piece of cake.

I had a conversation with a marketer who was saying that her boss is on board with finding something to handle what had become the impossible in their marketing efforts.  He had been challenged with cutting their marketing personnel by half.  She said they had always done a terrific job with their marketing operations on what they felt was a small staff.  Now, having been sliced in half, they were paralyzed, and left not knowing what to do next. 

Among other things, they specifically needed project management software, a marketing calendar, something for reviews and approvals, and a better/quicker way to handle the leads that were suddenly being neglected. 

She was happy to learn there was help on the horizon!  We discussed the many areas of Aprimo Marketing Studio that would help them.  Before we ended our conversation, she said she was so happy she had called even though she had feared no one could help them.

If you are down so low you have to crawl up to ground level to see daylight, please let us know.  I would love to speak with you about your specific needs and discuss how we might help you, too.

1. The obvious is the list of who has to review and approve a particular piece (this will almost always vary by the type and content of the piece).
2. Next you need to consider the sequence.  Who should review it first?  If you have a group reviewing something at some point, is it consensus (all have to approve) or majority (more than half must approve).
3. What do you do if a review is rejected (start again, run through same review after rework, etc.)
4. Do you want to run one clean review at the end to make sure everyone agrees with the interpretation of comments (I recommend this!)?

The act of going through this will provide a lot of value to the organization.  Enforcing this process through the workflow in a marketing automation can really make it happen.  It only takes one piece getting out without the correct legal review to make you understand why you need this.  But it's not always fear of negative that drives a review process...the positive side is making sure you get the benefit of feedback from your best creative and knowledgeable talent on your content. 

This week I spoke with a company CMO looking for a magic button to solve the chaos going on with his marketing budget.  He was exasperated with the many attempts they've made to manage it themselves and was looking for something to help him not only manage his marketing finances, forecasts, and expenses, but also their reviews and approval processes - all marketing operations wrapped into one simple package. 

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.

The concept was so simple, that it took a while for me to understand it.  Now, I had worked in a relatively big company (HP through the late 90s) but hadn't been in a big marketing organization since that time.  In reality, HP still operated as a series of small companies when I left them.  So, the concept that a Marketing Calendar could provide an ROI in Marketing was somewhat hard to grasp initially.  However, as my learning increased here and our own marketing got more sophisticated from lead development through marketing planning and I got exposure to larger marketing operations operating in this increasingly complex world of online marketing and offline marketing, it all came clear.

Marketing Operations were spending extensive person months just managing and communicating their calendar of planned activities.  Literally, there are multiple companies that have individuals that spend all of their time gathering new and changed information that drive the calendar of marketing activities and formatting the information to communicate it (everything from elaborate graphics to spreadsheets) to people inside and outside the company that need to know.  So, what if there was a tool within marketing automation that allows the people that are managing their marketing projects to easily update their calendar dates that could drive a series of calendars tailored to the audience and available online?  A simple concept extended to scale and married with the current process of marketing project management can really work.   I would love to hear from those of you that relate to this, those doing this or those that have tried and failed.

My first job in marketing was with Hewlett-Packard and my title was "Technical Marketing." Since that time this title has probably taken on multiple meanings, but at the time it seemed like an oxymoron (you know - like Jumbo Shrimp).  Having spent my entire career in marketing, the concept of Marketing Process Management suffers from a similar impression.  However, I can attest personally from my own experience and conversations with several marketers, that project management is a major part of marketing whether it is acknowledged or not.  We worked with Peppers and Rogers group to develop a white paper on the Marketing Value Chain that speaks to this aspect of Marketing Operations very well.

Marketing organizations have attacked this issue from many angles.  Some outsource heavily and put this burden on their agencies.  Some just throw more resources at it or bring in outsourced help when they get behind.  Some have hired project experts that drive manual process and some have started using collaboration or workflow tools to address the issue head on.  Very few have gotten very far along in their maturity of dealing with Marketing Process Management and are certainly not close to getting the most out of their resources.  Because that is really what it is about...getting the most of your resources (people, time and money).  You can avoid rush fees, do more in parallel, reduce or eliminate rework from missed legal or creative reviews and learn more about how you operate to optimize your own procedures.  It starts with you defining your marketing processes and committing to supporting and using marketing automation to manage and improve how you work. Oh, and we can help with all of that!

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.

When I graduated from college and entered the business world four years ago, I would've readily admitted that I didn't know much at all about corporate America. There were things I knew I didn't know, like how people managed to work in the same job for years. My experience, to that point, included various jobs that each lasted between four and six months. But, for the most part, I didn't know what I didn't know.

I didn't know that there were thousands of unique job titles in marketing that I could explore with my marketing degree, and I didn't know what those job titles were or meant. Marketing Research. Marketing Communications. Media and Public Relations. Marketing Campaigns. Inside Sales. Graphics. Web Content Management. Product Marketing. Event Management. (I like the sound of that last one...)

I also didn't know there would be applications and programs and software that would help me accomplish and organize my day-to-day work life, let alone that one of those software programs would fall under the marketing operations software umbrella. I definitely didn't know that I'd be working for a company that develops an industry leading product under that umbrella.

At Aprimo, we drink our own champagne. We develop and sell marketing operations software, and our marketing department uses it. I was introduced to "ARC," our internal implementation of the software, Aprimo Resource Center, on my first day. In those days, using ARC, meant researching, verifying and updating customer and prospect data in our database. Today, it means a hundred different things. I can't manage the planning and logistics of an event without it! I mean, I could. But I'd rather not.

When we're evaluating a new event, we use the proposal process. When we've decided to host or sponsor an event, we track the financial forecast, what we've committed to spend and what we've actually spent. When we need to make sure that ten team members are working efficiently on different aspects of an event, we use a workflow that sends reminders, captures completed work and approvals, and dynamically adjusts if the timeline changes or a new step is inserted. This is not simply project management, people!

I wonder... where do you find yourself today? Maybe, you're like me four years ago and are still trying to figure out what marketing operations software is. (If that's the case, I wonder how you stumbled across my blog...) Maybe you do know what you don't know, you know you need to learn more and find a solution that best fits your organization, but haven't done anything about it yet. Or maybe you're a perfect specimen of a marketer, with effective marketing operations software in place, and we could all learn a thing or two from you. So where do you find yourself and what do you know?

Marketing agencies develop great creative.  For companies lacking strategic marketing competencies, agencies can also help fill this void.  Many agencies are also highly efficient in managing the outsourced production of marketing campaigns.  Agencies are a tremendous asset to corporate marketers. 

Within agencies, technology is harnessed and pushed to the limits for designing creative, executing email marketing campaigns, and managing interactive marketing activities using online marketing tools for search engine optimization and social media. 

So why have agencies been laggards to adopt marketing operations software, commonly referred to as Marketing Resource Management?  I believe it's because they realize that MRM applications have the potential to disrupt the status quo of their client relationships.  Think about it - why would agencies want to give their clients greater visibilty and transparency into their internal marketing budgets, plans, production workflows, traffic schedules, marketing calendars, digitial asset libraries and communication strategies? 

Aside from a few innovative firms, most agencies have been sitting on the sidelines out of fear that MRM systems will disintermediate the fundamental business relationship with their clients.  In the meantime, corporate marketing organizations are rapidly standardizing on MRM platforms in order to increase their own visibilty, accountability and control across their marketing portfolios, while accelerating their time to market and reducing costs and inefficiencies along the way.  Ironically, the benefits of marketing operations software can be the greatest in the very area of focus for many agencies -- interactive marketing!

The net result is that CMO's are taking outright ownership of their operational platform, inclusive of the intellectual capital and creative assets that were typically maintained within agencies.  Agencies and other marketing suppliers are being required to use these MRM systems as a virtual extension of the CMO's marketing value chain.  Over 70% of Aprimo's customers require their agencies to utilize their Aprimo solution as a collaborative extranet platform.  CMO's are no longer held captive by inordinate switching costs as they're now institutionalizing their marketing knowledgebase as a corporate asset.

Welcome to the 21st century.  Successful agencies of the future will embrace, and in my opinion should actually lead, this marketing transformation.  Interesting times, for sure.  



 

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!

As mentioned in an earlier post - I am a "newbie" to marketing for technology and my learning curve has been steep on several levels. Let's just cover the first three letters of the alphabet!

A. The cobbler's kids DO have shoes - in marketing at Aprimo, we absolutely use the marketing operations software that we sell, so there's that to learn.

B. My charge is media relations and social media and although I rely heavily on social media in my personal life, I have been skiing uphill when it comes to learning about everything social media optimization can do for business - luckily - we have shoes for that here, too with our newest product, Aprimo Marketing Studio.

C. I would be remiss if I didn't mention forging relationships with the colleagues who instead of having pictures of their kids and families in their cubes, have pictures of princess Lea (is that her name? the one with the two sticky buns on her head??) and who can do a better Yoda impression than Yoda himself. Yeahhh....there's that.

I could dwell on C for awhile here...but we'll save that for a later post, so let's cover B.

My title is Media Relations. Mind you, I have not technically worked in Media Relations hands-on in over 5 years and in that time...how to send a release, the timing of them, the web wire services that now exist, far exceed what I was doing "back then." But what really amazes me is the science behind social media and word or should I say...world of mouth marketing. The true chemistry of the formulas built behind social media applications is amazing for garnering marketing results.

Much of this I have learned while playing around with our new  Aprimo Marketing Studio product. I have read a lot of articles and speculation around whether or not social media is a fad. Check out this video....and cast your vote - I will be keeping tally..here to stay? or trend for the day??

Integrated marketing.  Sounds simple enough.   Google its definition.  Doesn't seem so simple now, does it?  The reality is that the concept and practice of integrated marketing is applied along many dimensions:

• Integrated marketing communications
• Integrated marketing planning
• Integrated marketing operations
• Integrated online marketing

Regardless, the crux of what we're talking about here is creating the right alignment and synergy between disparate communication channels, strategies, budgets, campaigns, brands, teams, partners, agencies, etc. -- to create a relevant and impactful impression with our target audience at the point of interaction.  The challenge of pulling this off in a half-way coordinated and streamlined manner is nothing other than a daunting task, even for the most proficient marketing organization.  

The promise of marketing automation software is to enable integrated marketing.  The problem with most marketing automation software is that it partitions off only a limited aspect of the end-to-end marketing process and, by design, automates a discrete step (or channel) in the integrated marketing lifecycle.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude where this leaves you - with yet another integrated marketing challenge - that being how to connect these myriad point solutions operating as silos of marketing automation.  I've seen this time and time again, and trust me, it creates even bigger problems!

If we hone in on just the category of online marketing or interactive marketing, I can almost guarantee you that your marketing organization is currently using a collection of non-integrated tools to manage your PPC advertising, social media, banner ads, lead management, email marketing, microsites, PURLs, web analytics, etc.  Ughh!  Good luck bringing harmony to your customer's experience with your brand, not to mention figuring out how to report on marketing effectiveness. 

Now, extrapolate this microcosm to the reality of how we actually market, which is to transparently blend our offline promotions with online call to actions (and vice versa), and this challenge to integrate all your marketing activities starts to feel like your every-day world, right?  You're certainly not alone.

Aprimo's philosphy is that marketing professionals should be free to focus on high value-add activities (like marketing!) by relying on a comprehensive, integrated marketing platform to connect all the dots for them.  Aprimo believes that marketers should be liberated from time consuming, manual tasks so they can focus on strategic, 'above the neck' matters.  And perhaps most importantly, Aprimo believes in empowering marketers to unleash the power of truly INTEGRATED marketing.





   

I can honestly say I had never even considered the term Marketing Operations prior to starting at Aprimo nearly four years ago. Now I’m not only entrenched in promoting this technology for marketing to help automate and manage marketing, I’m also knee-deep in managing Marketing Operations at Aprimo. I guess this is what I get for having a strong math and process background. It goes back to my days as financial manager for the Concert Committee and my fraternity in college. My engineering degree gave me a healthy appreciation for process. However, my creative side drove me into marketing so…well…here I am. 

I’m fortunate to play a role that feeds my creative side and my process/logical side. What I find interesting is how marketing operations seems to be the step child of marketing automation. I understand that the “execution” aspect of marketing is where the rubber meets the road and demand is created, however; I am amazed that marketers don’t fight the amount of detail and project management they have to deal with to get to the creative work. A good marketing operations application can simplify a lot of this. It takes some work, but the pay off can be great. From financial tracking, to managing creative workflow and our digital asset library, we’ve benefitted many times over. A couple of years ago, we became our own case study when we let our discipline relax and lost track of some big invoices. I got the assignment to get our financials back in control and put some process in place supported by our own product.   Now, I'm tracking ROI in marketing activities.

Stay tuned and I’ll give you some more details on working with marketing financial software. If you are having similar issues or are on your own marketing operations journey, I would love to hear from you.

Even before I was hired, almost four years ago, I knew Aprimo was special because of something someone said about them.  This person candidly admitted he didn't know very much about the marketing management technology company.  He knew only that they were a marketing software company with a good reputation.  He didn't know what type of software they represented - PPC Management, Marketing Planning Systems or a much larger marketing operation system.  Without researching them, he said about Aprimo, "They came through the devastation and demise of so many software companies and they are still in business.  That means they are doing something right."

When I came on board, I quickly learned their Core Values:

• Cultivation of customer loyalty and success
• Commitment to the highest standards of integrity and ethics
• Dedication to teamwork and the focused pursuit of excellence
• Creation of career passions and professional growth
• Respect for the individual and the importance of a balanced life
• Responsibility for service and philanthropy in our communities

Aprimo doesn't print these core values on their website to look pretty and be politically correct; they live them every day, every one of them.  I've heard many co-workers comment, after working here for a few weeks, how impressed they were initially with Aprimo's Core Values and how these Core Values are truly part of the everyday makeup of Aprimo.

I've just attended training for our new Aprimo Marketing Studio.  Once again Aprimo is doing something right.  They have thoughtfully put together a product to solve the needs of many marketers and it is wrapped neatly into a SaaS  (Software as a Solution) package.  Once again, Aprimo is ahead of the curve.  Once again, they are honest in and about their offerings.  We are not perfect; we are not all things to all people, but we hear our customers and we are working to meet their needs in the industry. 

So, where do I see Aprimo in five years?  I have absolutely no idea.  They always surprise me in the most positive ways.  I should not be surprised after all this time, but I am.   Whatever we are doing in five years, it will still be right.

Well...that is a popular question these days now that trade show season is starting again.  Trade show attendance is clearly down and event managers are quick to tell us "it's gotten rid of the tire kickers."  If someone is coming to a trade show today, they are really interested in what you have.  That's an interesting premise but not one you can answer at the show (where they would like you to renew for next year, by the way).  Marketing operation management is important for answering this question.  To truly track the Marketing ROI of an event, you'll need to track the results and the cost.  It seems so simple, but keeping an accurate accounting of both is a challenge.

A strong Marketing Operations Management component will track the cost of the activity in one place.  This aspect of Marketing Financial Management software should not be taken lightly.  The ability to show a view of financial status the way that marketing wants to track cost is the elegant benefit of MRM software.  The marketing software application will provide you a foundation for tracking the results of an event.  How many names did you collect?  How many move to the next stage in the marketing funnel (downloaded a white paper or attended a webinar)?  How many became an appointment?  How many did sales pursue as an opportunity?  How many closed as new deals?  Depending on your business, your metrics and expectations will be different, but these metrics need to be tracked to express your marketing ROI. 

I have a confession:  Back in my early days in marketing, I was doing a national tour for sales training with a large multi-national high tech company.  It was one of those "If this is Tuesday, it must be Raleigh" tours with a different city and the same presentation each day.  To say the least, it got a little old delivering the same presentation.  To stave off the boredom, we challenged each other to weave in some nonsense phrases in our presentations (purple aardvarks for example). 

What's my point, you may ask?  Marketers don't become marketers to do the same thing over and over again.  They join marketing to tap into a desire to be creative.  However, much of marketing is about doing the same or similar tasks very well.  Just like robotics in a manufacturing facility, marketing operations management software can address the repetitive side and enable the creative side for a marketer.  Automating the marketing workflow takes some of the marketing project management load off of the marketing team.  If you're not sitting here worrying about who has to review this item next and whether you have the most recent version of the creative, you have more time to be creative.

So, why should you look at marketing operations management software?  It will give you time to find your purple aardvarks!
 

Let me know if you have been in this situation before:
It's getting close to the end of Q3, your budget is getting thin, and yet you have to keep growing the funnel of qualified leads for your sales team.
So, what do you do?
You're one person, right?
Ah, the one-man (or woman) Marketing team......
You're labor, you're management, and you're everything in between!!!

OK, so do you try to get IT to add another call-to-action and landing page to your website?
IT is telling you it will be another week or two until they can fit you into their schedule. 

Do you make a deal with some of your media reps to "test" some online ads?
Good luck with that one!!

Start looking for some tools to help....there is a whole world out there, called Marketing Software, that can aid you in your quest to keep performing.
If you're on the Operations side of Marketing, meaning managing processes and budgets, there are tools just for marketing operations management that can aid you!  

Looking to grow or increase the effectiveness of your online marketing initiatives?
You name it, there is help for organic search, paid search, microsites, all available to help you manage your business, and manage it more effectively.