Blog

From marketing operations best practices to industry insights, the Simple blog delves into all things relating to managing marketing projects, brand assets and technology.

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A partnership to empower marketing, for a brilliant customer experience

London And South Africa, March 4th 2021:The CRM Team, Expert Implementers Of World-Leading Customer Engagement Technology, And Simple MRM Ltd, Enablers Of Result-Driven Marketing And Customer Experience, Announce A Favourable Partnership. The alliance is a natural fit between two Microsoft partners focused on transforming the customer experience through technology. Properly coordinated sales and marketing improves engagement and advocacy with a brand, ultimately increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

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Agile Marketing Software: How Simple Supports your Agile Process

Business professor Leon C Megginson’s famous words sum up the conundrum facing a growing number of marketing leaderswho are turning toagile marketing processesto help them prosper in a disrupted world:“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”And just as inflexible marketing processes need updating, theproject management toolsteams use must be able to accommodate agile as well as traditional marketing workflows. Simple’sagile marketing softwarecombines the visibility of a centralised marketing platform with the flexibility of an agile approach to help your team be faster and more effective.

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Why Intellectual Property is Crucial to your Brand’s Marketing Success

It should be a simple matter to get a copy of a brand adfrom the brand owner, right? Um, not so fast. As the Simple team discovered recently, whether a brandowns the intellectual property in their advertising, and how invested the marketing team is in itsown digital asset management, can make it either a 2-minute request or something that wastes time and takes days.

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Six Ways to Smash the Silo Effect that Plagues Marketing

Most customers are on first-name terms with the Silo Effect: you know, when you call your insurance company to discuss your home insurance policy and find if you also want to take a car insurance policy you must provide all your personal details again to another department before you can even get down to giving them your business. It’s kind of annoying.

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6 Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing Agile Marketing

Most chief executives wouldn’t even consider asking their head of human resources to run product a couple of days a week. Nor do you generally see the head of finance running public relations part-time, or any other role for which they aren’t equipped. But in marketing, we regularly encounter IT Agile coaches or scrum masters asked to ‘teach’ the marketing team how toimplement agile marketing— without any training on how marketing actually works, and often in addition to their day job.

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Agile Marketing: 101 Things to Know Before You Go Agile

Heard of agile marketing? Wondering if you should try it with your marketing team?We’ve done the leg workand gathered together more than 100 need-to-knowinsights, statistics, observations and comments from manyof the giantsin the agile marketing community,to helpyou achievegreater agilityin your marketing team. Read on forfirst-hand experiences ofCMOs who have adopted agile marketing, definitions of all those strange-soundingagile terms and rituals, and insider tips on how to make agile marketing work in your organisation.

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The Creative Brief: How Cochlear Gave Consumers a Hearing Test in Disguise

Listed hearing implant maker Cochlear was a well-known name in Australia due partly to the long history of the company and its founder Graeme Clark, who developed and implanted the world’s first implantable hearing device in 1978.

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Case Study: Setting SOPs for Marketing and Creative Workflow in Simple

A major Australian bank was finding it challenging to keep track of all the requests for work coming into the marketing department, as well as monitoring the creativeworkflowthrough its internal design studio and external creative agencies. That lack of visibility and oversight was creating internal bottlenecks – the marketing team was struggling to prioritise marketing requests and manage internal resources properly. And the bank was not able to monitor how efficiently it was working with its external agencies.

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Five Reasons to get a Marketing Operations Platform (aka MRM) this year

Take a minute to think about this thorny marketing operations issue: how much of your team’s marketing activity is really aligned with your strategic goals? For one client, prior to its appointment of Simple, the answer to that question was 20 per cent. That’s right: 80% of their marketing activity was off-brief, misaligned or fell wide of the target in some way. That’s a lot of re-writing of briefs and re-creating of material; it’s a lot of wasted or misdirected time and effort; and it’s a lot of work that probably never saw the light of day. It probably also amounted to a whole lot of frustrated employees.

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The Death of the Spreadsheet Marketing Calendar

Managing all your marketing activity without a marketing calendar is a bit like having a dozen balls in the air and trying to guesshow fasteach one is spinningwhile riding a unicycleon a tightropeand belting out show tunes.

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How to Consolidate 4 of Your Marketing Tools with 1 Solution

Anyone who’s ever been part of a marketing team understands how chaotic it can be to execute on strategy. This only gets worse the larger your team gets. You end up withtool chaos— multiple logins, jumping in and out of different tools just to get work done. How good would it be to have just one central place to work from as a team? With a Marketing Operations Cloudplatform such asSimple, you can have one system of record and one place in which to get all of your marketing done. Here’s how to consolidate 4 of the existing marketing tools you use to get work done with Simple Admation Marketing Operational Solution.

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It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It

Many of today’s marketers spend their days, nights and weekends knee-deep in activities, campaigns and metrics which are broadly common across key verticals (finance, education, FMCG, etc) and audiences (B2B, B2C, P2P, etc).

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Episode 5: Marketing’s biggest friction point

He’s got a marketing track record that spans more than 25 years at the helm of some of the world’s largest and most successful brands and yet, for Alexander von Schirmeister, successful marketing comes down to one simple thing: good gut instinct.

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9 ways to modernise your marketing plan

From balancing your marketing mix to zero-based budgeting and feasibility checks – we talk with Jennifer Johnson (Rogue Consulting) and Kate Gunby (Guided by Numbers) to break down planning for the modern era. Watch it here

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MRM: The missing piece in your martech stack

Would you buy a car that had doors and a steering wheel but no engine? You could motor down hills and coast for a while on flat roads, but come to an uphill stretch and suddenly you’d find you’re at a standstill. Or spend millions on a complex engineering project only to leave out the critical piece?

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Simple and Solgari announce partnership

All-Channel Marketing Is A Beautiful Thing

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Brilliant creative briefs: how to get the best work from your agencies

We’ve all been there – you re-read a brief, it sounds spot-on and thenbam – you’re locked in an ongoing back-and-forth with your agency making countless changes and all of a sudden you’re hit with the realisation that this may never end.In thiswebcast, former global marketing and creative director for McDonald’s Joe Talcott, shares with us his top tips on how you can ‘brief brilliantly’ and get results.

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How Improving Marketing Ops Saved Us Millions And Made Time

The Australian Financial Services industry has been heavily scrutinised for the last two years by a Banking Royal Commission and regulators, which have identified deficiencies in operational risk management and financial advice businesses and caused the banks to pay billions of dollars in fines and remediation to affected customers. Against this backdrop, one of Australia’s “Big 4” banks wanted to overhaul its marketing risk and compliance management framework and optimise its creative agency cost base.

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I Once Knew a Marketer…

I once knew aMarketerwho promised me a chart to heaven, but took everyone through a matrix to hell. He had a romance with RACI, a penchant for PERT and a gal who loved GANTT. (Last I heard, he died and went to Excel.)

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The Transition to Agile Marketing: Be prepared!

Before you decide to implement an Agile Marketing process, it’s important to assess the benefit to your organisation of adopting Agile Marketing and your readiness for it — both from the point of view of your team and your organisation.

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It’s Marketing Resource Management… but not as we know it!

It’s always exciting in business when you see the value of a new opportunity, and I believe we’re witnessing the emergence and redefinition of a whole new category of marketing technology software — Marketing Operations Cloud2.0. The reason for this, if you’ll pardon the pun, is simple: due to the ever increasing number of digital channels companies still struggle to get a unified view of all their marketing activity, so they can understand which elements are performing, and which aren’t, and optimise it accordingly.

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Financial services brands get personal but need the tools to deliver

The increased level of personalisation now available to financial services brands through the responsiveness and immediacy of digital media and marketing channels is a double-edged sword.

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8 Simple Steps to Hack Agile Marketing

There’s a cult of ‘agility’ emerging in marketing as businesses look for ways to compress all elements of their go-to-market timeframe. Six to eight months to launch a major campaign is no longer acceptable. Marketing has become an always-on discipline, rather than something that happens in big bursts. But does greater agility have to mean the adoption of formal Agile Marketing processes? How much change do Agile processes require? Can you go agile with your existing team? How can you tailor Agile Marketing to suit your organisation’s needs?

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How Simple Streamlined this Marketing Workflow by 45%

We wanted to help marketers understand how streamlining their marketing workflows saves time. So we created a marketing workflow to describe the process of creating a marketing workflow. Then we asked one of our consultants to streamline it (see what we did there?). This is what happened.

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Inspiring Creative Briefs: Meet Graham, the Crash-Proof Man

Writing a brief that inspires a creative outcome is something with which many marketers struggle. In this blog series, we look at how award-winning creative campaigns go from brief to results. Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission nailed the creative brief by focusing on the insight that everyone is vulnerable to speed — whether they are ‘safe’ drivers or not — because our bodies simply cannot withstand impact forces of 30km/hour and above. The result? Meet Graham…

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Simple announces Intelligent Marketing Platform powered by Microsoft

Today marked an exciting development in the history of Simple! Simple’s CEO appeared onstage at Microsoft’s Business Forward customer event in Melbourne with James Phillips, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Applications Group, to announce that we are partnering with Microsoft and launching our new Intelligent Marketing Platform. Powered by Microsoft technology, our Intelligent Marketing Platform will transform how brands use artificial intelligence to create exceptional customer experiences. Read the announcement: