The 5 Business Processes of Marketing Resource Management (MRM)
Occasionally, marketing campaigns and programs seem to go off track – running in directions no one could have predicted. If you have ever managed marketing campaigns, or at least tried, then you understand the challenges that come with it. Fortunately, there is a solution. Marketing Resource Management (MRM) practices will help you tame your programs and campaigns by organizing your entire marketing operation.
The MRM Methodology
The use of MRM practices within an organization requires a thorough understanding of certain methodical concepts. MRM, at its core, is divided into 5 business processes / methodical concepts:
– Planning and Budgeting
– Business Process Management
– Approval
– Reusability
– Measurement
Each one of these processes plays a vital role in the success of an organization’s marketing operation. But together, these 5 components compose a holistic system covering all the aspects of your marketing operations.
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1. Planning and Budgeting:
At the forefront of a successful MRM implementation is the planning stage. The planning of an organization’s marketing strategy ensures all 3 MRM components; people, process, and technology align. Although budgeting also plays an important role, the planning stage revolves highly around scheduling and resource optimization.
Planning, and having an overview of all your ongoing marketing activities, increase overall campaign visibility and ensures uniform resource distribution. These resources are spread across campaigns in order of their complexity, priority, and allocated budget. These three key drivers will allow for more efficient marketing budgets across your different lines of business.
Additionally, when it comes to mature MRM implementations, historical data such as past budgets, resource efficiency, and campaign ROI are taken into consideration.
2. Business Process Management:
It’s time to minimize your manual mistakes. The rate and reoccurrence of human error is entirely manageable thanks to Adobe Experience Manager’s integration with Adobe Campaign. With AEM’s integration, you’ll have access to all the Adobe Campaign tools, assets, and pre-built templates necessary to compose personalized email messages without discrepancies. User data is, essentially, pre-populated to facilitate form submission, so that you and your creative team won’t actually need to learn how to use Adobe Campaign to develop highly personalized emails.
Thanks to the AEM and AC integration, businesses have reported a substantial drop in errors from 3-10 per week (approx. 16 hours of weekly reconciliation and rebuild time) to only 1 error every two weeks (less than 1.5 weekly hours to recuperate and rectify issues).[2] After all, error prevention is the key to expediting effective marketing materials to consumers.
3. Approval:
Approvals, another important part of a process management system, ensure proper accountability throughout the entire project. Large-scale MRM systems will often require several stages of approval cycles. So whether it be creative, legal, or financial, most marketing collateral will go through multiple approval stages before moving into production.
Predefined management procedures are the driver behind the definition of workflow steps. However, approval processes tend to vary across organizations and industries. Therefore, they usually are the reason for many cost and time efficiency gains.
As an organization evolves and adopts a mature MRM approval procedure, a change management system can play a significant role in achieving even higher process efficiency gains. Through tracking changes, executives can maintain visibility. This encourages transparency and typically yields greater results with both your marketing campaign returns.
4. Reusability:
With a median MRM value, reusability is one of the best techniques for improving business processes. In today’s digital marketing world, marketing objectives gear towards personalizing and tailoring down communications. Consequently, this creates multiple versions and variations for each piece of collateral. When managing the high volume of creatives, along with their approval processes, it is important to have a digital asset management system integrated within the MRM solution.
While we often associate reusability with assets, it also significantly improves the efficiency of various other marketing components like campaign briefs and financial information.
5. Measurement:
A successful MRM framework depends on performance measurement methodologies to track the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities. These performance efficiency gains are tracked across resource, process, and budgetary levels. Measuring resource capabilities goes from tracking the role of a particular resource to managing entire marketing teams.
To properly track these marketing activities, the measurement concept requires the use of metrics and KPIs. These marketing metrics and KPIs are defined by corporate objectives and vary depending on the industry. These represent campaign-specific metrics with ROI, response rates, the number of impressions, and offer conversion rates – amongst others.
After completing this stage, compare the results to the estimates you initially identified in the planning phase. You can then feed those results back into the planning stages of future campaigns. These iterations will help with resource optimization and ensure proper budget allocation.
