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!
 

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.
 

As I cruise along at 24,000 feet on my way to the Gartner CRM event I can’t help but appreciate the complexity of air travel.  Cram 130 people into a metal cylinder and fling them from Indianapolis to Phoenix.  Repeat thousands and thousands of time around the world every day. How do they make this a successful and repeatable process?  One key is automation.

For example, autopilot allows the intelligence of the airplane systems to automatically perform operations so the pilot doesn't have to.  Autopilot lets systems and software take care of the ‘normal’ activities a pilot would go through to fly along at cruising altitude.  I’m sure autopilot was complicated to program and test but the result of that effort is hugely beneficial.  

Many companies have no autopilot equivalent for any facet of marketing.  “Marketing needs to be high touch” or “Outbound Marketing is too complex to automate” they might say.    My guess is that if we found a way to automate the intricacies of keeping a plane aloft at 30,000 feet we can probably automate some of the processes marketing is doing manually today.

One significant autopilot capability for Marketing is triggered dialogs.  Triggered dialogs give marketing the ability to pre-define a series to steps to take for a given person that matches a certain criteria.  Here are some real-world customer examples of utilizing triggered dialogs:

• Automatically respond to a website whitepaper request with the selected content.
• Automatically follow-up with a prospect two-weeks after a sales call.
• Automatically send reminders to attendees of an upcoming webinar.
• Automatically route leads against lead score thresholds to the appropriate team

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?

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!

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

• 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

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.