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...

Is managing your marketing initiatives an exercise in cat herding? Do you frequently have moments where you're left wondering how to get things under control?! HCL’s Unica Plan can help you tackle the task. Managing a marketing initiative can be a daunting responsibility and being accountable for the P&L can be downright scary. Not having visibility into and control over those two things is a waking nightmare. Current marketing initiatives have gone beyond the traditional vision of mass media such as radio, TV and newspaper through the spray-and-pray world of Email and into the NEW “mass media,” including Text, Social and Mobile. In this new environment, where the Customer rules - you have to ride that hyper-personalization bronco. We have gone from the need to send the right message to the right person at the right time to have the right message personalized to that right customer at every possible touchpoint. ALL of the time in Real-Time! What does MRM mean to a marketing manager? In this era, Hyper personalization means more channels, more devices, more audiences, more creatives, more agencies and more WORK! Your processes have to be defined, documented, enforced and refined over time to be efficient. Your budgets have to be tracked to line items and invoices.  Luckily Marketing Resource Management (MRM) is here to help marketers and businesses manage marketing processes, optimize spend and resource utilization and manage creative content assets. MRM helps the team to work collaboratively and have greater transparency of tasks, dynamically track and understand resourcing, capability, and team workload. An MRM system provides planning, budgeting, and tracking capabilities. It also provides the tools to manage the creation of digital brand assets, workflows, and approval processes. For instance, running a campaign is like an entire project. It might look like a 4 step...