Akshatha Kamath, Content Marketing at MoEngage, looks into the common challenges for enterprise marketing teams and asks whether automation is the answer.

Marketing for a large enterprise company is challenging. It is often the case that big organizations have multiple teams working on marketing that are each in their own silo. The data is segmented, the campaigns are segmented and the teams do not talk to one another. This can cause friction in your organization when your marketing messages may be broadcast to hundreds of thousands or even millions of consumers.

When your marketing teams are working in silos your brand suffers. One customer might receive multiple different disjointed marketing communications from your brand and this impacts the customer experience negatively, as well as being a waste of your marketing resources.

Expansion to New Frontiers

Another current challenge of enterprise marketers is creating a seamless customer experience on and offline. For brick and mortar brands building out digital is an imperative (87% of executives say it is a “matter of survival”).

This is an especially taxing challenge for large enterprise brands who may have to juggle supporting local marketers with limited resources – be they a dealership or franchisee. Often, it may be that these local marketers do not have the same marketing experience as those working at corporate headquarters. They execute their campaigns without much background in marketing while also dealing with human resources, bookkeeping, inventory and all the other headaches that come with running a business.

Supporting these local marketers is also a challenge for brand managers. They can also be resource-strapped and often may not have enough to do all they need to accomplish. There’s a chance they also don’t have the campaign budget to produce all that they need and brand managers often don’t have dedicated staff to verify in-store compliance.

For an enterprise brand manager to overcome these challenges and successfully implement their marketing strategy, communication with local marketers is key. Brand managers must encourage success at the local level. Those who have high local marketer satisfaction have an active dialogue with local marketers to better appreciate how they are struggling. These brand managers also invest in easy-to-use tools in process, design, and technology. The higher quality the communication is, the better the outcome.

Solving Geographic Difficulties

A brand manager’s job is to make local marketing easy for affiliates. In a distributed organization it takes a lot of stakeholders to run just a single campaign. Something as simple as printing up a poster to be hung in a storefront window may require input and approval from design, brand management, compliance, and local marketers.

This is a natural part of enterprise distributed marketing as one’s business model is distributed so workflows are going to be complex. Despite the complicated approval processes and multiple stakeholders involved, these systems can be made more efficient with the right tools. Streamlining workflows for distributed enterprise marketing involves documenting the process of what needs to be done in order to make it easier for all involved to follow it. Often companies find it beneficial to use technology to do this.

Multi-geographic brands can also rarely monitor all field execution of marketing in person. This can generate concern that brand messaging is being modified in a way that is out of line with the brand’s standards.

Consumers typically do not distinguish between enterprise-owned and locally-owned businesses – they see just one thing: brands. 60% of millennials in the United States expect consistent experiences when dealing with brands whether online, in-store or by telephone. This highlights how important it is for distributed enterprise brands to keep their message consistent.

Education and knowledge about a brand are critically important for all stakeholders. Many distributed brands have affiliate on-boarding and training processes that place branding as a core subject. Other brands are finding value in marketing asset management technology in order to scale consistently. They use template tools for executing their local marketing strategies which allows brand management teams to “lock” certain design characteristics or messages and allow local marketers to input their information (such as address or local offers) in order to maintain brand consistency.

Is Automation the Solution?

What enterprise marketers may need is a system that streamlines their marketing channel in order to bring together marketers, campaign managers, and product managers under one system to efficiently manage marketing campaigns with input and collaboration between all of those involved.

MoEngage has developed some tools for enterprise marketing teams using extensive feedback from stakeholders. This unified approach to enterprise marketing can send out a clear signal amidst the noise. MoEngage Teams and MoEngage Campaign Approval Workflow are two such tools that enable brands to eliminate the silos within their teams and ensure a smooth flow of customer data and insights between teams. This can help enterprises eliminate the challenges that stem out large teams spread across geographies or multiple owned brands that need a unified customer view, and many more. Talk to MoEngage’s experts for a personalized walk-through of these enterprise-ready marketing tools from MoEngage.