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.

Marketers are traditionally been challenged by the onslaught of new trends, lifestyles and changing preferences of consumers. Earlier these changes used to happen over a long period of time. But now they have to grapple with another set of challenges – technology, the fast pace of technology disruptions virtually changes everything around them. The traditional ways of marketing are being challenged and disrupted by the technology. The digital savvy consumer is a hard nut to crack, but easier to access given the multiple avenues to capture them.

They need to reposition the product and services to align with the core purpose of the brand, shall find newer ways to connect with the consumer and to engage them as much possible. The moment a brand is out of their sight, someone else occupy that space instantly. With narrowing attention span of human beings, out of sight clearly means out of the consideration set, and eventually losing out on them.

All these exerts considerable pressure on the marketers to really focus on their core responsibilities rather than the mundane tasks and follow up which eats up their productive time. The typical day starts with the task list for each vendor, briefing, debriefing, follow up, reminders, reviews, approvals, sharing of assets, estimates approval, revisions, seeking internal approvals, cross department communications, budget tracking, approval when they finish their deliverables, verifications, invoice processing and lot many…and the day also ends with few pending items from this list. Often leaving the brand/ product strategies and core marketing communication planning to the sidelines. In the long run, this impacts productivity and the team’s ability to significantly contribute towards the effective demand creation for products/ services

With the hyper personalization trends, the need to collaborate with multiple vendors and partners become the need of the hour, further complicating the life of every marketer. The content landscape become larger and mediums of delivery turns wider.

The best way to address these challenges to be productive and focus is to befriend the technology, along with data for decision making. The technology platforms help to enhance productivity, collaborate efficiently, and to gain visibility effortlessly. There are software platforms that serves these purposes, along with being the one point touch point for all marketing activities. Xemarks is one such platform that can be a true friend of marketers across the company and still can assimilate all their project information at one place.

Xemarks comes with complete controls to efficiently manage the entire marketing spend, it acts as a task management system, budget tracking and approval management system, stores all creative assets along with it’s approval processes, vendors rate card, retainer contracts and delivery monitoring, also acts as a single linear control for budget allocation to invoice processing, pre -audit and payment disbursal. It makes it easy for the marketer and vendor to track their invoice submission to payment disbursal without the need to have multiple email/ telephonic follow ups.

The proliferation of content is another challenge to be managed well. From the earlier days of one or two campaigns a year, the marketer now has to release new content every days, if not every hour. And often these contents are out in the control of the content partners, limiting the ability to cross- deliver it when requires. The control to store all content, creative and artworks and their IP is all the more important for reasons related to compliance and investments made for them. They are the largest marketing assets of any brands, and there is no better way than ensuring they are always within the reach and control of the marketer. Xemarks has a module for asset management which helps to onboard all contents created and curated from various sources.

Finally, the data is the new gold. When all marketing activity related data are at one place, it can help for cost optimization of marketing activities, also to identify the best set of vendors basis various parameters. The division wise, product wise or cost centre wise spend analysis can be done easily. The provision report becomes easier. For each marketing team member, the complete activity and productivity reports can be taken with all details attached. By connecting the systems with internal systems, it can be a platform for marketing team to manage everything from one place with the comfort of data and visibility and track of all historical activities.