Safran boosts productivity 9% with Optimizely CMP for campaign planning

A world leader in resilient PNT (Positioning, Navigation, Timing), Safran (formerly known as Orolia) is the trusted partner for industry leaders and governments around the world for critical infrastructure in national defense. It heavily focuses on well-documented processes to deliver on its promise of superlative quality.

The leadership wanted to bring the same process-driven reliability and performance to their marketing org. With a global blend of 8 marketers, 10+ office sites, and 4 product lines, collaboration and communication were paramount. However, with a number of point solutions and a mar-tech ecosystem that wasn’t strategically integrated, the team faced a number of challenges as it related to visibility and collaboration.

“The team as a whole had hit a roadblock. We were using multiple tools; each solved a specific problem and had limited interaction with another. We resorted to an excel file to track campaigns at one place and soon enough, it had 8 tabs! It took us up to 4 hours of meetings every week to align everyone,” said Patrick Bark, Senior Marketing Coordinator at Safran. “We were at a critical point – but we needed a better way”

Knowing that the organization would need to streamline the way it planned, created, distributed, governed and measured all of its content, the team set out to implement a cutting-edge solution.

At the end of 2020, the Safran team selected Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to become a shared, centralized place for marketing planning and collaboration.

Their objectives? Unify planning to provide visibility on a global scale, accelerate how teams create content and execute campaigns, and ensure governance and compliance.

1. Centralized Planning & Global Visibility

Unified planning allowed teams to guide organizational action from one place with initiative-specific and intuitive workflows. From there, the global calendar was automatically populated, providing visibility to other business units, and enabling everyone to own their part in executing a plan.

“It’s easier to get people on the same page when everything’s organized. If someone were to ask me what we are doing for customer experience, I’d simply filter the results by the tags we are using. This kind of sort-by-variable functionality is great for analyzing results from different lenses and getting visibility into multiple product lines,” said Bark.

2. Streamlined Execution & Seamless Collaboration

The Content Marketing Platform's Campaigns module provided shared workspaces to not only collaborate on the work but also to create custom templates for common workflows to save time on future projects. It also made it easier than ever before to connect with professionals outside the niche one works in.

“We standardized workflows across content formats. For example, we created a template for tradeshows that allowed us to scale effectively. From budget planning to shipping – we manage it all in the CMP“, said Bark. “This has allowed us to identify and fill gaps in our approval processes.”

3. Improved Governance and Verifiable Productivity

Using Optimizely's CMP freed up time to focus on priority tasks and helped automate routine actions. Various content optimization tools allowed subject matter experts to collaborate in real-time and capture all feedback and action items at one place.

"We were spending a lot of time preparing for meetings to align everyone with what's happening. Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform eliminated the need to do this. As an organization that is process-heavy, our quality team greatly appreciated the ability to track asset history and the ease of ensuring compliance for each version."

Patrick Bark, Sr. Marketing Coordinator at Safran

Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform introduced a way to measure impact of marketing initiatives at Safran while keeping everyone aligned. Standardizing campaigns boosted productivity and made activations scalable.

What’s next?

“We’ve now launched a brand new website so our next steps include working on automating and integrating the CMP into our web environment. SEO and marketing analytics are the other side of the improvement coin for us in 2022. We are working closely with Optimizely on UX improvements and feature requests to make it the one-stop-shop for all our marketing needs,” said Bark.

The full business impact of the CMP will be realized in due time at Safran; meanwhile, feedback from champions like Patrick keeps the product ever-evolving to adapt to the needs of the modern marketer.