Marketing is an ever-evolving domain and the demand for operational efficiency is higher than ever before. Marketing operations teams are the ones handling day-to-day delivery of marketing activities, including campaign management, traffic generation, campaign optimization, reporting and so on. As demand for faster, more targeted marketing campaigns rises, MarOps becomes more and more complex. Inefficiencies, bottlenecks in processes, delayed insights, longer feedback cycles, manual optimizations, and inaccurate analysis all impact the team’s ability to deliver timely, effective marketing operations.
Business automation and marketing automation software is the next big trend that’s disrupting marketing. Business automation software, such as that from Aproove, is the answer to MarOps teams’ trials and tribulations, helping them accelerate delivery of marketing operations, reduce bottlenecks, and improve operational efficiency.
When any process or sequence of tasks slows down the workflow in some way, it’s called a bottleneck. These bottlenecks can happen for a variety of reasons, such as being stuck with manual processes, for example. They might also manifest in the inability to coordinate between teams, or otherwise knowing where to focus resources for the most impact.
Examples of classic bottlenecks in marketing operations include the following.
Approval Delays: The process of getting approval from multiple stakeholders adds to the delay in executing campaigns. This delay already causes missed opportunities during the campaign development stage, and can severely impact campaign timelines.
Data Management Headaches: Managing large amounts of data coming from numerous sources is a headache in itself. The inconsistent way data is entered – even in multiple spreadsheets – poor integrations between systems, and manual tools for data processing can all dramatically affect your ability to create actionable dashboards.
Inefficient coordination of tasks: The time spent coordinating tasks across different teams and departments can be wasteful. More importantly, when there’s no process around these tasks, they can easily get missed, leading to delays in the actual execution of the campaign. Something that business process automation software could help with.
Resource allocation: Whether time, budget, personnel, or something else, proper allocation is essential to ensure proper resourcing, neither too little nor too much. Otherwise, bottlenecks can arise when busy teams struggle to finish tasks, and broom-closet resources sit idle.
Silos: Team members, departments, or external partners who are not communicating effectively can create misunderstandings. If people are not in sync, you could end up doing things twice, or not doing them at all.
Business process automation software (or workflow automation software) helps in reducing the bottlenecks in marketing operations by:
1) Improving the communication
2) Automating repetitive tasks
3) Providing a real-time view of marketing operations
4) Streamlining workflows
5) Improving the collaboration
The strongest benefit of business automation software, what it’s largely being used for, and the primary area where marketing teams can expect to see the most immediate impact is in automating processes – such as data entry, reporting, email marketing campaigns, and social media posts. Automating these activities using marketing automation software frees up scarce time to spend on more strategic activities such as campaign planning and creative development.
Marketing materials must often go through a process of approvals before they can be published. This is another bottleneck process that can be sped up by business process automation software. For example, all stakeholders can review, comment on, and approve materials from a single place within the platform, and automated reminders and notifications ensure approvals aren’t missed, keeping the timeline of a campaign on track.
For instance, marketing teams can create predefined approval workflows using workflow automation software to route materials to reviewers and approvers. Each step of the approval process can be tracked in real time, both speeding up the approval process and providing visibility into and accountability for it.
Data is the key factor in a successful marketing strategy. It is important for each marketeer to get the right information in order to attempt to foresee the next steps. However, it is not easy to manage data, especially large amounts of it coming from multiple sources that may be not coherent with one another. Business or marketing automation software may help in this matter.
Business process automation software can collect this data from multiple sources – including your CRM system, social media platforms, and web analytics tools – and put it all in one dashboard. You can also use business process automation software to clean and normalize data so it’s of a consistent quality. That means you can be certain that your decision-making is based on the most up-to-date and accurate information, and that you avoid errors and delays due to the inaccuracies of manual data-gathering.
Accurate and timely allocation of resources is essential to marketing operations’ performance, and workflow automation software provides insights into how resources are being utilized. With automated processes, marketing teams can carefully monitor which set of people is working on which set of tasks at any given time, and enhance resource utilization so that it maximises overall productivity.
For instance, project management tools can auto-assign work in accordance with team members’ availability, skill sets and workload, ensuring nobody is overworked, and that tasks are completed on time. Real-time information about resource usage can help managers make decisions on where to allocate those resources.
The example above highlights that clear communication and collaboration is the key to running marketing operations smoothly. It is possible for all marketing staff to leverage the marketing automation software for communication and collaboration. The software solution is to offer a centralized place for all team members to work together, share information and track the progress.
For instance, if a collaboration tool can be integrated with email, chat and even project management systems, team members will be able to share files, provide status reports and discuss project details together in real-time, all in one place. This in turn would minimize chances of miscommunication.
Real-time access and reporting are essential for making effective marketing operations decisions. Marketing automation software can automatically create reports and dashboards with greater granularity for insight into campaign performance, resource utilization and other campaign metrics.
These insights help marketing teams identify bottlenecks early, and act to rectify them before they worsen. If your latest campaign is underperforming, for example, business automation software will give you data on engagement rates or conversion rates in real-time, allowing you to make changes and improve the campaign’s performance.
Below are two examples of use cases for business automation software when it has been used for marketing operations, and where it has been a success story:
Case Study 1: A Global Retail Brand
A global retail brand was struggling to manage marketing campaigns across multiple regions. Approval times of campaign materials were very slow, and the team couldn’t reliably collect campaign data from across different markets. Through the adoption of business automation software, the brand sped up its approval processes, automated data management, and improved regional collaboration, reducing campaign launch time by 30 per cent, and significantly improving overall campaign performance.
Case Study 2: A Non-Profit Organization
An organization that runs multiple projects with staff in different countries had problems deciding how to allocate its resources, as well as communicating information across its teams. To boost productivity, it introduced marketing automation software, which helped the organization’s managers to allocate resources more efficiently, track tasks effectively and improve communication - reducing project delays by 40 per cent, its staff told us. More importantly, the organization’s fundraising campaigns were far more likely to succeed.
In these fast-paced marketing environments, minimizing the bottlenecks is the most important weapon to remain competitive. As pointed out, marketing operations teams face multiple challenges on a daily basis, and business automation software will become an essential tool for the digital transformation of companies. Those who invest in digital tools will not only be able to manage the complexity of modern marketing, but also remove bottlenecks on the way to a successful marketing campaign.