How to define marketing resource management and how it's unique How marketing resource management software supports back-office marketing execution Definitions of common jargon and acronyms associated with MRM: marketing operations, DAM, EMM, etc. Common out-of-the-box features in marketing resource management tools How to justify investments in MRM How much marketing MRM technology will cost Essential pre-purchase tips and tricks to maximize an investment in marketing operations optimization

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Inside a Concept CheatSheet
The Technology, Defined
What’s does it do?
Industry Jargon Acronyms
Features Functions
Pricing
Justifying the Investment
Before You Buy
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Marketing Resource Management (MRM)
The Technology, Defined
MarketingResourceManagement(MRM)
provides the software infrastructure
to support Marketing Operations
Management. MRM generally refers to
technology for the areas of planning,
design and production within marketing
and MRM solutions do not provide
the analytics, decision making and
automated execution capabilities for
personalized marketing across channels.
MRM is a subset of Enterprise Marketing
Management (EMM) that embodies a
combination of technologies to support
all aspects of the marketing supply chain.
What Does It Do?
MRM is a software application that
supports back office operations though
workflow, approval, and business
rules. MRM offers a methodical and
systematic way for very large and
complex marketing teams to capture
budget, link ongoing campaigns to
strategic initiatives, manage processes
that include suppliers and agencies,
centralize collaboration, centralize the
marketing calendar, and centralize digital
asset creation and storage. The easiest
way to think of MRM is it supports
everything that needs to happen before
a campaign goes out the door. MRM is
not a campaign execution tool. You feed
your Campaign Management (email,
direct mail, web, etc.) with the output
from MRM. MRM allows organizations
to customize workflows to capture and
support any marketing process and
make it repeatable, streamlined and
systematic. In a way MRM is to marketing
execution as ERP is to Finance or CRM
is to Sales. Unfortunately, it’s all too
common for marketers to accept manual
and inefficient processes as “part of the
job.” As such, marketers don’t always
take too kindly to changes in process
during MRM rollouts. So maybe don’t call
it the ERP of Marketing unless you want
a mutiny on your hands.
Industry Jargon Acronyms
There are a ton of related technologies
in this space and all of them come nicely
wrapped with their own acronyms.
Some of these were developed by
vendors in an attempt to differentiate
products, and they stuck.
Enterprise Marketing Management
(EMM) isn’t really a technology; it’s
a combination of technologies. EMM
delivers an end-to-end internal process
for managing marketing operations
through three technologies that are
typically delivered as modules: Marketing
Resource Management, Digital Asset
Management, and Marketing Campaign
Management. Digital Asset Management
capabilities are called out separately
in EMM solutions because DAM is
frequently sold as a more robust asset
management module that integrates
with MRM for an end-to-end solution
to manage work-in-progress assets,
production ready assets, and asset
storage. A fully integrated DAM capability
allows organizations to easily re-use
marketing content during the production
process to save costs and maintain
brand consistency.
Marketing Resource Management
(MRM) is a class of technology that
was designed exclusively for marketers
to help manage back-office marketing
execution (pre-campaign execution).
MRM supports marketing operations
in the areas of planning, design, and
production through features such as

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Technology CheatSheet: Marketing Resource Management (MRM) 2
COMPLIMENTS OF:
workflow, asset management, budgeting,
a central marketing calendar, and
operational reporting.
Marketing Campaign Management
(MCM) is a stand-alone module for
executing direct marketing campaigns.
These tools execute campaigns across
demand channels like email, mobile,
direct mail, landing pages, and social
media. The best way to think about
MCM is that these tools utilize the assets
created and managed by MRM, or the
back-office content production process,
and push them out through customer
engagement campaigns. The campaign
production process demands some
level of content management, therefore,
most MCM tools have light content
management capabilities for storing and
locating the creative and copy used in
direct marketing campaigns. MCM is
typically insufficient for large enterprise
organizations to manage all digital assets
produced by marketing.
Marketing Operations Management
(MOM) is an alternative name for MRM
used by some vendors. The term refers to
the end-to-end optimization of marketing
operations from planning to creative to
execution and finally measurement.
Features and Functions
MRM automates the back-office
marketing operations processes through
the following features:
Strategic Alignment: The ability to
create a hierarchy of strategic imperatives
and goals from within the system and link
every activity to one or more goals. This
gives executive marketers visibility into
how spend is being allocated to meet
strategic targets and objectives on a
periodic basis.
Budgeting and Planning: MRM solutions
typically integrate with the financial
system of record so marketing budget can
be allocated and tracked from within MRM
at a more granular level. Budgets can
be approved, moved, re-allocated, and
canceled from within MRM for a holistic
view of spending and forecasted spend.
Workflow: Role based security allows
business rules to be customized for
different users. Marketing projects,
production processes, and activities can
be systematically mapped within MRM
to assign tasks and timelines to specific
roles. Business rules can be configured
to route tasks through approval
workflows and ensure timely delivery
of projects. Workflow gives marketing
executives visibility into the marketing
cycle time and granular drill-down into
bottlenecks or resource constraint
issues before they manifest themselves
in lost revenue.
Offer management: Offers can be
configuredwithinMRMandsystematically
optimized based on business rules
and an offer optimization engine. This
allows offers to be associated of specific
campaigns to close the loop on ROI from
production to execution.
Asset management: Most MRM
systems have a rudimentary form of
digital asset management (DAM) built
into the system. This allows assets that
are in progress, production ready, or
archive ready to be routed appropriately
during the production process and can
provide an effective means of capturing
meta-data from users who have context
about the asset use or intended use.
Project management: MRM assigns
specific roles to specific tasks and can
be configured to govern the cycle-time
on various tasks. Marketing projects
can then be aggregated on a marketing
calendar and flagged as on-time or late
for further action.
Marketing calendar: Marketers struggle
with managing global calendars,
especially in enterprise environments.
Instead of managing dozens of excel
calendars or separate tools for each
department, MRM users can add all
activities automatically to a central
marketing calendar, with role-based
views of marketing activities.
Marketing taxonomy: Configure
standardized views of products,
geography, the marketing organizational
hierarchy, campaigns, and customer
segments from within MRM.
Partner and supplier access: MRM
provides portal based access to
fulfillment, agencies, and marketing
services partners who play an ongoing
role in marketing operations.
Pricing
On-premise MRM solutions typically
aren’t a cheap date. An on-premise
solution typically generates sustainable
return on investment when implemented
for a larger scale, which is why enterprise
class MRM solution licenses tend to be
between $375k to $1M. About five years
ago on-demand MRM solutions became a
viable option for mid-to-large businesses
that had basic needs for out-of-the-box
MRM capabilities and a limited budget.
On-demand MRM is typically a good fit
for mid-size organizations with $100M in
revenue and up and ranges from $10k/m
and up depending on the number of
users and modules.
No discussion of MRM pricing is complete
without also factoring in the cost of
implementation. MRM rollouts demand
process re-engineering, customization and
configuration, and change management-
which means they typically require support
from vendor services, systems integrators,
and/or consultants. In a large enterprise

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Technology CheatSheet: Marketing Resource Management (MRM) 3
COMPLIMENTS OF:
setting MRM implementation can be
expected to span 12-18 months. Generally
service partners will phase the rollout
by core processes or functional teams
and incorporate requirements gathering,
configuration, change management,
training, and communication within each
phase. You can expect system integrators
to recommend a team of 3-7 consultants to
support the initiative and the team will need
access to stakeholders on-site for at least
6-9 months. Many business stakeholders
get sticker shock when they realize the
implementation is often double or triple the
license costs. Services for an on-premise
MRM implementation can range from
$500k up to $1.5M or more. Nine times
out of ten organizations that try to cut costs
and support the initiative internally fail. You
end up having to bring in consultants to fix
things, which is a lot harder than just doing
it right the first time. One executive from
a large financial institution that had been
using on-premise MRM for seven years put
it this way “last year we had a power surge
that shut down our MRM servers, it literally
shut down marketing at the same time.”
Stakeholders need to ask themselves if
it makes sense to outsource this kind of
mission critical work to the lowest bidder or
cut costs.
Justifying the Investment
When implemented appropriately MRM
investments play a central and long-
term role in the marketing operations
infrastructure. Unlike some marketing
technologies MRM can be implemented
with a 7-10 year timeline in mind
because the solutions will likely become
a critical conduit for marketing execution
and reporting.
The strongest business case for
MRM is typically derived from a
robust understanding of current state
processes and future state potential.
Most marketing leaders are shocked to
peel back the layers of the onion and
find out how business really gets done at
the executional level. Generally MRM is
going to justified from a productivity and
cost savings standpoint. That means a
thorough understanding of the process
efficiencies and overhead costs in
current marketing cycle time aggregated
over months or years across dozens or
hundreds of employees will ultimately
make the strongest tangible case.
Benefits of MRM include:
• Reduce Training Expenses
• Eliminate unaligned
marketing investments
• Reduce Cycle Time (Planning)
• Improve Productivity (Execution)
• Reduce Analysis Time (Visibility)
• Reduce Production Mistakes
• Savings attributed to shifting
to electronic fulfillment
• Reduction of Late Fees and Penalties
• Reduction of Supplier Costs
due to consolidation
• Revenue lift due to better
communication and lead management
• Improvement in Portfolio Optimization
Cost factors that should be included in
the current state evaluation:
• Existing software or licensing fees
(particularly software that can be
divested of completely)
• Support for existing software
and processes
• Hardware maintenance
• Support costs from finance,
IT, operations, marketing
• Number of employees
impacted globally
• Agency or service costs from
outsourcing processes that
could be done in MRM
• Time spend locating files manually
• Time spent budgeting and planning
• Time spent reporting on basic metrics
• Time spent conducting on-
off analysis projects
• Average employee salary
• Forecast accuracy
• Budget accuracy
• Aggregated time spent per
process per employee (multiply
by number of employees)
Successful implementations also provide
CMOs with visibility into global processes,
spending, and return on investment in
campaigns.
Before You Buy
Organizational Readiness for MRM
MRM has the potential to provide cadence
and structure to marketing execution
and back-office marketing operations.
However, marketers usually don’t take
kindly to changes in process that demand
rigorous steps and structured processes.
Some marketers will refer to MRM as the
ERP of marketing, and that’s partially
true. But MRM remains the most effective
way to gain visibility and control into
chaotic enterprise marketing execution.
For organizations considering an MRM
solution, consider engaging a consulting
partner that is skilled at configuring and
rolling out MRM. People are the most
common reason MRM systems fail.
Rigorous training, ongoing support, and
regular engagement with business users
will be critical to the system actually
getting used.

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Technology CheatSheet: Marketing Resource Management (MRM) 4
COMPLIMENTS OF:
How long will MRM
take to implement?
MRM implementations range from 6
months to a year. But, depending on the
complexity or global scale of the rollout,
implementations could take as long as
2 years. Bottom line, it’s going to take
more than a few months to configure
something useful AND get users
trained on the new platform. You should
look at a phased approach to MRM
implementation capturing some small
wins and milestones along the way.
Are there limitations with respect
to MRM customization?
Yes. You can add custom attributes to
MRM deployments to capture unique
information that is necessary for the
organization, but there are limitations to
how many attributes. At the same time,
excessive customization’s could cause
issues with future version updates and
system performance, so it’s generally a
better idea to simplify processes to work
within the system rather than customize
the system to work with overly complex
marketing operations processes.

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Technology CheatSheet: Marketing Resource Management (MRM) 5
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