It’s a kind of magic

Welcome to the downside of modern marketing, where comprehensive briefing and reporting are necessary if you are going to successfully measure ROI, but where managing the complexity of these processes can eat up so much of your time that you find yourself marketing by numbers rather than planning original creative campaigns.

What you really need is a magic wand that will miraculously take care of all the admin, procurement and reporting, letting you get on with the job of marketing. But while magic wands are thin on the ground, technology is increasingly striving to solve these problems.

This is one area where economies of scale can work against you. The bigger your company, the more likely you are to work in a siloed operation, with each department and region using different suppliers, assets and processes – and, yes, sometimes incompatible technologies.

For technology to provide the remedy, it must address not only the needs of the marketing department, but of other stakeholders across the business, as well as suppliers. It must enable you to retain complete control over your operation – too many companies find it difficult to disentangle themselves from poor suppliers, because the supplier owns the process and, in some cases, controls the assets.

Many of the country’s big-name brands and retailers, including M&S, Audi, Puma, Sainsbury’s, Boots and Heineken, have migrated their marketing workflow to a single technology platform – ITG’s Media Centre – which has been designed to meet the needs of the entire operation. With varying levels of authorisation available, every department, agency and supplier can access the same platform from anywhere, through any browser.

This has an immediate positive affect on brand identity. All parties, wherever they are in the world, have access to the same assets and images, all of which have been pre-checked for compliance.

Numerous other efficiencies arise. By briefing and approving through a dedicated marketing platform, you end your reliance on searching through masses of emails or falling back on often conflicting memories of phone conversations. Every job is given a unique ID number at the brief creation stage, and every comment, quote, amend and approval notification sits on the system for easy reference.

The right technology can manage and track campaigns for you; if you’re a retailer, it can hold information on all your stores, instantly letting you know exactly how much POS, and of what kind, you require to service your entire estate, minimising wastage and storage costs.

A smart system can also create dynamic templates for adverts and POS. A local manager can select a template for the system, tap in the size they require and enter information such as store name and contact details in customisable fields. This can save the central marketing department huge amounts of time in admin and procurement.

The technology offers meaningful reporting across all functions. This helps measure your current ROI and inform future campaigns, helping satisfy your key target of continually increasing ROI.

Best of all, from a time-saving perspective, you can view real-time reporting on all activity on your phone or tablet using a simple app. Give the app to the CEO, and you can save endless hours of putting together PowerPoint presentations and delivering reports. Hours that can be used to develop creative marketing strategies.

Technology can’t help you become a more creative marketer. But it can take away the pain of mundane, process-driven tasks and free up your time to let your creativity flourish. And in a world where marketing operations are becoming more complex and process-driven, that can seem, just a little bit, like the wave of a magic wand.

Ian Reid, Head of Marketing, Inspired Thinking Group

Tel: 0121 748 9950

Email: ianreid@inspiredthinkinggroup.com

Web: www.inspiredthinkinggroup.com

Twitter: @inspiredITG