Marketing Centre of Excellence offers below benefits to brands that adopt it.
Integrated marketing services for increased marketing efficiency
One of the fundamental reasons for the need for a Marketing Centre of Excellence is that, when marketing efforts are fragmented, it results in loss of overall marketing efficiency.
Let’s take a simple scenario. As a brand’s marketer, you may be working with the same agency or with two different agencies to drive organic traffic to your website as well as to track and report visitor behavior.
Unless the teams work in tandem, efficiency loss is inevitable. Let’s get deeper in to this.
Your organic traffic generation team may keep generating traffic for your desired keywords and the analytics team may keep reporting you on visitor behavior
As long as you get significant organic traffic and timely analytics reports, you must be thinking both the teams are doing their jobs fine.
The organic traffic generation team will only be more concerned about finding how much traffic the targeted keywords are driving to the website and the analytics team will be content with delivering reports needed by various stakeholders
However in reality, traffic from some keywords may result in conversion and traffic from some keywords may result in bounce. Unless the traffic generation team gets insights about this, they cannot optimize their efforts in targeting different keywords or content.
Only when the analytics team know there is an angle to this, they will be able to provide this insight to the team. Mostly this goes off their radar completely.
This is a very basic example of why teams need to work in an integrated manner to ensure the organization’s overall goals are achieved.
In Marketing Centre of Excellence, every team understands how the other teams’ output will impact the final outcomes and complement it with their deliveries. By this way, the Marketing Centre of Excellence increases marketing efficiency.
In most organizations velocity of marketing operations get hampered due to process inefficiencies when multiple vendors are involved.
Let us take a look at the classic example of how a lack of standardized reusability process in content marketing function impacts the marketing velocity of the entire organization.
Imagine there are two organizations that want to generate tonnes of content so that they can glut the internet and generate traffic.
However both the organizations have only a very small content team that is capable of generating only one or two high quality articles a week. At the outset, this may look insufficient.
The organization that lacks a standardized process for reusing the articles may have to live with just the two articles without achieving the intended goal.
However, the organization that has a standardized process for repurposing one original content in hundred different ways and distribute across different platforms like LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook etc. will get 100X velocity
This is just an example of how velocity can be created or lost by a simple process. Throughout the marketing organization there are so many processes that can be standardized to facilitate reuse and impact velocity.
In, Marketing Centre of Excellence, all processes are water tight and completely standardized to ensure the overall velocity is increased.
Brief to production via SPOC for shrinking communication gap and greater goal alignment
When marketing is done in a fragmented manner where you have multiple point solution agencies handling specific sub-functions within marketing, communication gap may arise resulting in inconsistent outcomes.
For instance, when your social media and digital campaigns are managed by different vendors, your customers might see inconsistent communication on the two. Both these vendors may be projecting different benefits of your products resulting in dissonance.
However in Marketing Centre of Excellence, there will be a single window for “Brief to Production”. The Single Point of Contact will get an alignment with the brief initiator in terms of brief understanding, success metrics, TAT and dependencies.
Once an alignment in understanding is achieved, the SPOC will brief the cross- functional team managing different channels and ensures the original brief is passed along with clear expectations from each team.
Any clarification required will be instantly flagged off and sorted out to make sure the output is in line with the expectations.
Having a single window for brief to production ensures the communication gap throughout the delivery chain is eliminated and greater alignment in terms of communication and goals is achieved.
Common marketing and tech goals for annihilating friction in tech priorities
One of the never ending conflicts in most organizations is the friction between the marketing and technology teams.
As far marketing team is concerned, the only stakeholder that they can bank on for technology needs is the tech team. However, for tech team, marketing team is yet another internal client such as finance or supply chain or operations team.
The marketing and technology teams differ at the culture level and have different priorities.
When tech team has multiple internal clients and steep SLAs and TATs, many of the times either the marketing requests get de-prioritized or not delivered on marketer’s expected time resulting in negatively impacting marketing efforts.
At Marketing Centre of Excellence, the tech function has only one client i.e.) the marketing team. This eliminates the team level priority conflicts upfront.
Moreover, the marketing team’s priority becomes the priority of tech team and the SLA / TAT for each are pre-determined as well. This ensures the marketing team gets all tech related deliveries on time with ZERO conflict or resistance.
Blended people, process and tech costs for rock- bottom pay-out
Here is how a lot of on-premise MarTech platforms are bought and used by brands.
Brands buy platform licenses, usually in lots. Pays license fee, many times perpetual.
Brands implement and customize the platform with the help of the platform vendor’s professional services or an implementation partner. Pays for implementation.
Post implementation, to ensure availability of the platform, brands opt for Level 1 and Level 2 technical support. Pays for support.
In order to ensure regular usage of the procured platform, brands either hire resources that are skilled in using the platform or engages with a services partner. Pays for resources / services.
Despite all these, the brands’ marketing team needs to conceptualize marketing brief and translate them in to a technical brief that the platform end users can understand and implement. To do this regularly, associate level marketing resource(s) may be needed. Pays for the resource(s).
At Marketing Centre of Excellence, there are no separate costs for licenses, implementation, technical support, functional maintenance and marketing operations.
The clients are charged only for the license and services provided using these platforms. This eliminates the cost associated with implementation and technical maintenance i.e.) L1 and L2 support resulting in significantly lesser pay out.
Marketing Centre of Excellence is all about agility to maximize velocity, congruence and efficiency at lesser cost.
As uncertain any business is, so is the marketing. The amount of effort required for marketing a brand to its prospects and customers is determined by both internal as well as external variables.
Internal variables could be launch of a new product, upgradation of an existing product, acquiring a new company etc. External variables could be political, economic or even a pandemic like Covid-19.
Marketers need the flexibility to upsize or downsize the team as the situation demands. Most of the engagements usually don’t support such flexibility.
However, Marketing Centre of Excellence offers this flexibility to brands. When your business needs to quickly scale marketing efforts, we can upsize the size of the team.
Similarly, when your business needs to go easy on marketing and cut costs, we can downsize the team in a short notice thereby offering you utmost flexibility.