Good companies talk about generating efficiencies, but great companies talk about increasing productivity, according to HBR. This is why for many teams, the missing piece in the martech stack puzzle is a marketing operations platform — also known as a marketing resource management platform — to manage the process of actually ‘making marketing’ – in effect, a marketing productivity platform that functions as a central system of record and output for the marketing team.
So what should marketers look for in a marketing operations platform that puts productivity at the heart of the martech stack?
1. Capacity to plan
Having the right marketing strategy starts with having a strong planning capability, such as a marketing calendar, that can be used to manage work in traditional enterprise marketing teams as well as more agile approaches to marketing.
It’s about getting 100% visibility through the marketing fog. The reason so many marketing calendars fall short is that they fail to cut across the swim lanes of the business.
As the senior marketer in the team, you may know your strategic objectives like the back of your hand: deliver more marketing-qualified leads; influence more sales-qualified leads; boost sales; improve your net promoter score; increase brand recognition; improve the customer experience.
But most organisations are poor at communicating these objectives. The further away from the lead team you go, the less likely are those objectives to be known.
With a platform such as Simple in place, marketing teams can forward-plan their campaign activity, ensuring alignment to future objectives, business targets and resource capacity.
Also, marketing calendars can be configured easily to improve visibility over completed and planned work, by team, by role, by campaign type, by segment, by product and by channel.
On the fly, you’ll be able to switch between the views you need at the time – by day, week, and month – and filter categories of work by product and medium.
2. End-to-end management of marketing work
A single source of truth for managing marketing work will save your team hours tracking down the latest changes to work in progress.
Ensure your marketing operations platform includes the ability to request and brief marketing work, an easy-to-use campaign management system, mark-up and collaboration tools and tiered approval systems that can be tailored to suit your company and help you work productively with agencies and other third parties.
A tool like Simple is built for marketing teams, allowing them to work as a team across everything — from planning, through production to analysis of people and program performance.
3. Asset management
Whether you have a large internal creative department or third-party agencies, an asset management system that can show you all the work you have in-market and provide instant access to all your pre-approved assets is a must for working effectively and getting work to market quickly.
What’s needed is a platform like Simple, which provides a central place for teams to manage their marketing assets across all media channels.
For example, in Simple, every asset is assigned relevant information such as keywords and usage rights, so you can quickly find the material you need and have the confidence to use it.
Marketers use our dynamic asset management system to view all marketing materials across channels and throughout the customer journey, so they can ensure they’re creating beautiful, consistent customer experiences.
Additionally, through our open API, assets can be mapped to intelligent workflows and passed off to common cloud-based channel execution tools such as marketing automation, CRM and CMS systems.
4. Streamlined processes in the cloud
The right solution should enable you to have all your budgets, plans, playbooks and workflows in one place. When you’re ready to hit the go button, so are all your teams and partners.
For example, in Simple, if other teams need access, just give them a login! They can track all the work they’ve requested with complete visibility — and approve and comment within the one tool.
5. Marketing team data
Marketing process data and analytics will enable you to measure and improve your brand’s performance across teams, processes, assets and operational management, providing insights that will help you achieve the speed and flexibility today’s enterprise marketing teams require.
By executing your marketing processes through a modern marketing operations platform like Simple, you can capture a vast amount of data covering what your people are doing at a granular level as they deliver your results.
6. Marketing risk management and compliance
A marketing operations platform with a risk and compliance tool that provides an auditable trail enables marketers to reduce risk, automate approval processes and increase speed to market, as well as satisfy the auditors later.
A marketing operations platform like Simple enables marketing teams to tick every compliance box, so that they can deliver on-brief, on-brand, and on-time. Teams can automate approvals and review, comment and edit work from anywhere.
Ready to Simplify your marketing with a marketing operations platform?
Simple empowers enterprise marketing teams with one tool to plan, review and optimise marketing campaigns.
Book a Demo to see how Simple works, or contact us to learn more.
