As marketing becomes more and more complex, so too does its management. While spreadsheets and email chains may be sufficient when the business is in its early stages, at some point, growing organizations need to find a way to manage their marketing efforts.
This is where marketing resource management software comes in. MRM has become an essential asset for leading businesses, and with prices better than ever, it’s more than possible for small to medium-sized businesses to get their hands on the game-changing software.
Not sure whether MRM software is right for your business? We’ve put together a list of some of the many advantages that it can provide, which might just be enough to convince your organization that now’s the right time to finally invest.
Get Live Insights Into Costs
As anyone who’s worked on a marketing campaign will know, it’s all too easy for spending to go beyond what the budget originally planned for. One of the primary causes of overspending is the fact that they often only come to light after the campaign is complete.
Marketing Resource Management software allows for live, up-to-date insights into marketing-related activities, allowing your team to catch any spending issues before they have a chance to become budget black holes.
Full Visibility
You can organize an entire marketing campaign via email, but doing so runs multiple risks. It’s impossible for everyone in the department to have a full picture of what’s happening when key details only exist in a couple of team members’ inboxes.
Good marketing resource management software centralizes everything related to your marketing campaigns into one platform. That means that all stakeholders can get immediate access to the information they need, without having to ask someone first. This is useful at all times, but becomes especially valuable when someone takes a leave of absence or leaves the company, at which point MRM software ensures that nothing falls through the cracks.
Speed Up Approvals
Time is of the essence when launching marketing campaigns. With teams under pressure to deliver, the last thing they want to do is spend time chasing up approvals. With marketing resource management software, brands can set up approval processes so that they’re always sent to the right people, and can even set up automatic approvals if precise parameters have been met.
In an era when a significant percentage of marketing campaigns go live late because of delays, using MRM software to get things moving as quickly as possible is one of the easiest ways to avoid the unnecessary delays that impact budget and employee morale.
Automate Routine Admin Tasks
Marketing teams work best when they have the mental time and capacity to think creatively and put together campaigns that’ll make a real impact. In other words, when they have the space to do what they were hired to do.
Yet many marketing professionals find that they don’t get to spend as much time doing those tasks as they would like, because they’re having to spend their working hours taking care of admin duties. With AI-enhanced marketing resource management software, businesses can remove a significant chunk of their marketing team’s admin duties, without having to worry about compromising quality. Plus, aside from allowing the marketing team to work better, automating routine admin tasks also reduces the risk of burnout — and that means happier employees, improved employee retention rate, and ultimately better outcomes.
Straightforward Task Assignment
One of the often overlooked contributors to poor marketing campaigns is assigning tasks to employees at random. All too often, managers give a team member a task even though they’re already snowed under with other tasks. In some cases, their skills weren’t the right ones for the job anyway.
It’s much easier to build impactful marketing campaigns when everyone has a manageable workload and when they’re working on skills that they’re well-suited for. With marketing resource management software, managers can assign roles based on work capacity and skills, which is just as good for the employee as it is for the outcome of the campaign. This can also reduce the delays that can occur when team members simply don’t know what tasks they — or others — are responsible for completing.
Enhanced Collaboration
A strong sense of collaboration can have a hugely positive impact on an organization’s marketing efforts. All too often, collaboration is stifled because it takes place in the shadows — for example, in an email thread in which a potentially important player is not involved. With MRM software, all teams have access to up-to-date files. This makes it much easier for people to make notes and give feedback, and have confidence that it’ll be seen by all the right people. This can also help to reduce the risk of duplicated or unnecessary work (such as an employee making changes to an earlier draft), which can impact productivity and, again, harm staff morale.
Brand Consistency
All businesses strive for brand consistency, yet not all of them achieve it. The reason for facing issues is nearly always accidental, such as when one team member uses outdated assets or when campaign steps are rushed due to deadlines. With MRM software, brands can have confidence that their standards will always be fully met because they’ll be embedded into the platform.
It’s Scalable
MRM software makes marketing efforts easier, at any scale. As businesses grow, MRM ensures that their marketing efforts grow with them. It’s much easier to add a new market, bring a new employee up to speed, and generally expand your marketing operations when you have a platform that is designed to simplify complexity.
In other words, it’s a useful asset for businesses to have at any stage of their growth. In fact, it can be worthwhile integrating MRM into a business’s operations as early as possible, since that’ll begin the production of historical data that can be invaluable when putting together marketing campaigns. The more data you have, the more accurate it becomes — and that can make a big difference when it comes to planning and forecasting.
