Streamlining Your Marketing Solutions to Keep Your Head Above Water

The need for marketing productivity tools has exploded, but all is not lost! It is possible to whittle down your selection. You can optimise your solutions mix to streamline your marketing operations with these five key steps.

  1. chevron left iconStreamlining Your Marketing Solutions to Keep Your Head Above Water
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Lucy Campbell-WoodwardMarch 13, 2023
  • Digital Marketing
  • Technology

It’s bad enough when you go to the supermarket for cereal at the weekend and you’re confronted with at least 50 different options. Or popping into the coffee shop – macchiato, americano, latte, flat white, cortado. It’s baffling. So imagine your dismay when you come to work on a Monday and are asked to choose a handful of solutions that will work beautifully together from a potential list of over 8,000…

The need for marketing productivity tools as well as the number available to choose from has exploded over the past few years. As needs change, so the technologies evolve and multiply. Savvy marketing teams equip themselves with the latest solutions to stay ahead of the competition. But before you know it, the business is being strangled in a technology tangle of its own making.

But all is not lost. While it’s true that there can seem like a there is a confusing array of technologies available, it is possible to whittle down your selection. You can create an optimal mix of existing and new providers that maximizes your operational effectiveness while minimizing outlay and complexity.

In censhare’s exclusive whitepaper, Getting Started With Omnichannel Marketing, five key steps to streamlining your marketing solutions are outlined in detail:

Review

Start with your needs. Not just those of the IT or marketing department, but every relevant employee in the organization. Today’s omnichannel marketing organization is not siloed. Sales, merchandising, product development, supply chain, and more, all impact on your success. For them to contribute meaningfully, they need to be able to access, understand and use shared systems. By conducting a comprehensive survey of needs across your whole organisation, you can begin to understand where opportunities lie – and where the barriers exist.

Refine

By building an understanding of who uses your systems and how, you can begin to build the ideal architecture that will meet the needs of your whole organization. This includes creating a domain model so users have access to the right systems at the right time; mapping customer journeys to gain an understanding of the most effective platforms and channels and creating a prototype to demonstrate back to the business how any technology transformation project will work.

Develop

Once you have a handle on what technologies are needed and how they will operate, the next step is to map out the assets they will manage. How much detail do you need on each asset? How many functions will need to access it? Will it be evergreen or single use? Who within your organization will have access to deeper levels of sensitive data, or have permission to modify assets?

Deploy

Bring together your internal (and external) experts such as IT and data teams to connect and integrate the necessary systems. Train users on new platforms or according to new processes and protocols – not all skills for technology implementation are technological in nature. Sometimes the culture of the organisation has to be addressed to energise new workflows and working partnerships.

Test and Refine

Successful streamlining should never be a ‘done’ process. Focusing on integrating technology once and then failing to review and refine it is often how companies arrive at a difficult situation in the first place. Survey users to reveal ongoing pain points, or potentially uncover new capabilities. Use the feedback to refine, then repeat the process again. And again.

Streamlining an organization’s processes can sometimes seem like a reboot, but it is actually a philosophy that businesses should adapt and use on an ongoing basis.

To learn out more about how these steps can optimize your business performance, reducing asset costs, lost work time to asset management and improve customer experience, download the censhare Getting Started With Omnichannel Marketing white paper today.

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Lucy Campbell-Woodward
Lucy is Head of Marketing for censhare, and leads the global team in the aligned planning and implementation of censhare's marekting strategy. Having joined the team in 2017, Lucy has played a pivotal role in the censhare Marketing team for a good few years now, and stepped up into a leadership role in 2022.

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