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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Simple launches in EMEA to help CMOs claw back cost of marketing

LONDON – 10 October 2018: Australia-based marketing technology company Simple has opened a London office and announced its EMEA management team a month after an investment round worth AUD $17m to expand its Intelligent Marketing Platform globally.

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6 signs the only good CMO is a growth CMO

Growth CMOs are all the rage. Is it because so many brand owners need to show shareholders quarterly growth? Is it because digital marketing is so measurable and data so available that they have attracted increasing budget share away from branding channels into trackable ones? Is it because growth hacking is slowly spreading from the low-budget, digital-only domain of the technology startup into mainstream marketing teams? Or that the “hockey-stick” growth some of these startups can show has made predictable, slower, long-term growth look so 20th-century? Probably, it’s all of the above.

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How to Build a Better Marketing Plan with Simple

Marketers spend a lot of their time planning. Talk to some marketers, and it feels like that’s all they do: plan out the year; set out the quarter; get into the nitty-gritty of the major themes and campaigns; schedule, brief and co-ordinate the agency work; review and plan again. But how can you spend less time on the admin, and more time on the necessary strategic thinking?

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6 Essential Elements for Cross-Functional Marketing Team Success

Cross-functional teams were once the domain of short-term or discrete projects – set up for a few months or a couple of years, and disbanded once the job was done. But the need for greater agility and responsiveness and an increased focus on the customer is driving structural change in organisations and their marketing teams. Executives know that functional silos slow the flow of information and make collaboration more difficult. Accordingly, businesses and their marketing teams are increasingly being reorganised into multi-disciplinary units focused on customer segments or journeys.

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5 Ways Marketing Team Structures are Changing in 2019

It’s becomede rigeurfor marketing team structures to change every couple of years, if not more frequently. These restructures can be as simple as a slight re-organisation to accommodate the addition of a new capability, or as complicated as a spill that requires everyone to reapply for their job.

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5 Tips for Buying Martech that Saves You Time

If you look at all the separate individual platforms or SaaS systems companies are investing in, teams are losing about five hours a week just by logging in and going into those separate systems. That’s not including time spent attempting to create insights from an excess of data.

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5 Tips for a Great Introduction to Marketing Operations

Introducing a marketing operations (or marketing resource management, aka 'MRM') system to your organisation takes a bit of planning. This is because there are usually many stakeholders, both from within and outside marketing, that will need to use your chosentool if your organisation is to get the full benefits.

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5 Steps to Visibility: the Holy Grail of Marketing

“The power of visibility can never be underestimated.”Comedian Margaret Cho may have been talking about bigger life issues when she said those words, but the same holds true when it comes to marketing visibility and the corporate world. When you can see something, you know it happened. You can assess it. You can measure it. You can manage it. And ultimately, you can improve it. But for many companies, marketing visibility is not easy to achieve. Marketers and their suppliers and agencies forma complexecosystem: an enterprise team of 30 people might have 20 agencies supplying it with public relations activity, to social media, content marketing, data management, strategy, brand advertising, media buying, and more.

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5 Steps to Designing an Effective Marketing Operations Implementation

The effective management of marketing resources is an omnipresent challenge in corporations, according to Kerry-Ann Benton, who has been involved with marketing resource management in many guises during her marketing career with a number of large enterprise marketing teams. A former senior marketing planning manager, Kerry-Ann has faced the familiar challenge of how to efficiently plan and deliver marketing work from a centralised marketing team through a broad-ranging national network of outlets, encompassing multiple media channels.

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Why AI is Too Important to Leave to Data Scientists

Marketers cannot leave data scientists to apply artificial intelligence to marketing data without themselves understanding how the technology works, or they risk misunderstanding their markets, customers and their motivations, a senior Microsoft executive has warned.

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The Key to Managing Operational Change in Marketing

“Most people don’t like change,” according to leadership guru John Maxwell. “They revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings. “For that reason, when good leaders prepare to take action or make changes, they take people through a process to get them ready for it.” Change is a constant in marketing today, according to Norma Abeyasekera, co-founder and principal of transformation consultancy Abey Abey Consulting, who quoted Maxwell in a presentation about managing operational transformation in marketing at Simple’s panel discussion, “Delivering Value in a Disrupted Marketing World”.

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4 Things We’ve Learned from Ongoing Global Financial Scandals

In 2019 there are some massive global issues for financial services marketers that will not go away. Every major market, from Europe to the US to Australia, seems to be affected.

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Managing brand personality across channels crucial to trust: RMIT

Media disruption is impacting the habits of some audiences as often as every three months, with students reacting to trends and changing the way they use or consume social media as often as once a quarter. It’s a stark warning for marketing teams, who shouldn’t assume that because a marketing channel was effective two years ago, it should continue to be used in the same way, according to RMIT associate director of digital communications, Corinna Maloney.

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5 Signs Your Marketing Planning Process Needs an Update

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” That’s the claim of time management guru Alan Lakein. So why don’t more marketers look forward to planning with a sense of anticipation rather than a sense of dread?

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5 Reasons to Restructure Marketing into Cross-Functional Teams This Year

Is your marketing department organised in cross-functional teams focused on customer segments and journeys? Or do your marketers work in functional silos with all the digital marketers together, separate brand and data teams, a content marketing silo, and so on?

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5 Best Practices for Managing Marketing Approvals

Nine out of 10 marketers sayapproval delaysare the top reason they miss deadlines. And while this might seem like a passing problem, it doesn’t take long to become embedded in the culture of an organisation. Another deadline missed because no one’s managing your marketing approvals? Nevermind — there’s always tomorrow.

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4 Ways AI Will Make Creative Briefs Better

Ad man David Ogilvy once famously said: “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” A tight creative brief to agency creative teams eliminates time-wasters and tangential information, making it faster and easier to get from the starting point to an effective creative idea. So does a tight marketing brief from marketing teams to agencies.Rightly or wrongly, for many marketers, the task of writing the brief is often perceived as being time-consuming, repetitive and overly administrative — in short, it feels a long way from being the conduit to creativity it should be. In fact, it’s one area of marketing calling out for the elimination of the unnecessary to unleash the extraordinary.

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3 Things I Hate About Marketing

How much time does your marketing team spend doing marketing? If half your time is wasted planning campaigns in spreadsheets, briefing and amending creative via convoluted email trails, or creating slide presentations that justify what marketing actually does all day, this report is for you.

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The Importance of Online Proofing for Marketing Teams

We all know that taking a marketing asset from the conception stage right through to it being published can become complicated. You typically have several rounds of review and feedback by different stakeholders before an asset is approved. Then you also have external approvalsto contend with before you can finally publish. As a result, you need to ensure that your review and approval workflow is as efficient and streamlined as possible to eliminate any snags along the way and make sure the project keeps moving forward. And here, emails and spreadsheets are simply no longer good enough, especially if you?re working on multiple projects at any given time.

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4 Things We Learned About Implementing Agile Marketing

There’s no doubt agile marketing is a hot topic in marketing circles, and it’s easy to see why. In a world that’s moving faster, agile marketing helps build nimbleness and adaptability into marketing teams so they can do things faster, control risk and take into account available data to make better decisions, and ultimately build better value for customers.

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4 Sure-Fire Ways to Improve Your Agency Relationships

Looking for better work from your creative agency? This can lead marketing teams to those all-consuming, headline-grabbing agency pitches that end up being expensive, time-consuming and inherently risky beauty pageants. Enlightened pitch consultants will say they should be avoided if possible. But that means learning how to work better with your agencies in the first place.

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4 Higher Education Marketing Technology Trends

“There’s a tsunami coming.” So said John Hennessy, President of Stanford University in a now-famous interview withThe New Yorkerin 2012. He was referring to how technology was about to radically change higher educationdelivery. But he could equally have been talking about the impending shifts in higher education marketing.

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4 Key Issues for Marketers Managing the Customer Experience

It was exciting to get the results from Simple’s recent research study,Marketing Operations in the Age of Intelligence— and have it confirmed that in many cases, marketers are now becoming the custodian of customer experiences rather than just brand communications. With almost 2 in 3 chief marketing officers and marketing teams taking on responsibility for managing the customer experience, it’s more than a nascent trend – and fast becoming business as usual. But what does that mean for marketing teams already overwhelmed by a mountain of processes, data, content and competition? From my discussions with busy CMOs, it adds up to 4 things:

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3 Tips for Retail Marketing Success From ex-Swisse CEO Radek Sali

Radek Sali, the former chief executive of Swisse, gave a great presentation in Melbourne at a recent retail event about how applying the wellness message to his own corporate culture, as well as the Swisse brand, paid dividends.

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3 Mistakes to Avoid at Your In-House Agency

As big brands like Optus and CUB embrace the concept of bringing creative work in-house, the discussion around the rise of in-house studios and internal agencies becomes a hot topic once again. It’s a hard-fought battleground: on one side are the independent creative agency staffers and freelancers, decrying the drop in creative standards they say will inevitably result; on the other, the smart marketers who know that in this day and age, they really don’t need to pay $100 to have a word in the headline of an ad changed, and they don’t need to wait 3 days to get it done.

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10 Steps to Refreshing Your Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are the cornerstone of any successful brand. For any marketing team — especially as your company grows — it would be impossible to build a consistent brand without them. And without documented, accessible and well-communicated brand guidelines, your marketing team, internal creative agency and external agency partners will struggle with the look and feel of every new project.