Marketing Project Management

Jeff Baker wrote a recent post, “Autopilot for Marketing," while flying from Indianapolis to Phoenix. He wrote it in the air, and I find myself doing the same thing right now. The wonders of social media applications.

We live in such an all-access society. It doesn’t matter that I have no access to the internet (although some airlines will soon offer wireless!) or my Blackberry (gasp!) and am forced to maintain the same uncomfortable upright position for three hours. As long as I have my laptop, I can let my creative juices flow. In a moment of honesty, I will admit that I wouldn’t be writing a post right now if my only tools were a pen and paper. When I’m back online in a few hours, I can submit this post for review and it’ll soon be live on the Aprimo blog.

Automation in general is everywhere. We use automation to schedule bill payments online. Many use it in email marketing. You don’t honestly think that seconds before you received that e-newsletter from [fill in the blank company], someone in their office clicked a big, red button labeled “send,” do you? We use automation for workflow and project management. Even your favorite pizza joint automates pick-up and delivery orders online. I think the biggest benefit of this is pre-paying with a credit card. I never have cash when the pizza guy knocks, but I can fill in my tip on the receipt and… voila.

As I fly toward San Diego for the DMA09, I must be somewhere over Arizona. When I’m back on the ground and this post goes live, I’d love to hear from you. What automated process in your personal life can't you live without? Is it your washing machine (wash, rinse, spin)? Is it online bill payment?

What about in your work? What process has your team automated that gives you daily benefits? What processes do you wish you could automate? Could Aprimo provide relief?

The weather is changing...the chill is in the air.  The scenery is changing...autumn leaves are falling.  Marketing is changing...social media is rockin'.  Are you blogging?  Are you tweeting?  Is your Facebook updated?  Does social media fit comfortably into your everyday vocabulary? 

I've spoken with lots of people recently who say they aren't into social media yet and don't foresee that in their company's future.  And that's okay.  Aprimo has marketing automation software to manage whatever it is you are doing in marketing....financial management, project management, campaign management, digital assets, lead management. 

How are your current processes working?  Do you feel like you are working for the processes or are the processes working for you?  What is slowing you down or creating bottle necks?  Let us know where your weaknesses are.  We can help you.  Give us a call at 317 803-4300 or visit us at www.aprimo.com.  We are happy to help whether you tweet or not.

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.

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.

It's football season!  I love football and have my favorite teams from high school, and college, up to pro.  We've had many great years and some not so great.  The teams work hard to achieve their winning seasons.

I spoke with a gentleman recently who asked where we are headquartered and when he learned we're in Indianapolis he asked if I was a Colts fan.  Of course I am!  He spoke about the team effort it takes to win a Super Bowl and likened it to marketing efforts.  I wondered where he was headed with the comparison.  He said the team must communicate well, they must be physically fit, have great play books, great offense, great defense, great special teams, not to mention the coaches, etc.  

His marketing team needs to first be physically fit and get rid of the baggage that is weighing them down.  He wants to switch from spreadsheets and sticky notes to marketing automation software.  His team needs visibility into their marketing efforts to communicate well - be it their financial management, project management/workflow, online marketing, reviews and approvals, etc.  They need a great play book and have everyone on the same page...a marketing events calendar.  It takes campaigns to drive prospects to them... offense.  It takes lead management to handle the leads and convert them to sales... defense back to offense.  It takes great special teams...creative marketing, database marketers, etc. and posting numbers on the scoreboard all comes down to ROI in marketing.

I had not thought of marketing as a football team, but they do need to be a well-oiled machine to get the job done and win the sales that their company is looking to capture.  If you need some coaching on how your team can increase your top line revenue, let us know.  Aprimo software manages all aspects of marketing.  Let us know how we can help.  We would love to huddle! Oh!....and go Colts!

A microsite is a mini-Web site that interactive marketers use to enhance the company's primary Web site. Often, a microsite has its own domain or subdomain.

Microsites are a great tool that allows other marketing professionals to obtain targeted leads for specific marketing campaigns.

Despite its small stature, a good rule of thumb to follow when developing a microsite is to develop and execute the microsite based on a comprehensive plan and execution strategy.

Post campaign analysis is a critical component of of any online property. Your execution strategy must contain a way to measure campaign results. Tools like Google Analytics or more robust offerings from Omniture need to be a part of the comprehensive plan.

Other planning tools that can go a long way in aligning your Web team with the marketing area requesting a microsite, is a site map. Visio is often used as a microsite tool to build a site map, but many other free Visio alternatives are available.

As with any marketing project, don't rush the microsite, as the targeted content and approach a microsite offers, can be a great way to boost ROI in marketing.



 

This week I had an interesting conversation with a lady I first met on Live Chat.  She told me she was looking to learn more about how our marketing software can help her company with their online marketing efforts.  She liked our Live Chat feature yet early in the chat she was a bit hesitant.  I asked if she would prefer I call her and immediately received her telephone number on the screen.  I called and we discussed her needs. 

In the discussion, she said that while she is the Project Manager leading the effort to find a marketing automation solution, she was not comfortable typing through a conversation.  She also mentioned she was not one to "text" either.  :)  After some discussion around her needs with offers, microsites and landing pages, I was able to direct her to the District Manager in her area to assist her further. 

If you are not comfortable typing through a conversation on Live Chat, you can always ask us to call you.  You may also call our company at 317 803-4300, email us at info@aprimo.com, or fill out a form online at aprimo.com.  Just let us know how to reach you so we can assist you with your marketing management needs. 

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.

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!

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?

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.

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!