Marketing Profs

Today, if you are a marketer with line responsibility…

• You are likely facing increased pressure to demonstrate your results. You are likely producing results with a reduced budget. 
  
  
• At the same time, you are likely managing a growing numbers of campaigns across broader geographic reaches with an ever-increasing variety of media. 
  
• You are likely required to coordinate with sales, finance, operations and R&D. 
  
  
• And you are likely reminded frequently that favorable results require speed-to-market.

To help manage their more complex and demanding marketing processes, marketers in many leading companies are turning to software technology, commonly referred to as Marketing Operations Management (MOM).

They are using it to get greater control and improve the efficiency of marketing operations. Indeed, they realize that a nimbler and more integrated and flexible marketing function can give them a source of competitive advantage.

As a primer for those unaware of how MOM technology can help, here are 10 frequently asked questions and answers:¹

1. What is MOM?

MOM refers to any technology that improves the coordination of an organization's marketing activities and resources to increase speed, reduce errors and decrease costs. Generally, it involves software to automate the processes of marketing operations.

2. How is MOM different from CRM, BAM, MIS, EMM, and the like?

CRM (customer relationship management) is a set of tools widely used to help companies manage dialogue with their customers. CRM (sometimes in conjunction with data warehousing and analytics) helps analyze information about customer buying behavior, guiding future decisions made to serve and keep our most profitable customers. The adoption of CRM is often controlled not by Marketing but by Sales, Operations or IT.

MOM is complementary to these technologies in that it helps with the management of both online and offline initiatives aimed at those customers.

Other acronyms are essentially additional terms for MOM with different emphases, or they're subsets of MOM: BAM/DAM (brand/digital asset management) covers the storage, dissemination and retrieval capabilities for digital assets; MRM (marketing resource management) and MIS (marketing information systems) both cover workflow, project management, budgeting and planning. EMM (enterprise marketing management) focuses on marketing analytics.