Choosing the Right Marketing Asset Management Solution-Part 1
Choosing a Marketing Asset Management Technology: To Make the Right Choice, Ask the Right Questions
Companies of all kinds are turning to marketing asset management (“MAM”) solutions to improve marketing productivity. If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably decided that a marketing asset management solution may be right for your company, and you’ve probably done the basic research to understand how MAM marketing solutions work, looking at Forrester distributed marketing content, the Gartner MRM magic quadrant, Frost & Sullivan’s MPOS report and more. The next step is to evaluate specific MAM solutions and solution providers, and this is not a process that should be taken lightly.
Implementing a marketing asset management solution not only represents a significant financial investment, it also involves changing the processes you use to acquire, manage, and distribute marketing materials. In some cases, it will also change how you create and execute direct marketing campaigns and programs. So, before selecting a marketing asset management solution, it’s important to define what you want the MAM solution to do and to ask prospective solution providers some critical questions.
There are four fundamental issues that should be addressed in any company’s MAM evaluation process.
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How will the marketing asset management / distributed marketing software solution be used? (What kinds of single and multi-channel marketing materials will be included in, and managed through, the MAM solution?)
In this blog series we’ll briefly discuss some of the major factors you should consider as you think through these four core issues of:
Solution Use and Scope
The first fundamental question to ask when evaluating a marketing asset management solution is: How will the MAM solution be used? Put another way, the question is: What kinds of materials will the MAM solution be used to manage? How you answer this basic question will determine how many and what kinds of individuals will need access to the MAM system, and it will greatly influence what functional capabilities you will need from your MAM system.
At first glance, the answer to this question probably seems obvious. As the name indicates, marketing asset management solutions were originally designed to manage “marketing materials.” Materials that are included in MAM solutions involve multiple channels including email, landing pages, digital display adverting, marketing collateral documents, promotional items, point-of-sale materials, print advertisements, social marketing posts, mobile marketing and POS and signage. Clearly, most companies that implement MAM solutions will use them to manage at least some these basic kinds of marketing materials.
When you’re evaluating potential MAM solutions, however, stop for a moment to consider what other kinds of materials you could use your MAM system to manage. If you can expand the scope of your MAM solution to include a wide range of marketing channels, you can increase the financial return you will earn from your MAM investment. Today, companies are using MAM solutions to manage a wide variety of materials, as the diagram below illustrates.
Next to managing basic marketing materials, the most common way to use a marketing asset management solution is as a platform for creating and executing marketing campaigns. When used for this purpose, the MAM solution will contain templates of campaign materials. For companies that sell through channel partners such as franchisees or resellers, this can be the most important use of the MAM solution.
If you plan to use your MAM solution as a direct marketing platform, you’ll want to look for some specific capabilities. For example, does the MAM solution enable users to purchase lists from commercial list providers? Does the solution enable users to upload mail/e-mail lists they’ve built on their own or obtained from other sources? Does the solution provider automate marketing fulfillment services and streamline payment processing?
Some companies are also using their MAM solutions to manage and distribute sales support materials such as sales presentations and sales proposal templates. We’ve also seen companies use their MAM solutions to manage documents that are not related to marketing or sales. Some examples include technical/maintenance documentation and administrative/human resources documents. Finally, we’ve seen a few companies extend their MAM systems to manage the procurement of general business supplies such as office supplies and maintenance supplies.
When considering this issue, what’s important is to keep your options open and ask your prospective solution providers if they can support these other kinds of materials.
In the next blog in this series we’ll look at the importance of reliability and responsiveness.
For More Information
If you are in the midst of evaluating a marketing asset management solution, or if you’d just like to know more about how marketing asset management solutions work and what benefits they provide, contact Saepio at 877-468-7613 or email sales@saepio.com. Be sure to ask about Saepio’s resource kits that can provide worksheets to help you with your decision process.
© This document contains copyrighted materials from PointBalance, Inc. Saepio also contributed to the content creation and editing.