Marketing Resource Management: From Nice-to-Have to Necessity

Marketing has changed a lot of late. The digital transformation has led to the need to manage multiple marketing campaigns and thousands of assets. Marketing teams need to streamline their process and work in ways that support their brand, and your team is no exception. Marketing automation is becoming more and more important as a way to free up time. It used to be that marketing resource management (MRM) was a new shiny toy that was nice to have.

Now, however, it has become a necessity. Content managers and directors care about tracking content activity across different channels and need the tools to do so.

Furthermore, they need these tools to be in one centralized location so that they are always able to access them. This is especially useful if they are working in a location other than the office.

The Growth of Marketing Resource Management

A study by Fact.MR showed that the market is likely to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10% through 2028.

This growth has sparked a variety of solutions and MRM systems that can help your marketing team deploy MRM in a way that best supports your specific use cases.

So, how should you go about implementing a marketing resource management solution?

What is Marketing Resource Management?

​Marketing resource management is a systematic method of managing all of your marketing resources. It is an application of enterprise resource planning (ERP) to marketing.

This means that an MRM solution handles your digital assets, your budget, your schedules, your forecasts, and your data. Everything that your marketing team needs to do their jobs is kept in one single place.

The advantage of this is that it saves time by keeping everything in a single ecosystem, to which everyone has access as is appropriate for their role. You can centralize everything from your marketing content to the metrics you use for strategic planning in one platform, such as Welcome.

How Does Marketing Resource Management Support Modern Multi-Channel Marketing?

It used to be, many years ago, that your marketing assets consisted of a few files, a logo, and boxes of flyers.

Now, however, you need to handle your digital marketing in a professional way that brings together all of the channels you use.

MRM provides a marketing platform that includes everything marketing departments need.

So, your MRM solution should include things like:

1. Digital asset management so you can reuse prior marketing materials. This can help save a lot of time. For example, DAM might include your logo, your stock photos, prior blog posts.
2. Your editorial calendar so everything gets posted when it should be. As much of this should be automated as possible. Social media posts should be scheduled to go out at times that analysis shows are most effective.
3. Analysis tools to manage and handle your forecasts and budgets, as well as to support personalized marketing, customer service, and ongoing campaigns.
4. Digital tools to help you produce and deliver marketing collateral quickly and easily. Many marketers spend as much time organizing marketing materials as actually making them.
5. Workflow tools to support approval processes and sign-off. Done right, these solutions can pass a piece of content through the process smoothly and with minimal human input.

Your mileage may vary on exactly what you need, but the point is to have everything in one system. This can also make it easier to leverage new media and new platforms. This includes podcasts and the increased utility of video.

With an integrated platform, you can add a new channel easily and quickly.

How Marketing Resource Management Improves the Customer Experience

​One primary goal of marketing is to provide a great customer experience. To this end, you have to coordinate with sales and customer service.

MRM helps by improving your ability to reach out to customers on social media. It produces content that goes out on time and gives you more time to handle personalized marketing. MRM can also automate some aspects of personalized marketing. Whether it’s as simple as making sure the customer’s name is inserted into mailings, or as complicated as ensuring messages go out on the right platform, whether it’s email, SMS, or LinkedIn.

It also ensures that you have all of the metrics you need to do said personalized marketing, especially for customer retention. Across all industries, individualized messages and offers are becoming more and more effective, eclipsing mass content.

You can work your customer lifecycle into the MRM system. This is whether you are selling small items frequently or big-ticket products a customer may only need every few years.

Retention becomes even more important for professional services and SaaS providers who primarily sell subscriptions. For you, it’s important to keep marketing to your existing customers, educating them about new features, and reminding them why they need your product.

How Marketing Resource Management Improves Your Team’s Ability to Collaborate

With everyone having access to the platform, information can easily be passed between team members. Meanwhile, appropriate role-based permissions allow you to control who gets access to what. Thus, provide you with better ways to protect your assets from data breaches and loss.

Each individual employee can easily see their part of the workflow plus any master calendars they need access to. Typically, an MRM system includes collaboration and communication tools as well as sign-off tools, so you can ask quick questions right within the system.

You can also provide appropriate access to other stakeholders such as accounting, the C-suite, sales, etc. In fact, an MRM system can also significantly improve collaboration and strategic planning between marketing and sales.

It’s often hard to get and keep marketing and sales talking to each other. So using collaboration tools can help break down the barriers and allow the two departments to work together.

How Marketing Resource Management Streamlines Workflow

​One of the biggest issues for modern marketing programs is streamlining workflow. There are multiple campaigns happening at once and marketing efforts are balkanized across various social media and content platforms. It’s easy for your team (or even individuals) to become scattered, not focusing and not knowing what.

A proper MRM system specifically supports workflow optimization. It also streamlines the martech stack in general by bringing everything together into a single dashboard.

Many marketers say the number one bottleneck is the content and asset creation process, which includes requesting and reviewing/approving work. The MRM system allows assets to flow through this process.

So, for example, the content director may send a request for a podcast episode to the content manager. They then assign the script to a writer, with a deadline.

The writer (whether in-house or outsourced) turns in the script. This is then approved and automatically passed on to the podcast director, who can then contact the narrator, schedule recording, and pass the raw files automatically to production. It goes straight out to the podcast after its finalization and approval.

The system helps by automatically passing the content to the right roles as soon as it’s signed off on. There is no chance of content getting past without approval. What’s more, the people responsible for approval will always get the request and the content in a timely manner.

Essentially, this eliminates many human-caused bottlenecks by reducing human error and saving time.

It also streamlines workflow by automating your planning process as much as possible. This reduces the number of meetings and the amount of wasted time, freeing marketers to produce content and do their work.

How Marketing Resource Management Improves Reporting and Analysis

Finally, bringing everything into one dashboard also improves your ability to generate reports, analyze data, and observe real-time feedback on the success (or not) of various marketing activities and initiatives.

​Faster feedback allows you to pull back from dead ends before you have wasted a ton of resources on them, and to put those resources instead into efforts that are showing signs of paying off.

You can make the analysis available to various roles both inside and outside marketing. So, for example, you no longer need to send quarterly reports to the CFO for budget purposes. Instead, the CFO has access to the dashboard and the system sends them regular reports automatically.

There’s no need to copy data (which can lead to errors). And even if a report is somehow delayed, access to the dashboard allows you to demonstrate the ROI of your efforts and thus get improved respect from the C-suite.

You can set the system to provide the analyses and data you need and run reports at any time to find out if, say, a Facebook advertising campaign is providing the ROI you expected. You can then cross-reference with sales to better track conversions.

Let Welcome Help You

A good system will give you data down to levels that support personalized marketing.

In other words, MRM solutions are now essential for all marketing teams. You simply can’t continue to use manual methods which can result in untidy workflows, slow approvals, and not getting the analysis you need, when you need it.

Welcome is a comprehensive marketing software platform that you can try right now. It includes MRM features that help you provide better customer service, streamline your workflow, and improve your reporting and analysis.

To see everything in action, sign up for complimentary access!