Transforming Marketing Departments into Marketing Powerhouses

The role of marketing is constantly changing. As budgets shrink and demands grow, departments across the country are being carefully scrutinized for their effectiveness. Top executives are holding marketers more accountable, which means they must not only deliver results, but also find ways to measure the actual bottom-line impact of their marketing initiatives.

Previously, the success of an initiative was primarily judged on the tangible deliverables the marketing team produced, such as media coverage at an event. However, those days are long gone. As the discipline of marketing evolves, practitioners are becoming far more sophisticated in terms of their ability to deliver measurable results and a solid return on investment (ROI).In addition, advancements in technology also help elevate marketing to a more exact science by replacing campaign-by-campaign reporting with the ability to establish meaningful metrics at the beginning of a mar-comm program, at key points throughout its execution, and at the program's conclusion. Such technology allows marketing teams to look at campaign performance in real-time, evaluate the success or failure of a particular initiative, and make changes accordingly.

As the trend toward merging marketing "creativity" with "science" continues, more companies are expanding their marketing departments to include a marketing operations management (M.O.M.) function, which directly links its marketing programs to concrete business results. Adding marketing operations management to a company's marketing mix enables it to run its marketing department as a viable, accountable business unit within the organization where people, processes and technology are fully leveraged to help make marketing outcomes more predictable.

The Benefits of Marketing Operations Management (M.O.M)

Marketing operations management is an emerging discipline that is growing both in popularity and in practice as more companies struggle with ways to optimally leverage their department's shrinking resources. As more organizations are discovering, implementing mar-comm operations management into a company's infrastructure can help transform a department into a powerhouse.

How do marketing departments go from practiced to powerful?

M.O.M "builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing an organization's marketing strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting and reporting." The obvious desired outcome of M.O.M. is to achieve a measurable return on marketing investment (ROMI). To achieve ROMI, a "marketing dashboard" of sorts must be created, which enables employees to utilize technology and metrics to monitor the status of all ongoing marketing initiatives at any given time.

With mar-comm activities being evaluated in real-time and directly linked to business results, "marketing departments are in the perfect position to influence strategic decisions and help increase organizational revenue, decrease costs and maintain high levels of customer and employee satisfaction." [2]

Overall, building a solid marketing operations infrastructure facilitates informed decision-making and accountability within an organization.

Aside from the many benefits, the in-house execution of mar-comm operations can be costly to manage and is often outside the company's business scope. Because of this, many Fortune 500 companies are turning to third party service providers, to outsource components of their operations.

Improve Your Marketing Efficiency with Archway

Fortune 500 companies are turning to Archway Marketing Services to help them manage their marketing operations. After doing this for more than 55 years, Archway has perfected outsourced marketing operations management and has leveraged its knowledge across a variety of clients and industries. Allowing Archway to do what it does best frees up companies to do what they do best - grow their bottom lines.

Archway offers end-to-end marketing operations management, providing streamlined processes with automated technology to eliminate unnecessary costs, speed time-to-market, and improve brand experience. As a business partner, Archway provides the decision support tools that executives need to gain instant access to data that determines the overall effectiveness of a marketing initiative.

Archway's marketing operations management services include:

• Business Assessments
• Market Planning
• Sales Portals
• Product Procurement
• Vendor Management
• Fulfillment Services
• Logistics Management
• Reporting and Analytics
• Decision Support Tools