Leveraging Martech to Streamline Marketing Operations and Workflows

Leveraging Martech to Streamline Marketing Operations and Workflows

“As we plunge further into this period of upheaval, organizations with the right marketing ops technology and processes will be armed with the type of agility needed to help their businesses weather the storm and come out stronger on the other end,” says Mirko Holzer, Founder and CEO, Brandmaker, in an exclusive interview with TalkCMO.


TCMO Bureau: What strategies can CMOs adopt to address the inefficiencies in marketing operations and workflows?

Mirko Holzer: Marketing excellence is too often held back by outdated manual processes, lack of inter-team and inter-group visibility, and different versions of the ‘truth’ – be it budget, metrics, status, or ownership. The impact of these shortcomings has been heightened during the past year. Operational excellence and business agility across all business functions, including marketing, is no longer a ‘nice to have’; it is business-critical.

Before enterprise marketing became as complex and dynamic as it is now, it was easier for CMOs to focus on the core tasks of doing marketing, like creating campaigns. Back in the day, “operations” was an overlooked and under-appreciated part of marketing tactics assigned to young marketers as “proving ground” and an opportunity to learn the business from the ground up. It was not high on the CMO’s agenda.

Now, in an era of modern marketing, it is time to think bigger about streamlining marketing operations, rather than thinking narrowly about operations as just the tedium of checking Google AdWords or running a marketing automation program. The marketing ops function has grown up quickly. No longer the backwater of the department, marketing ops is taking a central role in the intelligence, development, and management of the marketing function.

Today, marketing ops is everything that makes marketing happen. It is central, and it is strategic. It is the difference between marketing organizations functioning smoothly and responding to marketplace challenges and opportunities and those that are not.

Marketing ops will play a crucial role in the day-to-day functioning of marketing departments because it enables measuring, analyzing, and reporting on marketing activities so improvements can be made to increase return on investment.

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As the pace of change in global markets continues to accelerate, becoming an agile and efficient modern marketing organization is a top priority. Recent research shows that marketing ops is considered the most effective way to achieve this.

As we plunge further into this period of upheaval, organizations with the right marketing ops technology and processes will be armed with the type of agility needed to help their businesses weather the storm and come out stronger on the other end.

TCMO Bureau: What steps can brands take to improve their martech stacks for gaining visibility into their customer’s behavior?

Mirko Holzer: In a recent independent study, almost all [99%] of marketing executives indicated they want to see their marketing operations improve, especially the martech stack. The most significant area of improvement cited was better integration of martech stacks to gain visibility and control across stand-alone systems [51%]. This was followed by campaign management to easily deploy and adjust campaigns in response to market feedback and changes [46%] and better manage how brand assets are being deployed in each geography for each product line and campaign [28%].

By providing a single, integrated platform to manage, simplify, optimize, and automate the entire marketing value chain, advanced marketing ops and marketing resource management SaaS solutions can address these needs. The platform can bring much-needed collaboration, visibility, and agility to marketing ops and the ability to manage, measure, and continually improve marketing return-on-investment.

TCMO Bureau: How can brands optimize the impact of their marketing budget on their campaigns?

Mirko Holzer: It comes as no surprise that for many international corporations, 2020 was a challenging year. This year, management is looking for marketing to up their game and generate new demand and continually improve ROI.

The reality is that there is severe downward pressure on budgets. Every cost is being questioned. At the end of 2020, only 5% of marketers expected an increase in budget for the new year. The demand for marketing’s responsiveness, driving high value through an excellent customer experience, has not waned.

A marketing ops solution brings all financial information together, providing a single source of the truth. It enables significantly more effective financial management by providing, above all, real-time visibility into budgets – global, regional, and local – showing planned, allocated, and consumed status.

A large retailer recently graduated from thousands of spreadsheets to a centralized system coordinating budgets, campaigns, and resource allocation in 25 countries, yielding an additional 1 billion Euros per year. The business case was so compelling that the implementation was one of the few projects not curtailed during the past year.

TCMO Bureau: How can brands seamlessly deploy and adjust their marketing campaigns in response to the growing market feedback and changes?

Mirko Holzer: One of the biggest changes to marketing organizations is the shift to be more agile, critical to responding quickly to changing market conditions. Unforeseen changes and worldwide disruptions require marketers to respond at a moment’s notice. Marketing teams must plan quickly and effectively and know when to shift course to address new realities on the ground—they need a plan and agility to change weekly, daily, and even hourly.

The study found that most [94%] of marketing executives reported that inefficient marketing ops and workflows are barriers to effectively responding to changing market environments.

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To address these barriers, global CMOs are pivoting towards Agile streamlining marketing operations, providing the insights that:

  • Inform HQ about what’s happening in each country or business unit and communicate messages from HQ to the regions
  • Coordinate the creation, customization, and distribution of content around the world
  • Optimize the way each unit or member of the enterprise team is contributing to the whole, so the organizational muscle is exhausted or under-utilized
  • Monitor how the budget is flowing around the world, report how quickly it is being used and how well it is being converted into useful outputs, and redistribute funds to yield better results
  • Connect marketing with other functional systems such as sales and finance

It’s never been a more critical time for marketing leaders to optimize their marketing ops, freeing marketers from low-value, labor-intensive work and enabling them to embrace agility to deliver on the customer experience.

Mirko Holzer, Founder and CEO of Brandmaker, is acknowledged as one of the most successful software managers in Germany. He is the strategic lead and driving force behind BrandMaker. Since founding Brandmaker in 2008, the company has become a leading provider of marketing process optimization, a fact validated in reports from leading industry analysts including Forrester and Gartner.