Reducing Complexity in Campaign Management by employing tool-supported Marketing Resource Management

Starting Situation

One may expect widespread approval when describing the objective of modern campaign management today as follows: The focus of marketing must be the individualized and consistent interaction with the customer via his/her preferred channels - self-evidently containing relevant messages at the respective best time. While this statement is not very surprising nowadays, it still shows that behind each of these adjectives, there is a potential source of errors for a customer-oriented campaign strategy.

This is because the personalized and interactive customer communication has long since become part of the customer's expectations. In order to meet these expectations - as well as the challenge of multi-channel distribution - CRM activities have become much more widespread and in-depth in recent years, both in large and in small marketing departments. By making greater use of different channels and differentiating segments, the number of activities will increase.

The number of processes and dependencies which grew exponentially as a result generally led to a huge increase of complexity and a lack of transparency. This applies in particular for established businesses with historically grown campaign structures. Here, b.telligent frequently finds that its customers have structures for planning and implementing campaigns which are highly individual to their organizations and have been developed in-house; these structures often lack effectiveness and efficiency.

Solution Strategy

Precisely this is the starting point of marketing resource management (MRM): all material marketing resources and process steps which are relevant for campaign management are centrally recorded, planned and coordinated. This makes the processes and their status transparent and can thus be optimized.

In particular in case of leading businesses which are the benchmark of their respective industry - or at least claim to be - the historically grown campaign management is often actually very different: here, it is not rare that 500 emails are exchanged in order to coordinate and communicate one single campaign, via the systems which were developed in-house referred to above (most of which are only based on MS Office Suite).

If one now takes into account the high number of organizational units, it quickly becomes clear that these "manual" models have usually reached their limits long ago. In order to be able to understand, analyze and reduce the entailed complexity, process support by tools is urgently required. In the specific example, b.telligent supports the implementation and customizing within the scope of the currently largest German marketing resource management project of a mail order company..

The objectives of this project are defined as follows:

• More efficient campaign management by replacing the "manual" models
• More individualized customer communication while at the same time reducing time/effort
• Handling complexity by means of process optimization and standardized data storage
• Process security by means of workflow support
• Improved collaboration within the team through easier campaign planning
• Alignment of marketing resources with the business objectives
• Transparency and predictability of budgets/costs and production processes

Approach

The solution used is a workflow-based tool with a distinct hierarchic object structure. Due to the long-standing expertise in analyzing and modelling campaign processes and analyzing requirements and target systems, b.telligent has previously supported the implementation of this very tool for various customers.

Project Course

• The substantive requirements on the MRM have been comprehensively described in a detailed process analysis and a detailed technical concept.
• The ongoing implementation project includes primarily the customization of the tool and the rollout including structured testing.
• Within 5 months, over 120 analysis workshops with 70 experts and stakeholders were held as part of the implementation.
• The final MRM rollout takes place in three stages, which include a total of 20+ work packages and which are conceptionally designed in close cooperation between the department and the consultants.
• Further long-term, consistent optimizations and expansions of the tool are planned.
   

Key Learnings

• A clear stage-by-stage approach with a strong focus on testing enables permanent tool adjustments and thus increases user acceptance.
• Maximum complexity reduction by means of cross-channel standards results in a clearly structured marketing calendar with an enormous added value for the department and management.
• Distinct change management entailing a "leap into the tool" as soon as possible and early live demos promote a fast and effective correction of errors and high tool ergonomics of the users.

Outlook

Even during the implementation phase, we received a large amount of positive feedback regarding the huge added value of tool-supported marketing resource management. Not least for this reason, we expect an increasing importance of this comprehensive topic. Not only for that reason, we also expect this extensive topic to continue to become increasingly important for many companies. Keeping up in this field will also be crucial for medium-sized businesses in the future. Because due to the complex market environment described above, a close alignment of the various campaign processes with the marketing resources of a business will become essential in order to lift further CRM potential.

The replacement of inefficient, manual or partly-automated processes in campaign planning must be joined by a transparent view on all campaign processes in order to be able to roll out the optimal campaign for each customer. 

Only the knowledge of the dependencies of these various CRM activities enables an actual success measurement of campaigns, adjusted for confounders, and an optimal use of resources in marketing. Accordingly, these insights are also important for each business in evaluating a tailored and future-proof campaign management system.

As provider-independent consultancy with long-standing expertise in customer intelligence, b.telligent thus supports businesses of all sizes and industries in selecting and implementing the CI tool optimally adjusted to their respective needs.