When you hear the word “marketing,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe it’s words like “advertisements” or “commercials.” Or maybe you think of Don Draper in the television show Mad Men, working in his corner office in New York, developing a new slogan for a cigarette company. The reality is that marketing has changed significantly since the Mad Men days. It's more complex, uses different technology, and adds new channels every few years.
With changing workflows, priorities, and opportunities to leverage content to connect with consumers, marketing teams and their managers often struggle to organize and track their efforts. A Marketing Resource Management (MRM) tool can provide the solution they need. In this article, we’ll define what an MRM tool is, and explain how they work and how they can be connected with your Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to increase your marketing team’s efficiency.
What is an MRM and How Does it Work?
With the ever-growing complexity of marketing operations, marketing teams, managers, and departments need what’s called a “single source of truth.” In other words, they need all their critical information and content to be housed in one consistent place, rather than looking through and reconciling data on multiple systems.
MRMs act as the single source of truth for all things marketing. They allow marketing managers to make high-level decisions, assign budgets to emerging priorities, give tasks to employees and freelancers, and more. They also allow marketing teams to manage various channels, find and use the digital assets they need, and easily reference documented standards like brand guidelines and campaign strategies.
Essentially, an MRM is an end-to-end system in which marketers can facilitate their work. Strategic and financial planning, ideation, content creation, editing, approval, and quality control are all components of these systems. An effective MRM system can manage almost every workflow necessary for a marketing team's success.
Connecting DAM and MRM Systems
While all the workflows described above are essential, successful marketing campaigns are built on great content (i.e. digital assets). It’s why content creators are hired and what drives successful analytics and generates a return on investment for the organization.
The same is true for effective and efficient MRM systems since most of them are built on the foundation of a strong and organized DAM system. The purpose of an MRM system is to simplify an organization’s tech stack by cutting down on the number of unique systems used to manage all the different marketing activities going on in a given day. Because of this, it's wise to determine if the DAM platform you currently use to store, organize, and manage digital assets has an MRM component that can seamlessly integrate with your current ways of managing digital assets.
If you can build your MRM on top of an existing DAM, you’ll need to maintain the effectiveness of your DAM program while organizing your marketing information in your MRM. An MRM is useless without well-organized and searchable assets for your team to use so focus your efforts on your DAM system first to achieve the best results.
Conclusion
If you need help preparing your DAM system to build an MRM system on top of it, contact Stacks! We’re happy to help you get control of your assets in a scalable and structured way that will unlock all kinds of possibilities for the rest of your tech stack.
