Why your marketing team needs a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) solution.

• Is managing your marketing initiatives an exercise in cat herding?
• Do you frequently have moments where you’re left wondering how to get things under control?!

HCL’s Unica Plan can help you tackle the task.

Managing a marketing initiative can be a daunting responsibility and being accountable for the P&L can be downright scary. Not having visibility into and control over those two things is a waking nightmare.
Current marketing initiatives have gone beyond the traditional vision of mass media such as radio, TV and newspaper through the spray-and-pray world of Email and into the NEW “mass media,” including Text, Social and Mobile. In this new environment, where the Customer rules – you have to ride that hyper-personalization bronco. We have gone from the need to send the right message to the right person at the right time to have the right message personalized to that right customer at every possible touchpoint. ALL of the time in Real-Time!

What does MRM mean to a marketing manager?

In this era, Hyper personalization means more channels, more devices, more audiences, more creatives, more agencies and more WORK! Your processes have to be defined, documented, enforced and refined over time to be efficient. Your budgets have to be tracked to line items and invoices. 

Luckily Marketing Resource Management (MRM) is here to help marketers and businesses manage marketing processes, optimize spend and resource utilization and manage creative content assets. MRM helps the team to work collaboratively and have greater transparency of tasks, dynamically track and understand resourcing, capability, and team workload. An MRM system provides planning, budgeting, and tracking capabilities. It also provides the tools to manage the creation of digital brand assets, workflows, and approval processes.

For instance, running a campaign is like an entire project. It might look like a 4 step process where you Conceptualize, Construct, Execute and then analyze the running campaign. But it is more complex than you think. Specifically, for large organizations, there is a separate chain of email approvals that follow along with the documents being shared. There are n numbers of teams involved and an uncountable number of documents shared. It is nearly impossible to track the status of such a project.

What is the Importance of MRM to the Marketing Manager?

• Planning – To keep pace with today’s customer and the explosion of touchpoints, the Marketing Manager needs to have a lean, agile, repeatable process. An MRM solution can help define and maintain templates in support (or enforcement) of that process.
• Budgeting – With everyone trying to grab their piece of the action in this rodeo, the CMO is the judge and he is going to want to keep a close eye on the budget. You have to have a solution that lets you see where the money is allocated and be able to adjust it between winning or losing initiatives.
• Project Management – The Marketing Manager must have a solution that enables well defined, repeatable yet flexible workflows. The tasks, owners, status of each, as well as the project as a whole, must be easily visible and adjustable.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) – Most MRM solutions have or integrate with a DAM, but MRM is much more than just a DAM. To the Marketing Manager, one of the most important aspects related to the creation of collateral, email HTML, or digital assets is the ability to have it routed efficiently for approvals. The Project Management Workflow must have a solid mechanism for this.
• Integration with the Marketing Campaign Management (MCM)- Having an MRM solution directly integrated with the MCM solution provides very significant benefits through the reduction of lag times in communications regarding audience definitions and counts approvals.

Why HCL’s Unica Plan is the MRM Solution for You?

Unica Plan is a tightly integrated component of the Unica marketing suite fulfilling all of the requirements above. Plan has been vetted by hundreds of companies and thousands of users.  It has been proven to not only be a comprehensive and flexible MRM solution but also one of the most scalable.  Being integrated with Unica Campaign (our Marketing Campaign Management solution) combines all of the data necessary to enable true Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) reporting. Additionally, through the integration with Campaign, the need to email documents and spreadsheets around with the audience definitions and counts is eliminated, removing hours to days of lag time from the overall process.

Investment in Plan since the acquisition by HCL has resulted in significant changes in Version 12.0 and very impressive improvements in the interface and performance coming out in July 2020 with Version 12.1.

For more information on how HCL’s Unica Plan can fill your MRM needs, you can watch my related webinars on Unica Live

Or, visit our webpage at Unica Plan.