Marketing and BPM: A Match Made in Heaven Business Process Management (BPM) can be an effective tool to increase marketing productivity by Mac McConnell VP Marketing, BonitaSoft Bonitasoft 2013 www.bonitasoft.com 1
Business Process Management (BPM) is gaining traction across a wide variety of industry verticals. BPM's surge is part of the larger trend of agile development; organizations are weary of growing topheavy and employing a number of individuals to perform tedious, manual processes that could easily be handled by a single person if they had greater visibility into the complete processes and tools to automate all or certain portions of it. In addition to BPM's increased momentum across different industries, though, it's also being embraced by an increasingly diverse group of professionals within organizations. Over the past few years, BPM use cases have run the organizational gamut: From HR to sales to IT, and nearly everything in between, BPM has proved to be an effective tool to increase productivity and output. Marketing officials stand to gain from BPM solutions (BPMS) as well. Marketing professionals are constantly expected to wear many different hats and interact with many individuals, from inside and outside their organization, on a daily basis. Clearly organization is key to ensuring accountability and maximizing output for marketers. Automating key processes with BPM can go a long way in helping to meet those goals. Here are just a few marketing centric use cases in which BPM can help the marketing professional. 1. Content creation Marketing professionals are constantly working on their organization's latest bit of printed collateral be it a white paper, byline article, or even an e book. The creation and approvals process for this can be quite tedious and drawn out somebody will write a piece, somebody else (likely several others) will edit it, and then a third (or fourth, or fifth...) party will approve the content and OK it for distribution. When this process is broken, nobody ever seems to know if they're making edits on top of the most recent document, or what has been approved by whom, and when. It can be improved and strengthened by controlling access to documents for editing, and automating the approvals. BPM can ensure greater accountability and transparency in the content creation process For example, BPM can ensure greater accountability and transparency in the process. Once a given draft has been fully marked up (by all parties, identified by the responsible editor to have access to the document via the process application interfaces, or web forms) and is ready for final edit, an automatic alert can be sent to the editor. Editing need not be done inside the process; an external Bonitasoft 2013 www.bonitasoft.com 2
documentation management system can be linked to the process, or documents created in a word processor or presentation software can be uploaded for approval. When the document is marked by the editor as done, the appropriate person(s) will be alerted that the document is ready for approval, and can be approved for distribution or returned for further work. Figure 1. Automatic alerts can be set up to notify content editors and validators Only editor approved documents will be sent along for approval, and all drafts can be stored inside the BPM linked document management function for later access if needed. 2. Website updates Like content creation, this is another process that is too often plagued by opacity. When content is changed frequently, a broken process can result in confusion about what version of a page is the latest, what version is approved, and so on. Figure 2. Changes can be updated automatically when approvals are completed By automating the website update process, both IT and marketing can be appropriately alerted when content review is necessary, and when materials are ready to be published to the Web. This helps ensure that the latest, approved information is in place before changes go live. 3. Managing Social Media Marketing Printed collateral and web sites are not the only marketing materials that required approval of content, publication timing, and so forth as described above. Social media marketing campaigns that require specifically timed, coordinated, automatic tweets and posts to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and so on can be managed through process applications. Connections to existing Bonitasoft 2013 www.bonitasoft.com 3
social media platforms are certainly available. But, what about connections to the social media platforms of tomorrow? The fast changing world of social media requires that the BPMS to social platform connectors need to be flexible enough to be changed easily and quickly. 4. Events and Conferences Ask any marketing professional how they feel about tracking the many events and conferences that their company is involved in, and you're guaranteed to get a pained look. These events are often critical to the continued growth and welfare of organizations especially startups and smaller organizations and tracking the status of multiple events at once can be extremely time consuming. What s more, broken processes can mean lost time, lost money, and lost data. And when you ve spent your time and money on a great event, losing the lead data from it is like throwing it all away. broken processes can mean lost time, lost money, lost data, and lost opportunities Enter BPM. You can automate the process of tracking events to be sure that you and the responsible individuals on your team are automatically aware of all necessary components, from registration to payment to tracking leads from the conference and you can easily sync this up with a CRM system via a simple connector. Figure 3. Event registration as part of an automated process Bonitasoft 2013 www.bonitasoft.com 4
The devil is in the details when it comes to events, and implementing BPM can go a long way toward ensuring data integrity is preserved and critical details aren't missed. 5. Budget requests When you're running a marketing department, you're generally tasked with a finite budget for a given month or quarter. As you're fielding requests from members of your team and external vendors on a nearly daily basis, coming from a number of communication channels from email to instant message to verbal conversations, it comes as no surprise that this budget can be overallocated and cause an uncomfortable conversation with the finance department. Given the complexity of the daily communication, it can be difficult to maintain a central mechanism that tracks your spending in real time, to ensure you can keep up to speed on where your budget stands at all times. BPM can help create a process by which all approved requests are fed into such a central repository. This data can then be used to reliably track the spend for a given timeframe. 6. Managing customer relationships A solid CRM application provides both the tools for managing customer records and the workflow needed to move the process from initial lead to sales prospect to client to return customer, step by step. A solid BPMS provides the foundation for connecting up to other business processes inside the same enterprise. Linking CRM processes to other business processes in accounting/finance, customer support, professional services delivery, and marketing, for example can highly multiply the efficiency of the CRM. Connecting up CRM to BPM makes good sense and good business. For example, CRM workflow can be externally linked to marketing processes for lead creation, and can launch actions inside the CRM processes, to be taken as a result of lead acquisition due to marketing activities. 7. Keep focus on the big picture Today's IT environment which is dominated by streaming, real time, as a service delivery models is impelling a fundamental shift from the "management by spreadsheet" era. More and more, you re approving things on the fly, and it's easy to forget more focus on implementing strategy and less focus on operational details to update a spreadsheet. By integrating BPM, marketing professionals can automate a number of important processes that will allow more focus on implementing strategy and less focus on operational details. Bonitasoft 2013 www.bonitasoft.com 5
About the author Mac McConnell is Vice President of Marketing at BonitaSoft, responsible for all aspects of global marketing, including brand awareness, communications, demand and lead generation, and go to market. Previously, Mac co founded and managed BlueBird Strategies, was Global Marketing Lead for Sun Microsystems' mid market group and at JPMorganChase and Deutsche Banc Alex Brown. Bonitasoft 2013 www.bonitasoft.com 6