Anyone working in a large marketing department knows daily operations can be exhausting and chaotic, to say the least.
The expectation is to work faster to produce greater volumes of content, across more channels, for new markets and products, all while retaining your creative edge. Factor in the regulatory requirements that must be adhered to and management of marketing output can become a messy affair.
“The marketing department today has to do more with less in a fragmented market, dealing with multiple freelancers and agencies, and brand reputation is the number one priority in the current environment,” says Tessa Court, CEO of Marketing Operations Software IntelligenceBank.
As the ‘marketing disaster’ headlines in today’s news suggest, companies who have not invested in technology to manage their operations often get caught out.
In fact, recent marketing campaigns for Samsung, Deliveroo, Toyota, Telstra, Optus, Dodo, STA Travel and PETA were all found to be misleading or include false claims.
With increased scrutiny and new regulations, marketers have had a firecracker put underneath them to change their ways.
The Banking Royal Commission in Australia and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe are two examples of the regulation vice tightening.
Because of these pressures, marketing operations software has emerged as a preferred solution for enterprise businesses. It seamlessly integrates digital asset management, brand management and MRM software to provide a system that streamlines marketing processes, protects your brand and ensures consistent marketing compliance. And most importantly, it has an audit trail.
Prior to marketing operations software, it was necessary to have an ad-hoc martech stack to manage day to day activity.
A combination of email, spreadsheets, project management tools, third-party file transfer services and shared drives were used to manage marketing output, yet these stand-alone technologies aren’t easily integrated and require a large amount of administrative input.
The result was that spreadsheets weren’t filled in, creative assets were not controlled nor centralised, deadlines were missed and approvals became stuck in a pile of emails.
Marketing operation software pools key solutions into one platform, through which businesses can enjoy multiple benefits.
The first is streamlining processes for creative production and marketing operations.
Enterprise Digital Asset Management (DAM) acts as a single source of truth to store and distribute all approved creative, making content easy to find and manage.
By pairing DAM with online briefs, automated workflows and approvals, important steps in the creative process aren’t missed, and deadlines and requirements are met. These features reduce marketing administration by a considerable amount.
Brand protection is also a key feature of marketing operations software.
Online brand portals allow you to clearly communicate your brand guidelines with external creative teams, sponsorship partners, or internally.
Where needed users can access approved brand assets, stored within the digital asset management system. Without proper processes, marketing departments have to deal with excessive administration, and uncertainty around brand and marketing compliance stifled creativity.
By removing these barriers your teams can be freed up to focus on producing great creative content.
While many mundane administration tasks can be automated using marketing operations software, it’s important to have a single place to plan, manage and execute your marketing activity.
Custom briefs, projects and tasks provide you with the tools for effective marketing project management.
Briefs allow you to collect all relevant information for creative production, campaigns or daily tasks so that work doesn’t get held up waiting for missing information. They also ensure that compliance requirements are considered from the beginning. By completing projects and tasks within the platform and viewing them in calendars or using kanban boards, there is transparency into who is working on what, when, and visibility of potential roadblocks.
As marketing operations software is accessible via an online portal and governed by user groups and permissions, it can be utilised by multiple teams in your business, agencies or third parties. This ensures that all activity occurs within the one platform, giving users a birds-eye view of how close work is to completion. Access across multiple teams increases communication and transparency between them, breaking down traditional silos. It also increases user adoption of your software.
Creative agencies can collaborate on work with online briefs, annotations and version control. Then, when work needs to be checked for regulatory requirements, legal departments can easily view and approve.
While the immediate benefits of marketing operations software include brand protection, management of digital assets, unshackled creativity and increased collaboration, its marketing compliance with a clear audit trail that will protect your business from the negative effects of a tango with regulators.
By moving to an integrated marketing system, it’s possible for marketing teams to effectively scale in an increasingly demanding industry, without sacrificing creativity or compliance.
