Today’s marketers operate in a chaotic digital environment. Daily they deal with a rash of issues they have no control over: channel proliferation, more competition, rapidly increasing customer expectations.
With this chaos in mind, the Oracle Marketing Cloud provides solutions that help marketers solve the problems they do have control over. One of these problems is distributed, complex organizational structures. Since 2011, we have provided marketing departments with a distributed marketing solution that tames organizational complexity by enabling corporate oversight, while fostering local relevance and creativity.
Because some of our competitors are new to the distributed marketing party, we thought we would take some time to point out some lessons we have learned over the last 6 years.
Let Everyone Be A Marketer
Some distributed marketing organizations are composed of employees whose sole focus is digital marketing. Most, however, are not. Instead, they are composed of a loose network of employees who may wear their marketing hat in their spare time when they are not managing a store, selling insurance, or keeping their clients financial portfolio balanced. While this kind of marketer might not have deep digital marketing skills, they do understand their customers, regions, and localities better than anyone sitting at headquarters.
In order to better cultivate these kinds of insights and contributions, Oracle Marketing Cloud provides marketers with a set of streamlined apps for specific tasks and roles that are simple, self-explanatory, and safe to use. Through these apps, contributors get a limited view into only the specific area of a campaign that they are responsible for. This removes the need for otherwise busy professionals to maintain muscle memory intact around how to navigate within an enterprise marketing platform, as well as enable new team members to start contributing from day one without training.
A good example of this would be a hotel manager who’s insights into the customer base would be valuable for corporate marketing to harness, but who also has quite a few responsibilities outside of marketing. With our solution, this hotel manager would be able to login to a simplified UI, make their contribution and carry on with their day.
Distributed Isn’t Enough! Collaboration Is Key
Passing corporate approved templates to regional marketers is helpful, until it becomes a burden. A distributed marketing organization, by definition, is the sum of many dissimilar parts. Each team might be staffed differently, have different skill sets and perhaps even different goals. Marketers working in this type of environment need more than templates, they need to be able to collaborate with their corporate counterparts, lean on each other’s strengths, and amplify their collective knowledge.
With this in mind, our distributed marketing solution focuses on enabling collaboration throughout the entire campaign creation process. This is facilitated at the highest level through Collaboration Canvas, our interactive process orchestration tool that allows corporate to assign, manage and approve tasks for individuals across the organization. This kind of granular collaboration allows marketers to know what they are responsible for and when it is due, while also allowing corporate to control quality and lend a hand when needed.
For more information about the Oracle Marketing Cloud and our distributed marketing offerings visit our website or request a demo!