How marketing teams can benefit from marketing technology

As consumers, we are increasingly connected, informed and in search of personalised experiences. Just consider some of the key trends identified by Ofcom’s 2015 Communications Market Report:

  • 72% of people claimed to watch short-form video
  • Two-thirds of adults have a smartphone
  • For the first time, the smartphone has overtaken the laptop as the device internet users say is the most important for connecting to the internet that spent browsing on desktops and laptops
  • 54% of UK households have a connected tablet device
  • 56% of UK TV homes had a TV connected to the internet
  • 64% of TV homes have a digital video recorder

How do you ensure that your marketing function is keeping pace with your customer’s needs?

Brands engage and create experiences through visual content:

  • Billboards
  • Point of sale
  • Print
  • Websites
  • Videos
  • Mobile apps, and more

This multiplicity of channels and screens means that marketers have to produce, design and deploy assets in a wide range of formats, such as videos, animations, audio, pictures, which feed cross-channel marketing.

This makes digital asset management tricky.

Multi-device and multi-channel mean that managing briefings, content versions, approvals, license rights, and ensuring assets are suitable for viewing on any screen takes most of the marketers’ time.

Many businesses are simply becoming overwhelmed by their digital work.

How can marketing technology help your team free up time to work more strategically, creatively, and collaboratively to drive business forward?

There is an increasing number of vendors and solutions available, with stated and real benefits to help your marketing practice, which make selecting the right marketing technology a daunting task.

To stay ahead of competition the first measures considered often focus on cutting cost and being faster to market.

This can be achieved with marketing technologies, to help manage and adjust your time and budget based on marketing activities, sales and business needs, and in turn support your creative and brand credentials, which is what makes you stand out in the eyes of your customers.

To really reap the benefits, your marketing technology solution must:

  • Allow relevance, consistency and control throughout the marketing process, at all milestones and for all stakeholders
  • Support the many ways marketers engage with their customers
  • Free marketer time to work more strategically, creatively, and collaboratively to drive business forward

Which solution is right for you?

To identify which marketing technology solution is right you need to start with detailing out the processes you have – informal and formal, regularly adhered to or ad-hoc.

As you go through the different steps to develop your product content strategy (what content to publish, to whom, where, when, how and why) and the steps to create, deploy and measure campaigns (that is to ensure content has reach and impact it was intended to have), the following elements will transpire:

  • Tasks
  • Stakeholders
  • Decisions
  • Comments

These will guide you towards specific workflows management automation tools, marketing operations support solutions for managing the back office and marketing experiences support for more specialised technologies affecting customers across their lifecycle.

Should you be already using a DAM or asset procurement system, integration with your existing solutions will be another important element to consider and help narrow down the list of suitable tools.

Starting from your existing work practices will help identify which marketing technology solution will help you maximise spend and efficiency, through relevance, consistency and control.

How to build an end-to-end marketing technology platform for your needs

These days the simplistic sales funnel has been replaced with pictures of complex fragmented customer journeys and life-cycles.

Moving to the next level of marketing operation and marketing experience support – thus building an end-to-end marketing technology platform – requires a different approach.

Start with your customer touch-points:

  1. This will inform the type of asset and how they are created, personalised, deployed and reused across channels.
  2. This in turn will provide a map of the experiences, through location, demographics, language, time of day, consumer interest, engagement history, and more.
  3. Having identified your requirements to help you deliver end-to-end experiences, modules can be added including data analytics, multi-channel marketing, CRM, ecommerce engines, tag management etc.
  4. Cloud marketing and SaaS models will allow you to build a platform for your needs, as these evolve, and with your agencies and 3rd party partners minimising the risk of investment and technical integration.

At DWC we have seen clients gain measurable improvements in their digital asset management following a review of their current needs and implementing a new marketing technology platform. One client for example has seen:

  • 50% reduction in time for BAU artwork costs.
  • 25% saving in campaign management time through automation and elimination of waste.
  • 25% – 40% saving on repro costs per campaign (around £50?£100 per campaign).
  • Considerable savings through data analysis of campaigns and consolidation.
  • Three day (30%) saving on approving a new piece of marketing material.
  • 50% on average saving for re?approvals of marketing collateral.
  • From working with many spreadsheets to online automation, POS set up reduced from months to hours
  • BAU time reduced by 30%. Speed to market reduced by 24 hours on 5 day turnaround. dbm 2015 awards: Gold in the ‘Innovation in Insight Driven Direct Mail Marketing’ category
  • Up to 35% reduction of marketing spend

Check list

Whether following our methodology or not, any solution must:

  • Ensure relevance, consistency and control throughout the marketing process, across all milestones and all stakeholders
  • Free marketer time to work more strategically, creatively, and collaboratively to drive business forward
  • Support the many ways marketers engage with their customers

Digital Works and marketing technology

At Digital Works we have been working in the marketing technology space for some time; looking at things from both sides of the fence; helping vendors as well as brands looking to improve marketing processes within their organisation.

Start a conversation

Do you have a question relating to marketing technology? Perhaps you are looking to invest in new technology, or are a martech organisation looking to take your business to the next level? Please feel free to get in touch with us for a chat to see if we can help.

For more information contact Elise Korolev on +44 7786 114304 or by clicking here

 

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