Marketing Resource Management: An overview

Our businesses will continuously face challenges, and we must always be prepared for the long haul. During uncertain inflationary times where the Ukrainian war, shortage of raw materials, finished goods and workers, businesses are looking more carefully at their marketing budgets and looking for the most cost-effective way to deliver their products or services. It's all about allocating the available resources in the best way.

As changes happen in the market, your marketing team and the channels or software you use, you would want your Marketing Resource Management solution to keep up with these changes. How do you organise and optimise your resources?

What is Marketing Resource Management?

Marketing Resource Management or MRM is the method of organising, automating, and optimising your resources in connection with projects and campaigns. MRM covers strategic planning, budgeting, project management, production, tracking, reporting, approvals, compliance checks, and more.

As an integrated part of most MRM systems, you will find a workflow tool that helps you map and optimise the various workflows across your departments. You would use these as part of MRM to allocate your employees' resources, time, and tasks to optimise your team's overall output.

To summarise, Marketing Resource Management is the multifaceted process of getting the most out of your marketing department using several tools. This is also why MRM is relevant to all companies regardless of size – it will help optimise your output and the time it takes to get it done.

What is Marketing Resource Management software – and why should you use it?

Today, automation and software solutions are essential to running your marketing department as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

The best Marketing Resource Management software contains a toolbox that optimises all steps in your workflow, covers all stakeholders in your value chain, and aims to ensure your ability to get the most out of your marketing efforts.

MRM software could, for instance, shorten your time to market by automating and speeding up workflow processes and easing cooperation with freelancers, customers, and suppliers.

Since some MRM solutions have a SaaS (software as a service) core, Marketing Resource Management has become accessible to companies of all sizes – and in some versions, this gives the added value of the system being highly adaptable to the rapidly changing business environment. This means that you can integrate tools and add modules as you go to create the best possible MRM solution for you.

What should you be looking for when deciding which MRM solution to choose?

With a massive number of options, choosing is never simple – and where should you start when comparing your choices?

The initial decision you need to start with is whether to build the system from scratch – or choose a SaaS solution, where the base is pre-programmed but still adaptable. Typically, most companies would go with the SaaS MRM since it offers considerably lower risks and costs, can be implemented, and can be operational much faster.

Out-of-the-box features

What exactly do the MRM solutions you consider have to offer out of the box? Are all the necessary features there – or will additional costs be involved in implementing other features that are important to you?

User-friendliness

People (employees, suppliers, etc.) are at the core of your marketing efforts – so to improve the output and overall effort – you have to get them on board and use the MRM solution. This is, naturally, much easier if the solution is user-friendly.

Some of the questions that will let you quickly assess the user-friendliness of the solution are:

• Is it easy to understand, find your needed functions, and navigate around the solution?
• What does the interface look like?
• Can you adapt the interface/access to different users?

Adaptability and scalability

As changes happen in the market, your marketing team and the channels or software you use, you would want your MRM solution to keep up with these changes. A natural part of the changing business environment is the need to scale back or up depending on your number of customers, employees, freelancers, suppliers, etc. So please take a closer look at how easy it is to scale and adapt the MRM solutions.

Additionally, exploring which of your existing tools, software, and systems the MRM offers integrations to – or can replace – could also tip the scale in favour of one or more of your options.

Role-based access and shareability

Which options does the MRM software offer in terms of role-based access? Suppose your organisation uses freelancers and cooperates with customers or agencies outside of your primary organisation. In that case, you could benefit from granting them access to your Marketing Resource Management solution. However, there will inevitably be certain information that not everyone should be able to access.

Therefore, role-based access could be a huge advantage that can shorten your time to market.

Could the Encodify all-in-one solution be the right option for you?

As stated earlier, Marketing Resource Management solutions consist of several types of software focusing on the different pains of the marketing process and production. At Encodify, our approach to MRM is based on optimising all workflows – whether it is in connection with budgeting, project management, production, approval, distribution, or evaluation.

Therefore, the Encodify solution includes a broad number of key features:

• Project, resource, task and budget management
• Workflow management
• Approval and compliance management
• Real-time tracking and reporting
• User or role-based dashboards
• And much more

The Encodify system is furthermore designed to continuously improve your marketing output through automation based on AI (artificial intelligence).

Suppose your company, for instance, is focused on retail. In that case, the algorithms will offer suggestions. Or, if you choose, it will decide the product mix in a campaign and the necessary elasticity in terms of price points.

Encodify offers a variety of highly personalised solutions for retail, ad production agencies and brands. Click on the links to learn more about the specific solutions.