Traditional MRM vs Collaborative Work Management

It’s a marketer’s world. Customers can be reached by virtually any medium (email, SMS, social media) a marketer puts their mind to. But with so many channels, meeting customer expectations, understanding their needs, and formulating strategies to provide a great customer experience, the list of marketing “to do’s” is much longer than it used to be. Hence Marketing Resource Management has become an essential part of new marketing approaches.

What is MRM?

Forrester¹ defines marketing resource management as enterprise marketing technology that helps marketers with financial planning, performance measurement, collaboration and calendaring, project management, content production, asset management, brand compliance, and marketing fulfillment. MRM is not a new space, but marketers need to take a fresh look at available solutions.

As the MarTech landscape has exploded over the past decade, marketing operations has become the backbone that keeps all of the tools and processes working together to achieve the organization’s goals – encompassing everything from planning, processes, execution to technology and resource allocation. MRM includes the resources available to internal teams and the relationships with external stakeholders and approval processes. MRM lets you organize, automate and optimize marketing tasks.

The Purpose MRM fulfills

MRM exists to save time and marketing resources. Think of just one single marketing task – for example, preparing an email marketing campaign. The list of activities includes the coordination between your marketers, graphic designers, copywriters, and others involved – it is time-consuming and, therefore, costly. This was just an email campaign; consider the cost of running hundreds like these together. For every hour spent on this, you lose focus on other marketing collateral or company growth. With MRM in the picture to manage the assets, tools, and operations, it is easier and more cost-efficient.

• Creative Approvals – Easily float creatives to brand, legal and other teams for sign-offs and approvals.
• Single Source of Truth – Ensure your team works on the same approved assets, which can seamlessly integrate into your website, email marketing, social media, and other applications.
• Automate Creative Review – Always adhere to talent usage requirements and instantly automate creative expiration with outdated claims and legal copy.
• Track Records – Track expenses against targets to ensure your team stays on budget.
• Bring Your Brand To Life – Easily accessible brand guidelines so they get used by your stakeholders and agency partners.
• Manage Tasks & Projects – Never miss a deadline or task with project & task management and dashboard reporting.

What is CWM?

Marketing managers want their teams to collaborate effectively. Facilitating collaborative processes between team members and across departments, however, is easier said than done. The more people are added to a project, the more potential for decreasing productivity declines.

Gartner² released a Market Guide for Collaborative Work Management (CWM), which defines CWM as an emerging market that can “bring together the strands of collaborative activities and blend management oversight with work execution so that self-organizing teams can work effectively.”

Increased complexity is directly proportional to increased odds of project failure due to miscommunication, misalignment of resources, or general disorganization. However, when managers, sales team, designers, strategists, and analysts are all working towards a common goal, teams can achieve results far beyond what they could on their own. However, the complex needs of modern marketing also facilitated collaborating well across departments and disciplines.

Why CWM?

• CWM reiterates the fact that working agile is the key to an enterprise’s digital transformation. Connected employees now expect the experience of consumer communication and collaboration applications in their work environment — and the productivity it gives them. It helps you with more flexibility to adjust plans accordingly without endangering hard deadlines.
• Collaborative work management tools provide a centralized location for communication.
• With CWM, you gain increased visibility and transparency, keeping stakeholders up-to-date.
• It saves time by eliminating uncalled meetings, spreadsheet management since everything is documented in one tool. You can devote more time to important decision-making and problem-solving.

What does your Company need?

So is it MRM or CWM? Which one should I propose to my organization? It’s both! Let’s understand it better with the help of a use case.

July 4th Special Events Program needs to get approved, created and executed. The Project Manager and the Marketing Director are on top of their game to ensure everything is taken care of and delivered in time. They need to jot down the work efforts, record the activities, progress report, measure activities, and ROI. The Project Manager needs to engage with the Dev team to ensure the HTML for the emailers is written, tested, and executed. So the CT(Creative Team) Leader creates a Checklist for the July Mailer and adds a To-Do for each piece of the HTML, and assigns it to the appropriate team members. The Team Leader further allocates the task to a dedicated developer. The Checklist can be shared by the TL with the PM or MD if desired to check on progress. When all of the to-dos are complete, the TL can mark the project workflow task as complete.

See how while managing the entire project and collaborating with other teams provided a clear picture to the PM and MD on why and what can go wrong. Managing your marketing work processes and platforms requires cross-functional collaboration along with the enhanced project, time, and asset management solution. Sometimes, it takes two to do the job well!

For more information on how HCL’s Unica can help you fulfill your Marketing Work Management needs, you can watch my related webinars on Unica Live.

1 – https://go.forrester.com/blogs/forresters-inaugural-mrm-evaluation/

2 – https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3970107/market-guide-for-collaborative-work-management