What Is Marketing Resource Management?

Between email and Instagram, LinkedIn and print campaigns, marketers have more avenues for outreach than ever before. But this variety of channels and tactics brings numerous challenges, chief among them: how to stay organized? Marketing involves countless moving parts. Things get complicated quickly. Marketing resource management is an effective way marketing departments can plan, organize, and track complicated marketing operations, with the goal of saving time and money and increasing efficiency.

What Is Marketing Resource Management?

Often abbreviated as MRM, marketing resource management is a way of unifying a company’s marketing plans, tasks, budgets, collateral, and ideation under one simple software solution. MRM software lets marketers track the development of creative materials, plan their marketing strategy, plan budgets, manage company resources and brands, coordinate events, distribute marketing assets internally and externally, and also use data to measure marketing initiatives’ effectiveness in order to improve creative’s ROI.

These capabilities break down into clear categories.

The Different Capabilities of Marketing Resource Management

A range of capabilities fall under the umbrella of marketing resource management. While some overlap, these are distinct tasks.

• Brand management: Marketers often have numerous brands to market. Different brands in different categories require different tactics, have different personae, and can find customers in different points along the path to purchase. MRM software lets you tailor your approach and keep track of them all.
• Creative development and collateral management: Now that you have designed and created your marketing collateral, it’s time to distribute it. Many organizations use software known as digital asset management, or DAM. Although on the surface, digital assets seem like the sort of marketing resources that MRMs manage, DAM software is designed specifically to store, organize, and retrieve digital assets, centralizing what frequently gets stored in multiple locations. This means you will need an MRM solution that can integrate a DAM into it effectively.
• Media planning and execution: Campaigns, campaigns, campaigns, there are always more campaigns. Between meetings, product launches, webinar launches, campaign launches, and lead ups, it’s so easy to drop the proverbial ball and forget important action items. MRM solutions help control complex workflows so you can focus on success. By tracking the strategic and financial planning of marketing initiatives, an MRM provides a clear roadmap of all the activities involved in a campaign, from timetables to goals to budgeting.
• Event coordination: When the big push comes, you want to focus on execution. MRMs let marketers plant, schedule, and execute virtual and on-site events with more effective exchanges, more precise scheduling, and fewer bottlenecks.
• Strategic planning and budgeting: Anyone can plan a marketing campaign and design materials. Successful marketers plan strategically. Marketing resource management technology enables smart, logistical planning and equally strategic channel marketing budgeting to maximize impact.
• Measuring effectiveness: Managing your initiatives’ budgets and expenditures is important, but a good MRM also uses data to measure performance, which lets marketers gauge the return on investment, or ROI. Are your initiatives impactful? Are you getting the greatest value for your investment? Do costs run too high for the ROI? While you manage campaigns’ costs, MRMs also let you manage their value, too, and you can refine your approach accordingly.