I speak with marketers everyday who intuitively think that administration is a major part of their job. Filling in PO numbers, asking management for campaign financing, reporting, briefing requests to agencies, creative reviews and copying figures into and between spreadsheets.
Marketers know the value of improving conversion rates and driving new customers to offers through a multitude of acquisition methods and the power of retention.  However do you know about MRM? Marketing Resource Management? Its about automating standardised and repeatable tasks in marketing – something that I believe is one of the last un-optimised areas within marketing and an area from which we as marketers can realise significant benefits.

How can I as a marketer improve the way we do things?

1. As marketing continues to get more and more complex (have you figured out social media or how to measure and act on engagement?), we need to use MRM to become faster, smarter and more efficient to gain a competitive advantage and support our sales teams.
2. SaaS technologies can automate the administrative functions of marketing and help lower the cost of standard repeatable activities.
3.Optimising your marketing administration will let you concentrate on marketing activities to drive down CPC, CPA, CPM’s and ultimately drive sales for your company.

Yes, but where should I start?

Try counting the number of touch points with your marketing department using the SMCR Model*

• Source: The entity wishing to present a particular view of a campaign or product. Usually a singular brand or product

• Message: Signal or combination of signals that form a body of information (all types of content to support the source like emails, rich media ads, billboards, events)

• Channel: Vehicle, medium or carrier through which signals are sent (microsites, blog posts, DM, events, brochure)

• Receiver: The target, person or thing, that takes in the message (individuals or groups).

In trying to assess if you are in need of MRM, consider the impact of both the bullets and arrows on your company. The ‘bullet’s resemble variables that you can count and manipulate. The ‘arrow’s represent process which allow you to quantify activities. When you count the number of bullets and processes, you should be able to define the process and activities that is required by your marketing department.
How many do you have? What would be the value in being able to automate 15 of these processes? How badly do you need to be able to reduce two phone calls, five emails per day OR one communication mistake per month? Is it just me or would optimised marketing activities make a huge difference to many aspects of our work days? Let me know what you find.

*Shannon, C.E., Weaver, W., 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Board of trustees by the University of Illinois