Why Is Marketing Resource Management Important to Campaign Management?

[Posted by Marie Gosse Senior Product Manager, Neolane, Inc.]

Marketing Resource Management (MRM) refers to technology that improves with the upfront planning of a marketing function and the coordination and collaboration of marketing resources. MRM software helps marketing organizations create their strategy, define objectives, devise their budgets and manage document creation. Most interesting is that MRM technology can facilitate capture of an organization’s marketing best practices while allowing for the creation of reusable project plans and frameworks that other marketers can leverage. Once marketing projects are underway, MRM technology helps keep the team notified of which step the campaign is on (do the analysis, make the creative, pull the lists, etc.), who is responsible for the delivery and review of a given task, and who is supposed to perform the next task. In general, MRM technology is a combination of workflow and knowledge management.

According to Gartner, MRM technology investments will continue to increase, placing the emphasis on recognition of business value and cost savings derived from these initiatives.

Most campaign management software focuses on the design and execution of marketing campaigns. These applications allow marketers to select specific customers for inclusion in a campaign, filter other customers, decide which customers get which offers, decide the timing of when a customer receives certain offers, and through which channel the customer will receive the offer. Additionally, campaign management software can help detect customer responses to the campaigns and creates the output for telemarketing organizations, direct mail fulfillment, or email offerings.

The synergy between marketing resource management and campaign management is tight. Both functions leverage one another, especially during the closed-loop marketing process. The result is marketing plans aligned with business goals, centralized management of business resources and team work optimization. This synergy brings a more useful day-to-day working environment and improves the coordination of strategic planning with cross-channel campaigns.

To obtain a quicker ROI and higher marketer satisfaction with a complete marketing environment, many firms prefer to implement first their campaign management solution and then the MRM software. In this sense, firms notice a faster implementation and higher marketing effectiveness.

According to Gartner, MRM technologies have fine days ahead of them because of a proven ROI: “By 2012, companies that leverage MRM effectively will save more than 15% of their annual marketing budgets. For $250,000 to $1 million, you could cut millions out of your marketing spending.”