As MRM becomes a mainstream tool of marketers, it is helpful to understand the technology underpinnings and the various types of business processes that are related to marketing.
W H I T E P A P E R MRM GOES MAINSTREAM
MARCH 2008Marketing Resource Management (MRM) was born roughly ten years ago as a second major branch of the marketing technology family tree. Up until that time, marketing software providers focused almost exclusively on the automation of marketing campaigns, in a fairly narrowly defined manner. Campaign management enabled database marketers to extract records from a data warehouse, segment them into actionable groups, assign some type of action codes, and in the end, create an output list. While campaign management catered to a relatively small audience, it provided a breakthrough to the marketer's thinking-technology could dramatically improve the effectiveness of some part of the marketing mix.From the beginning, MRM had a vision of focusing on the automation of the "other 80 percent" or the mass of the iceberg that was hidden below the surface. In this fashion, MRM is much more closely related to its counterparts in the back office, such as supply chain management and enterprise resource management (ERP), than it is to its own closest relative in the marketing automation world, campaign management. MRM automates core marketing processes through a combination of workflow and role-based applications to the team members who must work together to make marketing happen. As MRM matures, its role as a mainstream marketing management tool has solidified. It has evolved to align and reinforce the critical processes that are the foundation of marketing. These include strategic planning, budgeting, financial tracking, offer management, personalization, multi-channel campaign management, brand and content management, lead management and performance measurement. Anyone who is considering an investment in MRM should consider how their potential software and implementation vendor can enhance these core processes that are the life blood of marketing. One major change in the marketing technology landscape has been the arrival and early growth of the Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) product category. EMM attempts to unite the two major tributaries of marketing automation-MRM and campaign management (CM)-and creates an umbrella application that is similar to that of ERP for the back office of the enterprise. Although this trend towards an integrated EMM platform is a welcome one, a simplistic view of CM + MRM = EMM is not accurate. MRM automates the fundamental processes that marketers use to execute across all channels, ranging from advertising to e-marketing to 1 to 1 channels, enabled by campaign management.As MRM becomes a mainstream tool of marketers, it is helpful to understand the technology underpinnings and the various types of business processes that are related to marketing. Understanding these requirements can help anyone who is planning to make investments in marketing technology and needs to evaluate the vision of their selected vendor options.
Key Requirement 1: WorkflowThe initial entries into the MRM world were primarily specialized project management systems. They allowed a marketing program owner to create a project plan and then automate the execution phase by using e-mails or some type of project portal that kept all program participants informed of their next "to do." Since many marketing programs were largely duplicates of previous activities, the technology added templates that allowed marketing operations personnel to quickly create replicas of an ideal target program. As the market matures, the leading MRM software supplier, Aprimo, has made a transition from project management to a much more extensible and reusable paradigm-workflow. The challenge for marketing technology vendors has been that marketing activities have characteristics that make them ideal for project management and for workflow. The Aprimo hybrid approach enables a marketer to set up a workflow template that defines the basic path and rules of the work process. W H I T E P A P E R
While this path is primarily linear, it may contain feedback loops and calls to other workflow processes when certain exceptional conditions are present. On the other hand, MRM software must provide a project management "overlay" to allow a marketer to assign and balance resources. This overlay supports the reality that nearly every trip through a workflow has unique resources and project requirements. By merging these paradigms together, advanced MRM software can e... [download for more]
