Efficiency is the Killer App

Efficiency is the Killer App

Nick Patrissi, Industry Relations Manager, Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group

Working efficiently is a business imperative in today’s competitive global marketplace. A global business requires the integration of marketing processes with global business requirements. Marketing strategies must now expand to include cultural norms, buying criteria, and selling propositions for dozens of international locales and partners. Marketing teams must schedule, collaborate, and review print, broadcast, and multimedia material among themselves and many creative and production partners.

As worldwide operations become more and more complex, marketing, creative, and production professionals are continually challenged to do more with less without compromising quality or effectiveness. Marketing and brand managers with bottom line responsibility are forced to take a much closer look at process automation and efficiency to meet these new business challenges, and are turning to technology to enhance efficiency and eliminate costly manual processes.

Interest in cool marketing business tools is not new, although the blend of cutting edge innovative technology with the strict discipline of process management is emerging under the category name of “marketing automation.” Marketing automation is growing in many segments of the corporate landscape. Led by early adopters and marketing directors in the consumer packaging, financial services and pharmaceutical sectors, many marketing companies have implemented sophisticated marketing automation solutions. The Winterberry Group LLC, reported that over 76% of marketing end users surveyed stated that their organization’s demand for marketing automation technology increased over the last 12 months. Most marketing research firms project increasing budgets for marketing automation in the years ahead and technology providers are responding with cutting edge software and hardware platforms to accommodate the industry need.

Cutting edge technology tools + Process management Discipline – Costly manual interactions = Marketing Efficiency

Corporate marketing departments responding to corporate financial pressures are looking internally at impediments to speed, visibility and profit. The following is a list of identified operational problems within marketing operations:

• Lack of visibility into work in process

• Poor project management

• Manual processes, such as approvals

• Lack of team collaboration

• Inaccurate or laborious budget and expense management

• Time-consuming report or calendar production

• Low re-use of approved assets

• Poor campaign coordination and alignment of work with strategic plans

The future is bright for adoption of marketing automation! The adoption of marketing automation tools such as Kodak Design2Launch Solutions have tackled many of these problems, and enabled marketing giants in the pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods industries to make significant improvements in process efficiency. Specific functional improvements include the reduction of process errors and routing time by streamlining such tasks as campaign briefs, project management, creative review and digital asset management.

• Average review cycle reduced from 56 to 6 days

• Number of status meetings per project reduced by 45%

• Amount of rework reduced by 38%

• Amount of time spent chasing down projects and files reduced by 65%

• Hard dollar costs from errors and proofing reduced by $1.2 million in year one.

“Marketing technology adoption is inevitable— and thus an imperative.” John Rizzi, CEO, E-Dialog

To Learn more about marketing automation solutions from Kodak visit www.automation.kodak.com.

© Kodak, 2008. Kodak and Design2Launch are trademarks of Eastman Kodak Company.

Joint Venture Marketing: Giving Your Customers More

When running any business, online or otherwise, customer service is one of the main tenants needed for building success. Building a strong and loyal customer base will ensure your longevity and ultimately long-term success. To create such a base of loyal clients, you’ll need to provide them with not only excellent customer service, but also with something they cannot get from other businesses providing similar services.

Joining forces with other businesses by forming a joint venture marketing partnership can give you an edge not only with your business and advertising, but also with your customer service. Providing varied and dynamic customer service is as important as providing superior customer service to your clients.

You want your marketing campaign to stand out and give your clients something unique they don’t get from other companies. It is also important to make your customers feel important, that you value their business and that having their business truly matters to you. Embarking on a joint venture partnership is one way to successfully address a broad range of diverse customer service needs.

Expanding the Customer Service Base

When you develop a joint venture marketing partnership, the goal is for new customers and new client relationships to grow out of this enterprise. However, with more customers come more customer service responsibilities. Luckily with your new joint venture marketing partnership, you can diversify your customer service with the assistance of your partners and provide successful and unique customer service that will make a visible difference to your clients.

You may wonder how a joint venture marketing partnership can assist with your customer service platform. This is a marketing plan, not a customer service plan, right? That is accurate. A joint venture marketing partnership is primarily about cooperatively advertising and marketing your business, but any good marketing plan will account for and influence customer service.

When you form a joint venture marketing partnership, it is a collective sharing of ideas and expertise. You will gain insight into how to reach customers in new and different ways based on how your joint venture marketing partners run their customer service. This is one of the main benefits of partnering with other businesses.

When working with your joint venture marketing partners, you will also have the opportunity to naturally diversify your customer service and to reach more customers. This will ultimately create a potential influx of new and loyal customers. Ideally, with a joint venture marketing partnership, you will end up gaining customers from your partners, and vice versa.

When you gain customers that are part of your partners existing client base, the customers are generally aware of the association. You can capitalize on this association by adding an advertising or customer service message to the customer service correspondence that your partners are sending out. This increases your contacts and relationships with your clients and serves to do the same for your partners.

Your clients will get regular correspondence from you and your partners, creating a greater feeling of involvement and importance and it won’t be the same boring emails over and over. You will actually be able to capture and hold your customer’s interest and attention, which is exactly what every company wants!

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing & Consulting firm empowering business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges and increase profits. To read more articles related to Joint Venture Marketing, please go to his Joint Venture Blog Site. He can be reached at christian@synertegic.com