Like every aspect of modern businesses, marketing is increasingly being examined and assessed under the harsh light of ROI. As marketing budgets grow and organisations place greater emphasis on digital marketing, accountability is also on the rise. Smart marketing executives have realised that if the digital environment can help them clearly demonstrate the contribution they are making to business success, everyone stands to gain. The challenge is to make production processes highly transparent, which is key for creating fresh opportunities to rationalise partner processes, increase efficiency and improve ROI.
While a variety of state-of-the-art analytics tools have substantially enhanced visibility to revenue and effectiveness for digital campaigns, partner processes have traditionally remained opaque. With globalisation the problem has been further aggravated. Maintaining brand consistency, quality and salience across geographies – with no let-up in turnaround times – is becoming a herculean task for those sitting in corporate headquarters.
Central marketing teams rely on their local agency partners to effectively reach a wider audience, however it can be challenging to get a clear picture of exactly who does what. These external partners are crucial for incorporating regional nuances (languages, culture, sensitivities and regulations) while remaining true to the brand guidelines, product definitions and campaign playbooks. It is even more critical to have reliable partners in instances where global activations and launches must happen simultaneously, rolled out across hundreds of disparate regions on mobiles, the web, print, and outdoors, with precision.
Rationalising agency fees
External suppliers can be more difficult to keep track of than their in-house counterparts in terms of exactly where your marketing spend is going. However, rather than being an obstruction, this should instead present a wake-up call to organisations to build closer relationships with their agency suppliers to gain that greater insight into who does what and why.
But is it possible to create this kind of inter-company transparency? Some organisations are already achieving this using the concept of Digital Decoupling.
Go beyond digital decoupling
Digital decoupling separates the one-time creative function from the repetitive production function to achieve consistent and on-time roll outs at reduced costs. Many organisations globally have woken up to this reality and are in various stages of maturity in adopting this model.
But digital decoupling is just the start. Full transparency needs to go one step beyond this: it needs a futuristic analytics-driven platform that demystifies external processes to create a clear and reciprocal agency/business relationship.
Imagine using a scalable cloud-hosted platform on a Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) model to commission, track, analyse and manage partner processes. This central “hub” point can become an essential resource for agencies and businesses alike, enabling better content sharing across regions, improved collaboration. It also offers an enhanced overview of media that has already been translated and adapted. At the same time as providing agencies with crucial access to central resources, it can also allow businesses to keep an eye on turn-around times, as well as monitor the security of their assets in one, centralised location.
Using analytics to streamline production costs
Once you have a cloud-based hub, the possibilities are endless. Incorporating analytics into the system becomes a logical next step. Automated tracking mechanisms and shared calendar tools can ensure that all activity is clearly logged, while any bottlenecks can be automatically detected. Meanwhile, rather than having to manually monitor campaign ROI, an analytics system can dramatically reduce the man-hours required for this kind of work, freeing your team up to work on ideation and the strategic media buying decisions.
Drive transparency and efficiency to improve ROI
CMOs today are under considerable pressure to show ROI. While they have access to a variety of tools to improve outcomes, they urgently need to bring an equal emphasis to managing campaign production costs. The only way is to adopt a managed service model powered by a digital platform that drives transparency and uses analytics to improve efficiency and ROI across the entire company and partner ecosystem.
By Sudipto Mazumder, associate vice president for platforms, products & solutions at Wipro Limited
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