Central marketing teams are under increasing pressure to manage more and more activity. More campaigns across more marketing channels in more territories. While the amount of work in the marketing team has undoubtedly increased, the processes for managing the work hasn’t changed. A typical central marketer spends most of their time on manual operational marketing tasks. They are responding to marketing support requests, sending marketing materials and managing artwork creation. They aren’t spending enough of their time on the strategic marketing activities that grow the organisation.

 

Automating Operational Marketing Processes

Marketers should consider which marketing operations should be manual and which should be automated. Should requests for logos and social media graphics really be managed via countless emails? Is it really a good use of time to be managing the creation of local tweaks to approved artwork? Should central marketing really have to constantly push staff to share the social content they have laboured over? Automating routine marketing operations while maintaining ownership of strategic and centralised marketing processes could save time and accelerate growth.

 

Operational Marketing Automation Table

 

Empowering Local Marketers

David Packard, the co-founder of HP famously said ‘Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department’. Marketers who try and retain iron-clad control over local marketing execution are missing out. The most effective marketers Empower local marketers such as staff, distributors and franchisees to amplify the central message. Rather than trying to restrict and control marketing, they use MRM systems like Brand Unify to strike a more appropriate balance between central and local marketing activity. Marketing resource management systems streamline marketing operations allowing non-marketers to;

  • Create artwork online – Empower local teams to make structured changes to approved marketing materials. Everything from professional posters to social media graphics and sales proposals can be created without the need for marketers to intervene.
  • Find and share social content – Centralise all of your social content into a single feed. Local users can search or filter the content by their own search terms to find the most relevant content to like and share.
  • Shop for merchandise – Eliminate the productivity zapping emails and calls requesting merchandising or marketing support. Make merchandising requests, budgets and notifications as simple as ordering from Amazon.
  • Find brand assets – The online brand guidelines ensure only the latest approved logos, fonts, colours and documents are available to download or share. Integrations with dropbox, box or google drive make it simple to update content for everyone.
  • Learn about local marketing – Forums, internal how-to videos and downloadable guides offer a scalable blueprint for marketing operations

 

Win-win for Central and Local Teams

Local marketing execution is the key to fixing the marketing operations bottleneck faced by many central teams. Local marketing users such as franchises, BDM’s or fundraisers benefit from greater flexibility and speed to market. Central teams are able to spend more time on strategic marketing activities by reducing the time they spend on low value operational marketing tasks. To find out if a marketing resource management system from Brand Unify is relevant to your organisation, why not take the MRM suitability test. Answer 10 questions and receive your instant MRM suitability score out of 100.