collaborative campaign management

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© 2011 SAP AG 1

Collaborative Campaign

Management: Using Local

Knowledge to Increase Brand

Value

Applies to:

SAP Customer Relationship Management. For more information, visit the EDW homepage

Summary

Involving distributed marketing organizations and channel partners, who are closer to the customers, in a marketing campaign not only enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of campaigns. It also improves the customer experience and, in turn, the brand’s value.

Author: Vikas Venugopal

Company: SAP

Created on: 25 April 2011

Author Bio

Vikas Venugopal is a product manager for SAP CRM Partner Channel Management with focus on Channel Marketing.

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/edw

Collaborative Campaign Management: Using Local Knowledge to Increase Brand Value


© 2011 SAP AG 2

Table of Contents

Executive Summary: Harnessing the Insight of the Distributed Marketing Team .............................................. 3

Increasing Brand Value and Improving the Customer Experience Through Collaborative Campaign Management ....................................................................................................................................................... 3

What Is a Brand Touch Point? ........................................................................................................................ 3

Empowering the Extended Sales Organization .............................................................................................. 3

Leveraging Strategic Insights at the Local Level ............................................................................................ 4

Collaborative Campaign Management ............................................................................................................... 4

Business Benefits ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Control and Visibility .................................................................................................................................................... 5

Best Practices .............................................................................................................................................................. 5

Collaboration ................................................................................................................................................................ 5

Leveraging Intimate Market Knowledge ....................................................................................................................... 6

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................... 6

Related Content .................................................................................................................................................. 7

Copyright............................................................................................................................................................. 8



© 2011 SAP AG 3

Executive Summary: Harnessing the Insight of the Distributed Marketing Team

The importance of “touch points” is key in the discussion of brand value. Every interaction that customers have with a brand can build the brand’s value – be it marketing campaigns, the product itself, internal sales representatives, or channel partners, among many others. Marketing campaigns form a significant part of this “total customer experience,” which in turn affects a brand’s value. A strong campaign initiated by the brand owner can be substantially more effective when the message is relevant to the target audience – whether that audience is categorized by region, demographics, or industry niche. That’s why it’s important, where possible, to involve distributed marketing organizations and channel partners, who are closer to the customers, in the campaign. This approach not only enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of campaigns, but also improves the customer experience and, in turn, the brand’s value.

For campaigns that are run in conjunction with internal and external distributed organizations, a standardized collaborative campaign management process can support brand consistency while involving these stakeholders. With their involvement, brand owners can significantly boost campaign effectiveness by taking advantage of local insights to tailor the campaign to a particular market condition. The key is to standardize processes sufficiently to ensure consistent messages throughout your extended organization, but to allow enough flexibility for the partners on the periphery to add value through localized knowledge.

Increasing Brand Value and Improving the Customer Experience Through Collaborative Campaign Management

Executives in any industry will tell you that they sincerely care about their customers; after all, satisfied customers are the source of a company’s long-term success. A recent SAP survey of 40 CMOs (“The CMO Agenda 2011” study) ranked “total customer experience” as the number-one item on their 2011 agenda.

1

The second item on their list was “brand or brand management–related topics.” Further, Web 2.0 technology is driving a move from the classic “push” in communication and sales to “pull.”

What this means is that now more than ever, it’s essential to be closer to the customer, to understand market trends, and to take a more decentralized approach to marketing and branding activities. Paying attention to the various “touch points” throughout the customer experience is an important way to sharpen the focus.

What Is a Brand Touch Point?

Every brand-related action, tactic, and strategy that touches customers or stakeholders is a brand touch point. A brand touch point could take place during the prepurchase experience (advertising, coupons, and so forth); the purchase experience (point of sale or sales representative, for instance); or postpurchase experience (such as product performance and service).

As the “face” of your brand, therefore, brand touch points have a profound impact on brand value and the customer experience. Therefore, it is critical that everyone responsible for executing marketing and sales activities understand the fundamental brand positioning, and that they present messages consistently. This is true for stakeholders throughout the organization and the extended marketing and sales network.

When your company manages them well, these stakeholders can both reinforce your brand and serve as a tremendous source of strategic insight. Because they are in closer contact with the customer, they can help you react to rapidly evolving demands, and recognize and act on market trends.

As every marketer knows too well, customers and prospects tune out the great majority of the information we provide them. Leveraging the insights of the people closest to the customer has never been more important for shaping relevant messaging that the customers do not, or rather, cannot, ignore.

Empowering the Extended Sales Organization

The first step in empowering these key resources is to educate them about the products and services – as most successful companies already do – and help them imbibe the core values of the brand. These resources might include internal sales representative or call center agents, for example, as well as external parties such as channel partners and outsourced telemarketers. But even when this step is executed

1 Strauss, R.E., Heydecke, J., The CMO Agenda 2011, Thought Leadership Paper, CMO Community,

November 2010.



© 2011 SAP AG 4

perfectly, it is not realistic to expect that each of these people will consistently reflect and convey the same core values when they connect with the customers. To achieve this consistency, most companies use strict or rigid activities designed with the brand’s value in mind. One key drawback of enforcing strict activities or rigid processes, however, is a level of inflexibility that often prevents these key representatives from adding value through their own insight.

Leveraging Strategic Insights at the Local Level

Introducing more flexible processes allows marketing organizations to preserve and enhance the core brand – no matter how far removed the customer is from the company – while leveraging insights at a local level. Consider the example of an international travel agency spread across a considerable geographical area and supported by a mixture of owner-operated and partner-operated sales points. To improve sales, the central marketing organization decides to launch a new “summer sale” campaign. Given the disparate markets (geographic, demographic, or others), holiday preferences will vary. This means that the campaign must have a central theme that aligns with both the core brand values of the travel agency and with the “summer sale” concept. Yet the distributed marketing and sales partners need the ability to customize the campaigns to increase effectiveness in their specific markets.

Allowing distributed marketing and sales organizations to tailor campaigns to their target customers can have a big impact. If a customer’s experience with a brand begins with the prepurchase phase, then marketing communications during that initial phase must emphasize relevant and consistent content to start out the customer’s experience on a positive note.

But such an approach brings along some complexities associated with involving multiple partners in multiple local markets. A perfect example is when a brand owner conducts a campaign with partners via a non-centralized media such as letters. The process of personalizing letters can be cumbersome and slow, with the added difficulty involved in extracting valuable analytical data at different stages of the campaign. Partners often lack adequate processes, which can reduce the efficiency of the overall campaign.

Collaborative Campaign Management

Collaborative campaign management processes allow corporate marketing organizations to more efficiently collaborate and coordinate marketing programs with distributed marketing organizations, both internal and external. These collaborative processes enable marketing with and marketing through your extended marketing and sales organization. In a simple “with marketing” scenario, marketing campaigns are triggered and controlled centrally by your company. Channel partners and distributed marketing organizations provide key inputs to the campaign, including which specific customers to focus on, which products or services to promote, and so on. This provides a potent mix of central control and flexibility on the peripheries (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 "With" Marketing



© 2011 SAP AG 5

On the other hand, “through marketing” empowers your channel partners and distributed marketing organizations even further. In this scenario, you provide them with marketing collateral and other supporting tools and processes to trigger and execute marketing campaigns themselves, based on their specific local market needs. When your company empowers stakeholders to initiate and execute campaigns at the periphery, you are enabling them to make use of localized market insight to create messages with heightened relevance. This way, you can proactively address market needs while gathering insight on trends that may be even more universal (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 "Through" Marketing

Business Benefits

The key business benefits of collaborative campaign management encompass both the tangible and the intangible – but all leading to profitable demand generation. For example, SAP has found that its automotive customers have realized an average 5% to 10% improvement in sales by running a collaborative campaign with dealers when compared to nonparticipating dealers. The benefits can be considered in terms of control and visibility, best practices, collaboration, and leveraging of valuable insights.

Control and Visibility

A key requirement with any campaign process is the ability to control that process (especially when executing a campaign with external parties). In addition, you need to have visibility into all the activities undertaken with respect to the campaign by each of involved stakeholder. With up-to-date access to campaign-related data, central managers can make dynamic, informed decisions to improve campaign efficiency and effectiveness.

Best Practices

Typically, processes employed by distributed marketing organizations and channel partners are less mature than those of the brand owner. For the brand owner, it is imperative that every representative at every touch point is working at the highest possible efficiency with the best time-tested processes. By educating all resources and bringing them into a common process, the company can ensure more control, involvement, and efficiency.

Collaboration

The first of the more intangible benefits that have an eventual impact on a brand owner’s top and bottom lines is involvement of all the company’s representatives in working towards a common goal. By collaborating with people who have close proximity to the market, a brand owner can extend its market reach



© 2011 SAP AG 6

considerably within the context of the campaign. A collaborative approach also brings a sense of ownership to the people working at the periphery (especially the external ones), and motivates them as they begin to feel like a part of the company’s activities.

Leveraging Intimate Market Knowledge

Close proximity to the customer also means that a lot of valuable information resides with the distributed marketing organization. Intimate knowledge of individual markets can bring in valuable inputs that can help shape the brand owner’s longer-term strategies. These inputs might include ideas for products or services supplemental to those the company pushes through the campaign, or suggestions for expanding into market segments that may have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Conclusion

By engaging channel partners and distributed marketing organizations, and harnessing their insights, collaborative campaign management maximizes the value of various brand touch points. A centralized process that is flexible enough to engage channel partners and distributed marketing organizations helps influence the total customer experience during the prepurchase and postpurchase phases. This helps maximize revenues by driving up the brand value and by increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities.



© 2011 SAP AG 7

Related Content

Collaborative Campaign Management

The "CMO Agenda 2011" .... Not Social Media, but rather Total Customer Experience being top of mind!

SAP CRM Partner Channel Management

For more information, visit the EDW homepage

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/19536

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/22510

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/index

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/edw



© 2011 SAP AG 8

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