What is Marketing Resource Management?

Over the past few years many marketing departments have been involved in selecting and deploying marketing automation solutions, building CDP’s and implementing other components like email marketing, activity based marketing and many others. These applications have been seen as important to increase marketing’s knowledge of the customer base and provide tools to analyse, segment, extract data and to manage increasing personalised communications to the customer. Although these solutions are essential in improving the effectiveness of marketing communications (right customer, right message, right channel, right time) they do not help marketing departments manage the marketing process or manage marketing assets and resources.

According to analyst firm Forrester, Marketing Resource Management (MRM) solutions [or Marketing Operations Management (MOM) solutions] cover a broad range of capabilities including the ability to plan, budget, coordinate execution and measure the impact of marketing efforts. In our experience organisations achieve substantial benefits from improvements in efficiency and effectiveness primarily because they have replaced primarily manual, uncoordinated and unstructured marketing processes based on office productivity tools rather than specialised marketing applications. MRM will help organisations overcome the growing number of challenges that they face including:-

• The need to respond more quickly and effectively to increasing competition whilst minimising the costs associated with the marketing function
•  The need to become more customer focused (with smaller and smaller segments and always on programs) whilst increasing the speed, flexibility and reliability of executing marketing activities
• The need to manage increasingly complex processes and activities but raise the visibility, accountability and return on marketing investments.

MRM looks to address all these challenges by supporting and automating the key processes and capabilities that enhance an organisations ability to manage and optimise both internal and external marketing resources.

Companies typically invest between 15% and 35% of total revenue in marketing but have little or no visibility of the return that this investment has delivered. Senior marketing professionals are therefore under increasing pressure to be accountable by demonstrating that marketing delivers a positive ROI. A strong marketing execution stack combined with greater operational efficiency delivered through Marketing Resource Management is the solution to this challenge and the growing challenges of increased complexity of marketing caused by a richer and more diverse communications mix and channels, the increasing requirement to comply to legal and best practise guidelines and the need to show reduction in costs all delivered with fewer resources.