Blog

From marketing operations best practices to industry insights, the Simple blog delves into all things relating to managing marketing projects, brand assets and technology.

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Essential Features of Marketing Workflow Management Software

Let's face it, marketing content approvals can be challenging, especially if your team is working on multiple projects. Compounding the problem is the fact, after abuoyant post Covid-19 market we have moved into tougher times with a recession looming and competition increasing. As a result, marketers constantly need to find innovative ways to reach their audience and make an impact. Yet, despite more competition, marketing budgets are declining sharply. So, in a sense, marketers are now working harder than before. The thing is, however, they should work smarter. If they can, they'll be more efficient and productive even with the challenges they're facing. To work smarter, though, they need the right tools.

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The Future of DAM

In our previous post, we dealt with why digital asset managers (DAMs) are so important, considering that digital marketing is becoming increasingly complex and more competitive.

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9 Top Martech Trends for 2020

As 2019 draws to a close, Simple took the opportunity to reflect a little on some of the martech trends that moved the needle this year, and where we’re likely to see activity concentrated in 2020, from conversational marketing to the application of AI across marketing. Here are our top picks.

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The Changing Structure of Marketing Departments in the Age of Disruption

The traditionalmarketing department structureis under siege from the impact of new technologies, but while marketers know their organisations need an overhaul, many are struggling to formulate the new world order. It’s no wonder: digital marketing and social expertise, data analysis, new technology platforms and other aspects of marketing can no longer be contained in silos but must be disseminated throughout organisations.

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How to Fix Your Marketing Risk & Compliance Process

So your company just got called out by the competition regulator and fined for breaching the rules on advertising – meaning ads went out the door with misleading information andincorrect disclosures – and your marketing risk and complianceprocess failed to pick it up. That’s when your competitor noticed.

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Why Marketers Need a Digital Asset Management (DAM) System

Marketers who are looking to build beautiful brands and create consistent customer experiences across all channels are increasingly turning to digital asset management (DAM) systems to handle the creation, storage and distribution of their own assets.

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The Role of the Agile Marketing Brief

An agile marketing brief is different from the creative briefs seen in traditional marketing processes. It always starts from the point of view of the customer. It includes a user story — a concept developed in traditional IT or software agile, adapted for marketing. And it also includes measurable goals. But ultimately, it is still about developing a shared understanding of the desired outcome and why that outcome is important.

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How Foxtel’s in-house agency Felix delivers brand and efficiency gains

How Foxtel’s in-house agency Felix delivers brand and efficiency gains Subscription television company Foxtel doesn’t do things by halves. Ranked in the top 10 Australian advertisers by spend, the marketing team is one of the country’s most sophisticated, having developed a hybrid in-house approach to complex areas of marketing including data management and programmatic advertising. Over the past three years, the company has also established Felix — an in-house agency to rival Australia’s best.

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7 Ways to Boost Creative Standards at your In-house Agency

Internal creative departments get a bit of a bad rap. They’re not all populated by burnt-out, ex-agency staffers looking for a quiet life. Mostly, your typical in-house agency team is full of hard-working designers, copywriters and digital staff doing their utmost to get high-quality marketing work out into the market. In fact, with enterprise marketing teams looking to bring an increasingly diverse range of creative services in-house, and tech brands and start-ups establishing in-house agencies relatively early in their lifecycle, internal creative departments have come a long way from the LinkedIn ads and sales collateral that might once have dominated their working day.

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Balancing Agile Marketing and the Creative Process

Balancing agile marketing and the creative process Agile marketing and the big creative idea: can they be cosy bedfellows or are they mutually exclusive?

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How Simple Fills the Gaps in the Marketing Process

Ever felt like you’re working in a team of one? Even in big marketing teams it can feel like you come in, do your job, and hand your work over to the next person with little idea of when you’ll see the result, much less learn how it fits into the big picture or the overall marketing process. So often, marketers find themselves hampered by siloed technology and team structures, disjointed or gappy processes, inefficient communication and data confusion.

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Under the hood of AGL’s digital transformation

Under the hood of AGL’s digital transformation Energy supplier AGL is undergoing a massive corporate agile digital transformation. We talked to General Manager, Customer Experience Transformation Craig Lauchlan about the impact this is having on marketing and the customer experience. Craig, thanks very much for speaking with Simple! How would you describe the agile transformation underway at AGL?

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How MRM Underpins Successful Digital Transformations in Marketing

These days you can’t turn around in business without being exposed to some form of digital transformation. It seems everyone is either actively planning, just emerging from, or deeply mired in a digital transformation. But how do you get your team working together quickly and successfully, to effect rapid change? And how does it apply to marketing?

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The 6 Must-Have Features of A Marketing Operations Platform

Good companies talk about generating efficiencies, but great companies talk about increasing productivity, according toHBR.This is why for many teams, the missing piece in the martech stack puzzle is a marketing operations platform — also known as a marketing resource management platform — to manage the process of actually ‘making marketing’ – in effect, a marketing productivity platform that functions as a central system of record and output for the marketing team. So what should marketers look for in a marketing operations platform that puts productivity at the heart of the martech stack?

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A partnership to empower marketing, for a brilliant customer experience

London And South Africa, March 4th 2021:The CRM Team, Expert Implementers Of World-Leading Customer Engagement Technology, And Simple MRM Ltd, Enablers Of Result-Driven Marketing And Customer Experience, Announce A Favourable Partnership. The alliance is a natural fit between two Microsoft partners focused on transforming the customer experience through technology. Properly coordinated sales and marketing improves engagement and advocacy with a brand, ultimately increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

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Agile Marketing Software: How Simple Supports your Agile Process

Business professor Leon C Megginson’s famous words sum up the conundrum facing a growing number of marketing leaderswho are turning toagile marketing processesto help them prosper in a disrupted world:“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”And just as inflexible marketing processes need updating, theproject management toolsteams use must be able to accommodate agile as well as traditional marketing workflows. Simple’sagile marketing softwarecombines the visibility of a centralised marketing platform with the flexibility of an agile approach to help your team be faster and more effective.

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Why Intellectual Property is Crucial to your Brand’s Marketing Success

It should be a simple matter to get a copy of a brand adfrom the brand owner, right? Um, not so fast. As the Simple team discovered recently, whether a brandowns the intellectual property in their advertising, and how invested the marketing team is in itsown digital asset management, can make it either a 2-minute request or something that wastes time and takes days.

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Six Ways to Smash the Silo Effect that Plagues Marketing

Most customers are on first-name terms with the Silo Effect: you know, when you call your insurance company to discuss your home insurance policy and find if you also want to take a car insurance policy you must provide all your personal details again to another department before you can even get down to giving them your business. It’s kind of annoying.

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6 Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing Agile Marketing

Most chief executives wouldn’t even consider asking their head of human resources to run product a couple of days a week. Nor do you generally see the head of finance running public relations part-time, or any other role for which they aren’t equipped. But in marketing, we regularly encounter IT Agile coaches or scrum masters asked to ‘teach’ the marketing team how toimplement agile marketing— without any training on how marketing actually works, and often in addition to their day job.

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Agile Marketing: 101 Things to Know Before You Go Agile

Heard of agile marketing? Wondering if you should try it with your marketing team?We’ve done the leg workand gathered together more than 100 need-to-knowinsights, statistics, observations and comments from manyof the giantsin the agile marketing community,to helpyou achievegreater agilityin your marketing team. Read on forfirst-hand experiences ofCMOs who have adopted agile marketing, definitions of all those strange-soundingagile terms and rituals, and insider tips on how to make agile marketing work in your organisation.

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The Creative Brief: How Cochlear Gave Consumers a Hearing Test in Disguise

Listed hearing implant maker Cochlear was a well-known name in Australia due partly to the long history of the company and its founder Graeme Clark, who developed and implanted the world’s first implantable hearing device in 1978.

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Case Study: Setting SOPs for Marketing and Creative Workflow in Simple

A major Australian bank was finding it challenging to keep track of all the requests for work coming into the marketing department, as well as monitoring the creativeworkflowthrough its internal design studio and external creative agencies. That lack of visibility and oversight was creating internal bottlenecks – the marketing team was struggling to prioritise marketing requests and manage internal resources properly. And the bank was not able to monitor how efficiently it was working with its external agencies.

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Five Reasons to get a Marketing Operations Platform (aka MRM) this year

Take a minute to think about this thorny marketing operations issue: how much of your team’s marketing activity is really aligned with your strategic goals? For one client, prior to its appointment of Simple, the answer to that question was 20 per cent. That’s right: 80% of their marketing activity was off-brief, misaligned or fell wide of the target in some way. That’s a lot of re-writing of briefs and re-creating of material; it’s a lot of wasted or misdirected time and effort; and it’s a lot of work that probably never saw the light of day. It probably also amounted to a whole lot of frustrated employees.

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The Death of the Spreadsheet Marketing Calendar

Managing all your marketing activity without a marketing calendar is a bit like having a dozen balls in the air and trying to guesshow fasteach one is spinningwhile riding a unicycleon a tightropeand belting out show tunes.

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How to Consolidate 4 of Your Marketing Tools with 1 Solution

Anyone who’s ever been part of a marketing team understands how chaotic it can be to execute on strategy. This only gets worse the larger your team gets. You end up withtool chaos— multiple logins, jumping in and out of different tools just to get work done. How good would it be to have just one central place to work from as a team? With a Marketing Operations Cloudplatform such asSimple, you can have one system of record and one place in which to get all of your marketing done. Here’s how to consolidate 4 of the existing marketing tools you use to get work done with Simple Admation Marketing Operational Solution.

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It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It

Many of today’s marketers spend their days, nights and weekends knee-deep in activities, campaigns and metrics which are broadly common across key verticals (finance, education, FMCG, etc) and audiences (B2B, B2C, P2P, etc).