Is a Marketing Asset Management Solution Right for Your Business?

Prompted by growing demands from the corner office, marketers in all kinds of companies are seeking innovative ways to improve marketing productivity.  Today, a growing number of companies are turning to marketing asset management solutions to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing function.

A comprehensive marketing asset management solution combines technology tools, manufacturing capabilities, and fulfillment services to automate and streamline many of the processes relating to the acquisition, management, and distribution of marketing materials.  MAM solutions can also provide a powerful platform for creating and executing direct marketing campaigns and programs.

In the right situations, MAM solutions can produce significant and valuable benefits.  For example, they can enable companies to:

• Eliminate the internal costs of processing and fulfilling requests for marketing materials
• Eliminate the costs of storing marketing materials and free up valuable building space for other uses
• Reduce the time required to process and fulfill requests for marketing materials
• Greatly reduce the waste (and cost) of marketing materials obsolescence
• Reduce the use of obsolete marketing materials by salespeople, channel partners, etc.
• Simplify and automate the process of creating and producing customized (and therefore more relevant and effective) marketing materials
• Simplify and automate the work required to create and execute customized marketing campaigns and programs in distributed marketing environments

You may be asking:  "All this sounds great, but how can I determine if a marketing asset management solution would be a good investment for my business?"

The final determination should be based on a thorough examination of your company's marketing needs and the characteristics of your existing marketing supply/distribution chain.  This examination will allow the benefits of a marketing asset management solution to be estimated and quantified based on your unique circumstances.

We've developed a self-assessment tool that's designed to help you begin the process of deciding whether a marketing asset management solution would make sense for your business.  This short questionnaire/scorecard is not intended to be comprehensive, and it doesn't answer all of the important questions.  The objective is to provide a preliminary indication about whether a marketing asset management solution would be a good investment for your company.

If you'd like a copy of our self-assessment questionnaire, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

What It Takes to Make Marketing Content More Compelling

There's no longer any doubt that relevant marketing content is essential for B2B marketing success.  Business buyers are incredibly busy, and they're exposed to hundreds of marketing messages every day.  The only reliable way to cut through the clutter and create meaningful engagement with potential buyers is to provide marketing content that prospects will see as relevant and compelling.

The big question for marketers is, how do we create this kind of content?  We often hear or read that the answer is to customize marketing messages and materials for specific buyers.  But, what kinds of "customization" will actually increase marketing relevance and effectiveness?

There are two proven ways to make marketing content more relevant and compelling.  The first key is to make it easy for prospects to identify with your content.  To do this, you'll need content that's customized to fit the personal and professional characteristics of your potential buyers.  What jobs do your prospects hold?  What kinds of companies do they work for?  What size companies do they work for?  So, for example, if your target prospects are plant managers in small manufacturing companies, you'll need content that's tailored for that kind of buyer.

This kind of content customization increases what I call personal relevance, and it's proven to increase marketing effectiveness.  In research by MarketingSherpa, 82% of business buyers said that marketing content was more valuable when it was targeted to their industry.  Sixty-seven percent of buyers said that marketing content was more valuable when it was targeted to their job function, and 49% said the same for content that was targeted to companies of similar size.

The second way to increase relevance is to create and use marketing content that speaks to issues that have immediate importance to your prospects.  Most B2B buyers move through an identifiable set of buying stages as they make purchase decisions, and the issues that are most important to buyers will change as they move through the buying process.  If your marketing content provides a potential buyer information that's out of sync with his or her decision making process, it's far less likely to capture the buyer's full attention.

The solution is to use marketing messages and materials that are designed for each stage of the buying process.  This kind of content customization enhances what I call situational relevance, and it can provide powerful competitive advantage.  In a recent survey of B2B buyers by DemandGen Report, 93% of respondents said the solution provider they chose supplied ample marketing content to navigate through each phase of the buying process.

A few weeks ago, I published a white paper that describes these two ways to make your marketing content more relevant.  If you'd like a copy of this white paper, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

How Marketing Asset Management Improves Marketing Results

A growing number of companies are implementing marketing asset management solutions to improve marketing productivity.  MAM solutions combine technology tools, manufacturing capabilities, and services to streamline many of the processes relating to the procurement, management, and distribution of marketing materials.  They can also provide a powerful platform for creating and executing advertising and marketing programs, particularly direct mail and e-mail marketing campaigns.

Most discussions about marketing asset management solutions focus on how they can reduce costs and improve the efficiency of the marketing supply chain.  However, MAM solutions can also improve the effectiveness of marketing activities and programs in three major ways.

Less Use of Obsolete Materials

The obsolescence of marketing materials is a big problem for many companies.  In a recent survey by the CMO Council, 40% of respondents said they waste 20% or more of their marketing materials because of obsolescence.

The direct financial costs of obsolescence waste are bad enough, but the consequences of using obsolete marketing materials can be even worse.  In a highly competitive business environment, sales can easily be lost if prospects are provided outdated information.  And unfortunately, the use of obsolete materials is all too common.  In the CMO Council survey, 51% of marketers admitted they had sent materials to customers or prospects that contained outdated content.

Marketing asset management solutions reduce the use of obsolete materials by combining "virtual warehousing," on-demand manufacturing, and rapid fulfillment to eliminate the underlying causes of obsolescence.  With a marketing asset management solution, materials are stored in digital form so they can be easily and quickly updated, and MAM solution providers manufacture most materials on an as-ordered basis, so there is no need to maintain inventories that can become obsolete.

More Relevant Marketing Materials

Marketing asset management solutions also improve marketing effectiveness by enabling the creation and use of more relevant marketing materials.  Marketers have long known that customizing materials for specific audiences will make them more relevant and effective.  Unfortunately, however, using customized materials has usually forced marketers to choose between losing control of the brand and incurring excessive costs.

MAM solutions make customization easy and cost effective while simultaneously enabling corporate marketers to keep control of brand messaging and brand presentation.  The key to this controlled customization is user-friendly templates that identify what components of a marketing item can be customized and provide a set of pre-approved customization options.

Simplified Distributed Marketing

The third way that MAM solutions boost marketing results is by making it easy to create and execute effective marketing campaigns and programs in distributed marketing environments.

Distributed marketing  refers to a marketing model in which both a central marketing department and "local entities" perform marketing activities.  The defining characteristic of a distributed marketing model is that the local marketing entities have some degree of autonomy from the "home office."  When the local entities are franchisees, resellers, or other independent channel partners, they may have complete marketing independence.  A big challenge, therefore, is to persuade channel partners to market as aggressively as they should.

MAM solutions boost results in distributed marketing organizations by enabling local marketing partners to customize marketing programs to fit their specific needs and by making it simple for local marketing partners to create and execute those programs.

I've just published a white paper that describes these benefits in more detail.  If you'd like to review this paper, send me an e-mail at ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.