Lorna Loney (pictured below) looks at what brand marketers need to do to ensure they are operating in the most effective way possible against a backdrop of tightening industry regulation.
Whether you’re a global brand or a large financial institution, if you are conducting any form of marketing or advertising, the ability to standardise your operations and activity should be high on your agenda.
As brands have widened the net through which they communicate with customers, many have found it harder to have a clear and objective view of every precise detail of a campaign. With consumers more likely to scrutinise marketing collateral in greater detail than they were five years ago, often taking to social media to voice any dissatisfaction, brands need to evaluate their internal marketing and assess whether or not they are operating in the most effective and compliant way possible.
Joining up campaign materials, particularly in large organisations which typically have widely dispersed sales and marketing teams, can often prove complicated. But with strict regulations governing how organisations are allowed to market products and services, having the right processes in place to address these challenges has never been more important.
Marketers who have the right systems in place to tackle this increasingly level of activity can dramatically improve efficiency and streamline their teams in such a way as to not only improve the effectiveness of their campaign development, execution and delivery, but also mitigate the risk of something being communicated to the market that is factually inaccurate or misleading.
Marketing Resource Management (MRM) is critical to realising this. In simple terms, MRM is the software infrastructure which supports marketing operations management. Marketing Operations is the term given to the alignment of people, process and technology across a department or organisation with the primary purpose of supporting internal and external marketing activities, in addition to improving marketing effectiveness.
Marketing compliance – the cost of error
The cost of non-compliance for organisations can be significant, irrespective of their size. It can damage performance targets and prohibit or delay crucial investments being made. In some cases this damage may only result in some bad press for a few weeks but in more severe cases, where complaints go viral, the cost to the business may not just be financial. It could, if handled incorrectly, have a lasting negative impact which is difficult to shake.
Establishing effective marketing operations can not only help to successfully minimise errors and risks, it also helps each team fully understand the function and role everyone plays in the creation and execution of these campaigns.
This approach enables teams to gain greater clarity on all the different aspects of the campaign which need to be appropriately executed, so that the customer is not left feeling confused or misled. While the ability to operate in a compliant manner across all your marketing activity is one of the core benefits of investing in MRM solutions, not everything can simply be fixed by technology. Somethings require a seismic shift in the way marketing departments operate.
Investment in technology, which unite various silos together in order to simplify the flow of information throughout the entire organisation is critical, but it’s only part of the story. While technology can help enhance the operational functionality of a department, there needs to be an overwhelming willingness from those involved to want to change in the first place.
MRM solutions enable businesses to operate in a compliant manner, but administration errors do still happen. Therefore, if organisations don’t invest in training or internal workflow systems which encourage better communication and an integrated approach, the benefits of these systems will not be fully realised.
In the past, engaging customers across multiple channels, optimising program execution and turning data into actionable insights, while controlling costs, seemed like an impossible task. But marketers today are becoming increasingly more aware of the need to invest in systems which can improve their marketing operations and minimise the risk of distributing materials to market that could open them up to scrutiny, additional work and heavy fines. That said, for this to have a profound impact, businesses need to ensure they have end-to-end visibility and reporting across all processes, from campaign planning and execution to paying the last invoice.
Lorna Loney is pre-sales director at Teradata UKI.