Marketing Activity Management made easier for Brand Owners

Marketing activities are often managed by a large team with many segmentations. In large organisations, it’s based on product category or brands, in some service organisations, the division is basis activities, and few organisations have a fluid-structure. The interchanging of responsibilities and projects are another reality. With the dynamic opportunities in the marketing eco-system, people movements are another norm. The marketing ecosystem always remains very dynamic due to the way it has to respond to the market realities to be in sync with a fast-changing competitive landscape. The marketing leaders often face this challenge to keep the flocks together to ensure that, the common objectives are aligned well with the entire team. Long term marketing objectives vs short term effectiveness, tangible outcome vs brand building and many more such conflicting questions arise in front of them. The visibility is the key here, knowing where the marketing money is been put into, where the money works hard and not so much. When all activities are spread and aligned well to achieve common and planned objectives, with a mix of short term and long term marketing targets, the task is done for the leadership.

The visibility is very important and when the marketing activities are carried out with efficiency and within the planned timelines, the ability to deliver results increases. The marketing activities often gets dragged due to a number of variables and dependencies on vendor ecosystem and production challenges that are very common. The best way to overcome these challenges are transparency that helps everyone to push the team and vendors.

Emails and fragmented workflow systems do not do enough good for achieving transparency, neither the excel sheet which disconnected from others is enough. The right solution for this is seamless systems that can track end to end activities, giving complete visibility to the leadership in umbrella level view and when required gives granular level details. Such systems help the leadership to be well ahead of the subordinates in knowing the ground level realities, spend which is going around, vendors involved, activities that are pending to be completed, updates on ongoing activities, how much of a team member’s time is allotted for each activity etc. This info is critical for the planning, course correction and to measure the effectiveness of various campaigns.

Xemarks is such a system that can manage the marketing activities end to end, starting from the budget allocation for a project/ campaign, approval from all stakeholders to task allocation to the vendor, tracking of vendor’s task, completion of tasks, invoice submission, payment disbursal etc.

The most important part of this system is that all marketing assets – creatives, artworks, adaptations etc are also coming to this system, also the proof of implementations for projects like signage, outdoor etc, are also becoming part of this system. Other assets like photo shoot images, stock photography, libraries of assets etc can also be stored in the DAM attached to the Xemarks. This avoid dependency on agencies for creative assets all the time. The files can be shared over email links easily by the users. The DAM features allows to manage all marketing assets in an organised manner, with complete info about the assets. The assets can be searched with so many parameters like expiry of Rights, asset owner, products associated with a creative etc. This helps to explore the assets and to utilise them well which leads to cost saving.

The approval of the creatives can be done through the creative approval tool which helps to have annotations in the artworks itself. This helps to communicate the changes in the creative to agencies effectively and multiple stake holders can comment on the creative at the same time. Creative approval will have the track of comments and agencies can make changes easily and clearly.

Coupled with many other extensive features, Xemarks can help marketing leadership to achieve the necessary agility and visibility about the marketing team’s activities with few clicks. The necessary approvals are sought with complete details, and activities are updated regularly, building valuable MIS on the go. The MIS can provide much more detailing required on many areas like vendor dependency, distribution of projects to efficient vendors, Speed of execution, cost over runs, pre-audit concerns, proper accounting of expenses to budget heads and GLs etc.

Xemarks could be a perfect tool for marketeers, especially for large brand owners to unify all activities under single system giving complete control and visibility. Xemarks got successfully implemented with one of the leading private banks in India known for innovative marketing initiatives.