A case study on bringing accuracy, speed and visibility in marketing activity management with XEMARKS

The client is one of India’s largest banks, a reputed Global Indian brand and belongs to a diversified Financial Services group. Having more than 1600 branches across India, the group offers a range of financial and banking services including consumer and commercial banking, asset management, investment and life insurance. The current market cap of the bank is over Rs. 2,70,000 crores.
The bank is known for it’s differentiated style of marketing communication and presence all across the vantage points of major cities. The marketing team frequently comes with effective campaigns and consumer awareness messaging about various banking products or services.

• There was no central system/ tools to track marketing activities.
• Visibility of marketing activities and their progress to leadership.
• Access to critical data like approved budget, consumption, budget heads, task assigned, provision, invoice processing, lack or delay of data for pre-auditing.
• Marketing team refer to multiple documents to manage activities and subordinates- excel sheets, email thread, notes on diaries, WhatsApp conversations, documents and PPTs shared for approval etc.
• Duplication of effort and services by vendors, back and forth of invoices when certain projects overshoot the budget allocation or budget head was another challenge.
• Too much effort by pre-audit team to report provision, marketing team to take data from each vendor, collate and report which takes may days.
• Budget Approvals were haphazard often deviating from the rules set, as in email, enforcing such rules is difficult. Difficult to track approvals and delays in approval etc.
• Creative approvals were not by following any specific SOPs or rules.
• All creative assets and artworks are in control of vendors, no Digital Asset Management system to see the shoot imageries, existing creatives etc.

Xemarks has the complete workflow of marketing activity, so it is able to record all points in the marketing lifecycle and those data alongwith the details provide critical inputs to team leaders and subordinates. Many projects are collaborated between the team and those information flow across the team. Reporting heads are able to act on approval faster than ever as they are presented with enough data and they can easily refer to the data and progress of an activity easily. The Xemarks also has status wise listing of activity along with extensive search facility, so Marketing team can review activities in each status and move them to the next step. The features that give access to vendors is helpful for them to self service themselves in many areas like invoice upload along with data inputs. This avoids data input from customer side and put the onus back to vendor to submit the right details for payment processing. Also the asset management features enable the assets to be stored at the customer end, and ensure easier access to them by the entire team members.

• Once the solution got implemented, the acceptance by the marketing team was fairly encouraging, as most of them got hands-on quickly, mainly due to the self-explanatory and intuitive User interface and logical workflow, quite similar to actual operational flow.
• The team got the tool to create activity, to allocate budget, to provide details about vendors, to seek approval in a systematic manner controlled by Xemarks basis the configurations. Approvers get all details that is required to approve any project, they get well organised and details mail template to approve or reject in a single click without even opening Xemarks. System updates all stakeholders about the actions of approvers, also remind them daily with soft reminder mails. Team heads get to see projects pending and got stuck due to delays in action.
• Once the budget is approved, they can allocate vendors, share the budget with team members. Vendors get proper brief and a soft PO from the system, this expedites the vendor allocation and removes a lot of hurdles as all approvals to spend are in place with clarity.
• Once the vendors complete the job, they get approval for task acceptance and then only they can raise invoices. Task initiators approve the invoice and it goes for pre-audit and to payment disbursal as an automated process. Vendors gets updates and it avoids
  several calls to know the status or payment follow-ups. Any dispute in invoices are recorded and sent back for resubmission.
• Creative approvals are also sought through the system, it is having an annotation tool for collaborative review and approval. All versions of creative can be referred, and once approved, it goes to the DAM for storage which can be shared from system.
• It is easier for to understand the Rights duration and terms of all the talent imageries and DAM manages these well. There are alerts when rights are expired or when someone download an asset with rights restrictions.
• Vendor onboarding is an easier process, there are provisions to record and update the contracts of retainer vendors, take reports of retainer vendors effort/ deliverable consumption for the month etc. Also, the vendor rating is there in the solution, which aggregates the satisfaction index of the vendor by task owners after each task. One of the major benefits of the solution is vendor analysis, to easily understand the vendor dependency and rates for various jobs from the same vendor, satisfaction index from various teams etc are available for evaluation.
• All marketing members can download the MIS reports, spent reports, Product-wise, category wise activities etc and many other reports directly from the solution, without waiting to collate or preparing them.
• On a financial year, they had executed 5000+ activities, with top performers executing 800+ tasks through the system, managing close to 300 marketing vendors.
• Overall, all marketing activities are tracked at one place and it acts as an easy reference and moment of truth for data related to marketing.