About the Pie Chart The data presented in the pie chart is derived from the Q4 2013 Local Marketing Automation survey and serves as the basis for this Deep Dive, which provides analyst commentary related to a particular aspect of the topic. The objective is to provide additional perspective and illuminate certain key considerations regarding the implementation of the related technology-enabled business initiative. Additional survey data utilized:»» Q3 2013 Gleansight benchmark report on Omnichannel Marketing (n=189) To learn more about Gleanster s research methodology, please click here or email research@gleanster.com. Deep Dive Local Marketing Automation February 2014 What is local marketing automation and why is it unique & different from traditional campaign execution tools? Managing multi-channel communications within a single corporate marketing function is challenging enough. But if your organization has a corporate 23% marketing entity that also supports local or regionally distributed marketers, you know it s exponentially harder to manage brand consistency and the customer experience in this environment. Unfortunately, recent Gleanster research suggests that distributed marketing organizations are struggling to enable local autonomy with legacy marketing technologies. In fact, it was only over the last decade that a new and emerging class of technology called marketing asset management or local marketing automation emerged to address the unique nuances of a distributed marketing environment. But research indicates organizations are slow to divest of corporate-owned point solutions like campaign management, so the vast majority of distributed marketing organizations rely on marketing technologies that are not capable of maximizing customer engagement across corporate and local marketing. 68% 61% Percentage of Top Performers that regard Generate mer Insights as a top reason to monitor Social Media Percentage of Top Performers using Local Marketing Automation (versus 12% of Everyone Else.) This Deep Dive will explore why some marketing technologies may not be the best solution for distributed marketers and how an emerging class of technology called local marketing automation is enabling corporate marketing to oversee brand consistency and simultaneously give local marketers autonomy and control over communications to their local target audiences. According to the research, Top Performers are 5x more likely than Everyone Else to utilize dedicated local marketing automation tools, suggesting the technology plays a critical role in enabling superior performance for these organizations.
Local Marketing Automation 2 Top Performers Defined Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to distinguish Top Performers from all other companies ( Everyone Else ) within a given data set, thereby establishing a basis for benchmarking best practices. By definition, Top Performers are comprised of the top quartile of qualified survey respondents (QSRs). The KPIs used for distinguishing Top Performers focus on performance metrics that speak to year-over-year improvement in relevant, measurable areas. Not all KPIs are weighted equally. The KPIs used to distinguish Top Performers in this Deep Dive include: Revenue growth Click-through rates on email ROMI on Local Campaigns A Deep Dive on Available Technologies There are a myriad of technologies available for managing back-end marketing processes and customer engagement. In a distributed marketing environment where a corporate entity oversees the brand and local or regional marketers share in customer communication, managing the marketing value chain can get quite complex. Gleanster defines the marketing value chain as the series of steps that marketers engage in to plan, create, execute, and measure communications with a target audience. Today the value chain is largely supported by a variety of different technologies, including spreadsheets. In fact, according to research from Gleanster, the average organization manages 3-5 different marketing technologies such as email marketing, web analytics, landing page hosting, marketing automation, etc. In a distributed marketing environment the challenges of managing multichannel execution are amplified by the volume of stakeholders who want to communicate with a target audience. Corporate marketing wants to establish a compelling and unified relationship with the brand, while local marketers want to deliver highly relevant communications with these same individuals to drive local sales targets. In a regional or local marketing environment, it s not uncommon to see local marketers investing in their own marketing technologies for greater autonomy in communications with the local audience. That means the actual number of technologies utilized by the brand can be amplified by 2-3x to 10-15 marketing tools and that s a recipe for chaos. Unfortunately, this creates lots of opportunities for inconsistent branding, challenges in managing customer preference, and general lack of visibility about the success of different initiatives at the corporate level. Resolving these challenges is complex. More often than not, distributed marketers invest in multiple marketing technologies and internal processes to meet the needs of corporate and local marketers. But over the last decade a new class of technology has emerged that is specifically designed to address the nuances of a corporate and local environment. Given the volume of different technologies that are marketed today (campaign management, marketing automation, marketing asset management, content management, digital asset management, etc.), it can be very confusing to understand exactly what each one brings to the table in the context of distributed marketing. More often than not, solution providers are eager to suggest that their technology can meet your needs, and that isn t always the case. Let s explore some of the different technologies that are often utilized to manage marketing at a regional and local level. We will also look at how the technology is applied and where there might be limitations to each unique class of technology. Campaign Management. Campaign management tools are designed to manage customer engagement across two or more marketing channels. These are more than point solutions for email or a landing page. Campaign management tools can be used to centrally manage customer preference and execute outbound or inbound engagement with a target audience. It s hard enough to manage these processes in an
Local Marketing Automation 3 Common Features in Local Marketing Automation Tools While capabilities vary widely among solution providers, a local marketing automation technology will address the needs of marketers through one or more of the following features: Digital Asset Management The core of every local marketing automation solution includes asset management capabilities to help manage tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloging, storage, retrieval, and distribution of digital assets. Marketers need a place to centralize digital assets for digital rights management, annotations and versioning, asset re-utilization, and more. Workflow and Process Automation Workflow capabilities link sequences of connected steps to the development and approval of a digital asset and the execution of multi-channel campaigns. In a distributed marketing environment, using email to manage a workflow or approval process between local marketers, corporate marketing, and agencies can multiply marketing cycle time by weeks, not days. Local marketing automation streamlines this challenge by adding role-based security and approvals to the creative and campaign execution process. Workflow capabilities allow organizations to streamline the marketing cycle time so vacation, attrition, and overworked employees are speed bumps rather than roadblocks in the development process. At the same time, as the creative process moves from an idea to a physical asset, metadata is captured at each step in the process. organization with a single corporate marketing department that manages all marketing communications. The challenges get exponentially more difficult when local marketers also want to send out their own personalized communications to the local target audience. But a corporate-owned campaign management tool can be used to centralize all communications to customers. In order to use a centralized tool to execute campaigns, local marketers would have to submit requests for corporate marketing to execute campaigns on their behalf. Unfortunately, as demand for more relevant and personalized communications increases, corporate marketing becomes a bottleneck for engaging local audiences. Local marketers, in turn, seek disparate local-owned technologies to manage their own communications (email marketing, web analytics, social media engagement, local agencies, etc.). The real victim is the customer who receives inconsistent messages, who may be driven to opt out of communications. According to the Q4 2013 Local Marketing Automation survey, two-thirds of organizations that operated in a distributed environment (defined by the industry the company engaged in: financial services, franchise, retail, manufacturing, and automotive) managed marketing communications via a corporate-owned campaign management tool. It is very common for these organizations to rank brand consistency and fragmented customer data as top reasons to invest in local marketing automation. Top Performers, on the other hand, were 9x more likely than Everyone Else to leverage a local marketing automation tool (which we will explore further below). Some campaign management solutions have built-in features for securely managing outbound templates or approval workflows, but in most cases these tools are not flexible enough to offer the local marketer the autonomy they need to impact local sales or manage approval and workflow in a distrusted environment. Email Marketing. Stand-alone email marketing solutions are very common in distributed marketing environments. According to Gleanster, four out of five distributed marketing organizations report the use of more than one stand-alone email marketing across corporate and local marketers. In some cases, local marketers will invest in their own on-demand email marketing tools and completely circumvent corporate marketing for outbound communications. While this does allow local marketers a greater degree of flexibility and autonomy in marketing campaigns, it creates bigger issues with the brand. Fragmented and disparate tools create issues with brand consistency. If local marketers are not diligent about updating brand standards in email templates, the brand can be reflected inconsistently across corporate and local marketing messages, leaving customers with a poor impression of the brand. More importantly, when prospects and customers opt out of communications, disconnected systems have no way of communicating a change in customer preference. Corporate or local marketers could inadvertently continue communicating with a prospect that has opted out, adding to the risk of real violations of CAN-SPAM and other global privacy laws. In addition, multiple stand-alone email marketing rarely give corporate marketing visibility into the overall brand communication strategy.
Local Marketing Automation 4 Features Continued... Searchable Access to Digital Assets Imagine how much time is spent searching for assets on individual hard drives or shared drives. The loss of productivity and drain on profitability is a measurable metric that can be aggregated to help justify an investment in a new technology. Actually, survey respondents estimated that the average marketer will spend as much as 35% of their time searching for assets. Furthermore, many times assets can t be located, and rights to the same asset are purchased multiple times within the organization. Adding searchable access to digital content could represent millions of dollars in cost savings each year in employee productivity and the re-use of assets. Dynamic Content Templates A handful of local marketing automation providers address what is perhaps one of the most essential features of the solution: dynamic content. Corporate templates are developed that break up collateral and digital content into locked and editable sections. This essentially re-creates an asset as a template where certain sections are editable by local marketers and other sections are locked by corporate marketing to manage global brand compliance. This provides a highly scalable infrastructure to simultaneously address the needs of corporate marketing (control brand consistency) and local marketers (customize collateral for local audiences). For the first time, justification of MAM can include top-line growth, since more personalized and relevant content at the local level is more likely to drive increased sales. Marketing Automation. Marketing automation tools are designed to manage multi-channel engagement and determine a prospect s propensity to purchase through lead scoring and CRM integration. B2C marketers are starting to adopt these tools to build more intimate relationships with customers through nurture marketing and inbound tactics. What s nice about marketing automation is a steadfast focus on revenue and return. For this reason, the largest providers of marketing automation now position the tools as Revenue Performance Management (RPM). Marketing automation tools are the best tools for gaining visibility into customer engagement, from communication to closed sale. But these tools are not great at managing the front of the marketing value chain; asset storage/management and templates are generally very weak in marketing automation tools, and most are not capable of managing security or customer data for a distributed marketing environment. In addition, marketing automation is still a fairly technical technology, and customizing templates and communications typically demands some knowledge of coding, which local marketing departments can rarely manage. That said, a growing number of Top Performing organizations, about 21%, used both a marketing automation and a distributed marketing technology for customer engagement. This allows the organization to manage the creation of highly personalized content at the local level (via local marketing automation) and the distribution of this content in a multi-channel strategy (via a corporate-owned marketing automation tool). Digital Asset Management. In a distributed marketing environment, marketers need a place to centrally manage brand-compliant graphics, text, and brand standards. Generic digital asset management technologies, also called content management and enterprise content management tools, have been widely adopted for brand portals that house the most current versions of logos, graphics, brochures, etc. These portals are critical to a distributed environment, but they typically fail to manage local iterations of brand-compliant materials. Meanwhile, there s limited workflow or approval and version control, it s difficult to know which assets are the newest, and finding content can be a challenge. Marketers typically find that traditional digital asset management quickly becomes obsolete as frustrated marketers who can t find what they need refuse to use the portal. Eventually, shared drives, individual hard drives, and email replace these tools. digital asset management might address one piece of the problem, but it s by no means a holistic solution for the distributed marketing technology stack. But the need to manage assets is still critical to a distributed marketing environment. As a result, these capabilities are replicated inside of local marketing automation tools, where they are more valuable when augmented with the ability to actually execute campaigns. Local Marketing Automation. There are a variety of ways vendors position these tools: marketing asset management, distributed marketing, multi-channel distributed marketing, regional marketing platforms, and marketing operations. In some sense, vendors struggle to market these technologies because most marketers don t exactly think of their environment as distributed or local or even something that demands asset management. That s because
Local Marketing Automation 5 Features Continued... Financials and Fund Management The ability to integrate local marketing automation with your financial system of record varies widely across different providers. Some link directly to enterprise resource planning and allow marketers to allocate funds across corporate and local environments for shared investments in corporate marketing programs. Others allow marketers to manually enter financial data for tracking but do not link directly with the system of record, which can make financial tracking more complex and places an increased burden on the end user. Localized and Personalized Landing Page Creation Some providers have out-of-the-box capabilities for hosting personalized sales rep landing pages or local landing pages that can capture leads at a local level. This is increasingly becoming a critical capability to look for in a provider, as it helps to centralize lead capture and the data that is collected on multi-channel customer engagement. Likewise, the ability to manage paid search spend on these assets from a central system of record is critical to ensure that corporate and local marketing efforts are not competing for the same keywords or engaging in redundant spend. Local paid search should target local audiences. distributed marketers have the exact same challenges as every other organization. How do you engage a target audience with just the right message, at just the right time, in just the right channel? The problem is, in a distributed environment there are two unique constituencies trying to meet this challenge: corporate marketing and local/regional marketers. Point solutions like campaign management and marketing automation are not designed to make the brand scalable for both stakeholders. Few technology providers that address the needs of distributed marketers call themselves local marketing automation. (For a complete list of local marketing automation providers and analyst perspectives on each, visit the Gleanster.com Marketing Asset Management vendor landscape.) Gleanster is using this term to define distributed marketing platforms because of the growing popularity of marketing automation. At the core, local marketing automation provides all of the benefits of a multi-channel marketing automation platform while augmenting the tool with capabilities that are essential to distributed marketers. As such, local marketing automation technology is fundamentally different than marketing automation or campaign management. The defining characteristic of local marketing automation technology is the ability to uniquely support an environment with a centralized corporate marketing function and a network of regional or localized businesses with their own local target audiences. (See Figure 1.) These organizations have the following needs and requirements: A need to manage marketing communications via a corporate entity that oversees the brand and executes marketing campaigns. Figure 1: What is Distributed / Local Marketing Automation? Co-Op Spend Management Multi- Channel Campaign Execution Multi-Channel Integration Email Landing Page(s) Measurement & Analytics Local Marketing Automation (Corporate & Local) Dynamic Templates Rich Media Print Collateral Social Media Paid Search Digital Asset Management Contact Management Etc. Preference Management
Local Marketing Automation 6 From Marketing Asset Management to Local Marketing Automation Marketing automation technology has to a certain degree diluted the unique qualities of marketing asset management. But marketing automation is popular right now, mainly because it s all about enabling intimate relationships that result in sales. That happens to be exactly what organizations with a distributed marketing environment are trying to accomplish. As such, Gleanster feels it is appropriate to help evangelize distributed marketing by jumping on the proverbial marketing automation bandwagon; hence, local marketing automation might be a better way to describe these technologies. Local Marketing Automation is also referred to as: Marketing Asset Management Distributed Marketing Distributed Marketing Operations Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing Localized Marketing Platform Regional Marketing Platform A desire to provide regional, local or field business operations with corporate-branded and approved materials that can be personalized for the nuances of a local target audience. A need to globally manage customer preference for communications from corporate and local marketing. A need to manage multi-channel engagement across email, the web, and offline locations. A need to centrally manage brand compliant templates, logos, graphics, and standards to ensure that the brand is consistently represented across all regions and channels A need to segment customer data or customer lists for use by field marketers. A desire to customize marketing communications (print, digital, signage, etc.) for local audiences but still ensure compliance with the brand. A need to reduce or manage redundant relationships and costs with agencies and technology providers. A need to manage shared financial investments across corporate and local marketing efforts. Features that are typically included in local marketing automation tools are designed for both corporate and local marketers. For example, dynamic templates (digital or print) allow corporate marketing to create branded templates and lock specific aspects of the template that are critical to brand compliance (such as the color scheme, use of the logo, a header or footer, etc.). But a dynamic template allows local marketers to customize certain elements of the template, such as a picture or text, to more intimately reach the local target audience. The workflow, security, and centrally managed customer data in a local marketing automation tool give markets much more autonomy and flexibility than a traditional campaign management or marketing automation tool that is owned and managed exclusively by corporate marketing. Justifying the Investment Today, the catalyst for investments in local marketing automation is largely a desire to control brand consistency and fragmented customer data. According to 78% of Top Performers, the number one way to maximize the value of local marketing automation investments is to increase the intimacy of corporate and local marketing communications. Historically, investments in local marketing automation have largely been justified by operational efficiency and cost savings. While these remain key reasons to invest in distributed marketing technologies, it s also critically important to measure the impact of more intimate local marketing communications on the sales pipeline. Top Performing organization that used local marketing automation technology reported 300% or more increases in revenue growth within the first 12 months of investing in the technology. (See Figure 2.) Recommendations Recognize the tradeoffs in legacy tools and processes over local marketing automation. Many organizations become complacent with legacy processes; they worked in the past, so they must work in the future. But consumer expectations are rapidly changing. We are all growing accustomed to more intimate forms of
Local Marketing Automation 7 Figure 2: Reasons to Implement for Top Performers Increase relevance and personalization 71% 94% Control brand consistency in multi-channel messages 85% 83% Increase visibility into brand communciaitons 67% 82% Manage fragmented customer data and campaign results 76% 79% 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% Top Performers Everyone Else Local Marketing Automation Survey 2013, n=158, Qualified Survey Respondents n=132 marketing and aware of the need to move away from generic messages. This means brands must find more and more intimate ways of reaching target audiences, and nobody knows the needs, desires, and wants of the local target audience better than local marketers. That means autonomy in local marketing messages is critical to the future of the brand. Local marketers need tools that are simple to utilize and flexible enough that they can be customized for use in any channel a local target audience determines is appropriate for brand communications. This means email alone probably won t cut it anymore. Local marketers need the ability to execute campaigns that involve printed collateral, landing pages, local search spend, social media, and mobile. The longer an organization waits to centralize these communications, the more complex it will be to align the customer data in the future. Figure 3 shows the tradeoff between using a centrally owned corporate marketing tool and the augmented capabilities provided by a local marketing automation technology. Notice how local marketing automation simultaneously addresses the need to manage brand consistency while still allowing local marketers flexibility in personalizing messages. Divest of legacy processes. Among Top Performers, 76% indicated divesting of legacy processes was one of the top two challenges with investing in local marketing automation. As always, technology alone is not the answer. Technology is an enabling capability in the marketing value chain that is also supported by human resources skills and processes. Marketers are fickle bunch, and in many cases it can be difficult to champion internal change when marketers can easily rely on legacy processes, especially if change has been mandated by corporate marketing. Investment in
Local Marketing Automation 8 Figure 3: Campaign Management versus Local Marketing Automation CORPORATE MARKETING Corporate Brand Compliance & Holistic Visibility Local Autonomy LOCAL MARKETERS Stand-Alone Campaign Management Technology Multi-Channel Campaigns Email & Landing Page Templates Workflow and Approval Campaign Reporting Customer Datamart Customer Preference Engine Offer Optimization Engine Integration / API Local Marketing Automation Technology Multi-Channel Campaigns Email & Landing Page Templates Campaign Reporting Customer Datamart Customer Preference Engine Offer Optimization Engine Integration / API Brand Control / Brand Consistency Workflow & Approval Role Based Security (Corporate & Local) Multi-Channel Templates Dynamic Customizable Templates Co-Op Fund Management Local Campaign Execution & List Mgmt Digital Asset Management local marketing automation should be vetted by corporate and local marketers before the investment is made. Get everyone involved in the demo process and use a highly respected local region to champion the initial rollout. The key benefits of local marketing automation should be evangelized internally before the decision is made to move away from legacy processes. When the time comes, it s also important to completely divest of legacy technologies and processes to force marketers to embrace new technologies. Interviews with Top Performers revealed that it s not uncommon for the most vocal and disagreeable marketers to become the biggest advocates for the new technology when they finally realize what it is capable of doing for the local brand. Educate yourself on what it will take to transition to local marketing automation. While it s important to understand why local marketing automation is beneficial, it s also important to learn why the initiatives fail. According to the Q4 2013 survey on local marketing automation, one-third of all other organizations invested in local marketing automation and failed to realize the benefits Top Performers referenced. For example, configuring dynamic templates in a new system is time consuming and often requires some degree of administrative training. Depending on the quantity and complexity of these templates, it could take months or years to transition existing assets into the dynamic format. Additionally, it usually takes technical knowledge or at least a dedicated administrator to configure templates and manage security and workflow configuration for the tool. It s important to remember that there really aren t any other alternatives to empowering a local marketing environment in a scalable way. So if moving to a new technology seems like work, consider how much work goes into manually executing marketing campaigns via a centralized marketing platform or
Local Marketing Automation 9 more importantly, the complete lack of visibility corporate marketing has over the entire marketing communication strategy for the brand. Some solutions are designed with less robust features and a simple interface to allow local sales reps or marketers to easily execute campaigns. A key decision for the brand will be how robust the technology solution needs to be to support the brand. Sometimes it s better to transition to a solution that is feature-light but simple to use to learn best practices before making the leap to a more robust solution. Deep Dive Talking Points Gleanster defines the marketing value chain as the series of steps that marketers engage in to plan, create, execute, and measure communications with a target audience. Today, the value chain is largely supported by a variety of different technologies, including spreadsheets. In fact, according to Gleanster research, the average organization manages 3-5 different marketing technologies. The defining characteristic of local marketing automation technology is the ability to uniquely support an environment with a centralized corporate marketing function and a network of regional or localized businesses with their own local target audiences. The workflow, security, and centrally managed customer data in a local marketing automation tool give markets much more autonomy and flexibility than a traditional campaign management or marketing automation tool that is owned and managed exclusively by corporate marketing. Local marketing automation tools are unique because they allow corporate marketing to configure brand-approved templates that can be customized by local marketers and pushed out through a variety of marketing channels. This allows corporate marketing to have visibility into the communication strategy, central management of customer communication preferences, and control over brand consistency.
Local Marketing Automation 10 Related Research Recently published research that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners include: Customer Journey Mapping Scaling Digital Marketing at the Local Level ebook: Marketing Automation- Disrupting the Status Quo Headquarters Gleanster, LLC 825 Chicago Avenue - Suite C Evanston, Illinois 60202 For customer support, please contact support@gleanster.com or +1 877.762.9727 For sales information, please contact sales@gleanster.com or +1 877.762.9726 5 Powerful Strategies for Distributed Marketers ebook: The State of Customer Lifecycle Engagement in Mid-to-Large B2C Companies How Top Performers Drive Relevance and Revenue in Distributed Marketing Environments The Gleanster website also features carefully vetted white papers on these and other topics as well as Success Stories that bring the research to life with realworld case studies. To download Gleanster content, or to view the future research agenda, please visit www.gleanster.com. About Gleanster Gleanster benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives, delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions. Gleanster research can be downloaded for free. All of it. For more information, please visit www.gleanster.com.