Ops Bridges the Gap Between Marketing Strategy and Customer Experience, says BrandMaker Pulse 2022

    Ops Bridges the Gap Between Marketing Strategy and Customer Experience, says BrandMaker Pulse 2022

    The current marketing industry environment is not the most comfortable to deal with. Various industry experts have delved deep into the current marketing strategies and whether they will be adequate for survival or growth in the coming months. The rapid digitalization of all enterprises has massively impacted the strategies that will work.

    One recent report by BrandMaker, a Marketing Operations and Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software solutions provider, has shared the findings of its third BrandMaker Pulse that was conducted in September to capture the top marketing priorities of 2022.  Pulse, many will be aware, is a global qualitative study into the key issues affecting global marketing organizations. The BrandMaker Pulse study has delivered some interesting key points. Some are given below:

    • Successful marketing is all about value-rich and competitively differentiating customer experiences. In the survey, 80% of marketing leaders see the need for personalized services that are customized for individual preferences and budgets. Of these, three fourths believe that a customer focused strategy can be only crafted using detailed analytical insights. And 63% realize that the key to the best possible customization comes from knowing your customer better than the competition.

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    • The imperative to create the best marketing performance metrics in 2022 is world class and agile project management skills and critical thinking. This is the view of 705 of the respondents, while technology skills came a close second.  67% agreed that knowledge and skills in automation would be important to optimize marketing efforts. Understanding customer experience takes the top slot, and 67% of respondents said it was a crucial factor in creating the most effective customer strategies.
    • Data analysis was a significant factor too, and 63% of marketers feel that availability of skills to analyze data enhances the ability to draw meaningful insights, and this would be a prized skill moving forward.
    • With automation taking over almost all business processes, automated marketing ops ensures that the skilled teams have time and scope for providing the best services and offerings for customers – delivering much desired collaboration, and creativity. The advantage of automated marketing ops is that it frees up skilled resources to focus on high-level planning rather than spreadsheets. Automating the processes would give workers an extra 5-0 hours a week, feel 43% of marketers and 40% feel they would save 10-15 hours a week; 10% would save 15-20 hours a week. This time could be used for focusing on better understanding the customer/market environment felt 70% of the respondents. 67% of them felt it would give enough time to collaborate with team members in other geographies and 53% felt they could then develop more creative campaigns.

    Said Mirko Holzer, CEO of BrandMaker, opining on the impact these findings will have on marketing strategy budgets going forward, “Marketers require greater agility than ever before to keep pace with sky-high customer expectations and day-to-day business demands. They must be able to reallocate budget where and when needed in real time—not next month or next quarter. The right budget management capabilities can help ease this burden and give marketers the agility they need to maximize ROI. This starts with a marketing ops solution that can automate budget processes, improve collaboration, and enable visibility into all marketing programs—across teams, the business, and partners. This is critical for supercharging performance and ensuring that marketing organizations are quick and nimble enough to thrive in today’s digital economy.”

    Here are some critical marketing ops capabilities required to maximize marketing ROI:

    • Real-time insights: Real-time access to data on spending and performance is critical to make adjustment quickly and correctly. The agility gained by leveraging data and analytics to strategically execute changes in real time can be a significant competitive advantage.
    • Transparency across all marketing budgets: Visibility is essential for timely understanding of potential budget risks, under-performing programs, and where budget should be shifted to drive greater success. Strong transparency can come from effective integration with other business systems like ERP.
    • Automated budget processes: Automation goes hand-in-glove with real-time data, enabling marketers to greatly increase their operational agility.

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    “Faced with global disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic, marketers must be able to respond and adapt at a moment’s notice. This need for greater agility puts marketing operations at the forefront because it is the key to speed, performance, collaboration, and customer focus. Our Pulse shows that marketing ops is the layer between marketing strategy and customer experience—and it holds the biggest untapped potential for business improvement by allowing alignment of strategy and new levels of marketing performance and accountability,” he added.

    But how do organizations up skill their existing teams to meet the new market needs?

    “One sure-fire way to improve marketing operations is by bringing on board specialized team members who have the technical and analytical skills needed to take a systematic and measured approach to managing and optimizing operations. What do these people look like? “Well, compared to traditional marketing team members, individuals working in marketing ops need to be more logical and less emotional, and more likely to want a structured management style. Even at a CMO-level, marketers need to be performance-driven with analytical and digital technology skills to thrive in today’s market. Another great way to improve marketing operations is by implementing a single, integrated platform to optimize and automate the end-to-end marketing value chain. Such a platform can bring much-needed collaboration, visibility, and agility to marketing ops, as well as the ability to manage, measure, and continually improve marketing return-on-investment,” Holzer signs off.

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