Marketing organisations are challenged to ensure that their spend delivers on the organisations brand awareness and revenue growth objectives and the money is spent in an effective manner with no over-budget surprises. As a result they look for significant improvement in the following marketing planning areas:

Strategic planning

Ensure that various stakeholders have full access to the objectives and schedules of the marketing plan and collaboratively and transparently work together to create and approve such plans. Marketing teams then use the approved marketing plan to design and execute their marketing activities. This ensures complete alignment between the marketing plans and corporate goals and objectives.

Operational planning

Provide a consistent way to integrate budgeting, campaign planning and spend tracking into a cohesive process. This requires:

• Marketing managers to define planned marketing programs and integrated campaigns.
• Ensure that budgets are appropriately allocated to each campaign in the marketing plan.
• Program spending is tracked for each plan/campaign at a detailed level.
• Information on planned vs. committed vs. available funds for any plan/campaign at any given time is easily available.

As a result, all stakeholders have detailed visibility into the execution of the plan, can track marketing spend by cost categories, by customer segments, by products and many other parameters, and find it easy to realign marketing budgets mid-year due to changing market conditions.

Assetlink’s Marketing Operations Management (MOM) suite enables the marketing organisation to address strategic planning, as well as operational planning requirements. Some refer to MOM as Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) or Marketing Resource Management (MRM). Capabilities of the Assetlink Planning Solution include:

Define and track marketing plans with a list of marketing programs and integrated campaigns

For each marketing program or integrated campaign, identify sources of funding and capture all the marketing parameters such as products, target customer segments, marketing channels, distribution channels, marketing objectives, expected and actual results as well as the execution timelines. This information automates the creation and updates to the marketing calendars and is used to generate a variety of marketing reports