Marketing

The race to agile retail marketing

Mirko Holzer, CEO of BrandMaker, examines the three key areas retailers need to consider in the race to agile retail marketing.

Photo by istock.com

March 11, 2021

Over the past year, the marketing and sales pipeline and revenue forecasting at major retailers have been thrown into turmoil. As marketing teams rethink their marketing strategy and seek to fine-tune campaigns on the fly, marketing operations — often seen as a tactical/administrative process — has quickly come under the spotlight. Its potential to give global marketing teams the ability to work at an unprecedented pace with agility and scale has become both strategic and vital. Collaboration, automated workflows, campaign visibility, financial visibility and reporting — all are no longer 'nice to haves', they are quite literally mission critical.

Unforeseen changes and worldwide disruptions require retail marketers to respond at a moment's notice. Marketing teams must plan to quickly and effectively and be able to know when to shift course to address new realities on the ground — they need a plan plus the agility to change weekly, daily, and even hourly.

What does it mean to have an agile retail marketing organization? I can tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean asking highly skilled marketeers to spend precious hours poring over and consolidating spreadsheets to uncover data to figure out which campaigns are making headway or where to put more budget. It doesn't mean turning your marketing department into a glorified data-processing and project-management office. It doesn't mean grappling with manual processes. No real retail marketer can spend days reconciling spreadsheets, especially now when every second counts.

Rather, agility means the ability to know very quickly what works and what doesn't, to learn fast and fail fast. It means updating the marketing plan on a dime and then pushing those changes throughout a retail organization so everyone is on the same page and can successfully execute as a cohesive, coordinated team.
Marketing agility requires the highest levels of alignment and collaboration throughout a retail organization. This can't be done successfully without technology to streamline the collection and analysis of data, automate key processes and engage the appropriate audiences.

The benefit is not just operational excellence, it goes straight to the top line as one large global retailer learned first-hand. The company's marketing team was relying on spreadsheets to support its commercial activity development, planning, and execution. This lack of efficiency was compounded by the fact that global and local plans were not integrated or connected, and performance management and metrics were entirely manual. By optimizing its marketing operations, the retailer removed the spreadsheet madness, collapsed workflow and information silos, and created seamless collaboration and visibility across 50 markets, 400 stores, and 170k employees.

This new marketing operational maturity is on track to drive a 1% increase in sales — which translates to a triple-digit dollar figure.

It's never been a more critical time for retailers to optimize their marketing ops, freeing marketers from low-value, labor-intensive work and enabling them to embrace agility to deliver on the retail customer experience.

Here are three key areas retailers need to consider in the race to agile retail marketing:

1. Organize budgets in real-time. The reality is that there is severe downward pressure on budgets. Every cost is being questioned. At the end of 2020, only 5% of marketers expected an increase in budget for the new year. The demand for retail marketing's responsiveness, driving high value through an excellent customer experience, has not abated.

It is vital for marketing to concentrate on activities that fuel the pipeline. Having visibility on marketing performance and the ability quickly shift budgets to what works best will create the agility needed to achieve this.

2. Manage campaigns on the fly. Rather than spend hours on conference calls assigning responsibilities to a distributed team, marketing operations tools should help marketers to streamline project management simply and digitally across multiple geographies, stakeholders, and agencies via a single point of information and direction. When done well, marketing operations can provide a 15% to 25% improvement in marketing effectiveness, as measured by return on investment and customer-engagement metrics, according to McKinsey.

3. Global consistency. At a time of crisis, it's more critical than ever for teams to be aligned, to be able to follow guidelines, and to act in unison. Agile marketing operations gives the platform to ensure that all brand and product marketing content is current and easily accessible across all geographies — and that the latest, correct branding is available for every product in every market at every moment. Why? Say, for instance, you run marketing for a global food retailer with multiple products and brands. It's important to have overall visibility of marketing content, budgets, and performance — to be able to manage activities and campaigns with agility and against performance metrics across all global retail locations.

'Agility' has taken on a whole new meaning in retail marketing these past 12-plus months. As we plunge further into this period of upheaval, I'm convinced that retail organizations with the right marketing operations technology and processes will armed with the type of agility needed help their businesses weather the storm and come out stronger on the other end.

Mirko Holzer is CEO of BrandMaker