Unless you have access to a magic wand, genie or unlimited budget, you’ll know that managing multiple marketing projects is hard. There are more channels, segments and techniques to choose from, tighter timelines and greater compliance risks to avoid.
How Marketing Operations Platform brings order to Chaos. Source: IntelligenceBank
That’s where a Marketing Operations Platform (MOP) comes to the rescue. A MOP takes you out of spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains into a scalable system that ensures projects are delivered on time, on budget, on brand, and prevents you from getting fined or sued.
IntelligenceBank CEO (and former marketer) Tessa Court puts it perfectly, “Marketing Operations Platforms put order to the chaos by giving marketing departments a system to manage how things get done versus managing hundreds of projects haphazardly. Just like sales teams need a CRM system to manage their world, modern marketing departments need a Marketing Operations Platform to manage content marketing processes”.
Read on this article to learn:
- Key features of a robust solution
- Use cases to consider
- How you can bring order to marketing chaos
Content Summary
Key Features Of A Robust Marketing Operations Platform
Use Cases For A Marketing Operations Platform
How You Can Bring Order To The Marketing Chaos
Key Features Of A Robust Marketing Operations Platform
The beauty of a Marketing Operations Platform is that all tools you need to manage creative development process, content, planning, approvals, distribution and reporting are available within a single application. Here are some of the integrated features your team will love using:
Marketing Projects Management: Create custom forms to capture project requirements – from creative briefs, campaigns, budgets, tasks, campaign performance criteria and forecasts, and even contracts with suppliers. You can also use marketing projects as an interface to the rest of the organization who need to submit a marketing request.
Dashboard Reporting and Analytics: Instantly view the status of projects, designer workloads, expired artwork, marketing risk profiles, spend vs. budget and performance metrics. Our usage analytics enables you to do a deep dive on how users are interacting with creative content.
Brand Compliance: Automate risk scoring on projects to determine your overall marketing risk and to elevate only specific issues to legal and compliance.
Digital Asset Management: Centralize both work in progress as well as final artwork files, link files to project and seamlessly share them internally, externally and embed them into third party marketing applications such as Web CMS, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation and other systems. Magic links resize the files within the URL so you can store files once, and re-use them multiple times across your marketing stack.
Workflow Approvals and Alert Notifications: Sign off creative briefs, work in progress creative files, final artwork, the downloading of logos and other brand assets, and anything else that needs a process. Receive notifications based on custom triggers, such as when a project is overdue or approvals are pending.
Marketing Calendar and Planners: From marketing projects, easily view all key dates across various date ranges and link through to creative. When campaigns get pushed out, instantly see where overlaps will occur and how to maximize media exposure. With this features, you will always see what’s “in planning” and “in market” all at once.
Use Cases For A Marketing Operations Platform
While Marketing Operations is a very broad term, following are some of the most common techniques our clients use to manage the processes around developing and distributing creative content.
Front Door to Marketing
A massive challenge for any marketing department in a large organization is interfacing with the rest of the company. Logo requests, how to request sponsorship, how to initiate a project and other simple requests can often take up 30% of the day.
By creating a ‘front door to marketing’ interface, you can ‘herd the cats’ and manage requests in a methodical manner, track request types and turn-around times.
Creative Project Management
Once a brief is accepted, now it’s time to assign designers, allocate job numbers, time spent, due dates and actual budgets – so it’s all reportable.
When a project gets started, you can link it to a dedicated work in progress folder to centralize in progress creative, invoices and media plans, and final artwork.
Contracts and Date Sensitive Asset Tracking
Your Digital Asset Management platform needs to be more than just a place to centralize content. Rather, you need to actively manage your content based on talent usage renewal dates.
When managing creative content with talent usage rights associated, you can add review dates and creative custom reports to ensure you don’t get fined. For marketing contracts, you can create a custom register as to renewal dates and important clauses of which you need to be mindful.
“Compliance, along with innovation and creativity is an important part of our marketing processes. Ensuring all creative is on-brand, relevant and complies with both legal and clinical requirements is of the utmost importance, and IntelligenceBank DAM is making this process easy for us.” – Fiona LeBrocq, General Manager, Marketing Customer & Portfolio, Medibank
Creative Approvals, Content Risk Scoring and Compliance
With brand reputation consistently raking as the #1 corporate risk, and inaccurate claims in advertising causing large fines and headaches, having a robust system for creative approvals and compliance has never been more important.
It’s vital to score content based on risk profiles, and elevate projects for approval based on conditions.
For example, a new healthcare product with benefit claims, price points and a media spend of over $1mil will automatically be routed to brand, legal and compliance for sign off. Whereas a social media post promoting a team event can be recorded but approval is not required.
Creative Briefs
Every great piece of content starts out as a creative brief. With creative brief forms, you can streamline the briefing process and ensure all elements are properly captured, including propositions, target, performance objectives and budgets.
“The system educates stakeholders on brand/logo style and allows us to quickly brief and supply material to designers. The platform oers a quick snapshot of assets due to expire and pending approvals. We love the way we can link images to signed consent forms.” – Carly Gilchrist, Australian Red Cross Blood Services
Planning and Scheduling
The average marketing department has more than 300 projects ‘on the go’ at any time. From smaller social media posts to global TV campaigns, the need for a bird’s eye view over all projects in progress and in market has never been more important.
Drag and drop events to reschedule and link to creative and budget allocations.
Resource Allocation and Tasks Management
With an effective dashboard reporting tool, you can instantly see what people are working on, who’s overloaded and which designers or project managers have capacity. You can also set up budget and performance widgets to see how expenditure and campaigns are tracking.
Instantly see which tasks and projects have come in, what has been completed and what’s overdue within a single interface.
How You Can Bring Order To The Marketing Chaos
The first step in transforming your marketing operations is to take stock of the number of projects you have underway, how much visibility you have on their progress, the number of team members and stakeholders involved, and the range of processes employed. This crystallizes the need for a Marketing Operations Platform and the key features urgently required.
The next step is to consider how you would benefit from transforming the following:
- The way creative briefs are used (or if they are used at all)
- How projects are set up and managed
- The way marketing interacts with the rest of the organisation
- How content approval is coordinated and tracked
- The way contracts and content with talent usage renewal dates are managed
- Your helicopter view of all projects and the associated expenditure
If you’re drowning in a sea of spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains – talk to us about how a Marketing Operations Platform can come to the rescue.
Learn how we can help you deliver projects on time, on budget, on brand, while minimizing compliance risks.
Source: The IntelligenceBank Team
