Marketing resource management gives you visibility into resources, spend, and performance. That visibility lets you quickly identify bottlenecks or waste in your marketing operations, and allows you to strategically plan available resources for better ROI.
The stakes are even higher when you’re a remote team. Without proper resource management, you risk losing hours per day searching for marketing assets—instead of executing campaigns and winning business.
Read on to find out what marketing resource management (MRM) is, its benefits, and how you can implement it for big wins within your organization.
What is marketing resource management?
Marketing resource management is a set of processes and technologies that help marketing teams manage their resources (including people, money, and time).
MRM aims to help teams work more efficiently and effectively by improving how they plan, allocate, and track marketing resources.
MRM systems often include tools for budgeting and planning, project management, asset management, and marketing performance reporting in a centralized location.
What are the benefits of MRM?
Marketing resource management leads to increased efficiency and productivity through:
- Better resource utilization. By giving marketing teams visibility into how resources are used, MRM can help you spot underused resources and avoid duplicated efforts.
- Forecast project timelines more accurately. With a single view of the team’s capacity, you can plan people’s time more precisely for healthy projects and happy teams.
- Improved decision-making. Access to data and insights on resource availability and past performance helps your team make better-informed decisions about where to prioritize resources.
- Greater transparency and accountability. MRM can help organizations improve transparency and accountability within marketing departments by tracking and reporting on marketing resource utilization.
- Improved work quality. MRM allows you to better prioritize and allocate work by dedicating a sufficient amount of resources to boost work quality. With a single overview of your team’s time and skills, you can always assign the best team for the job.
- Reduced costs. A good MRM provides visibility into how long each task takes. You can use this data to understand if you’re using high hourly rates on low-value tasks. That way, you can outsource those tasks and save money.
- Improved collaboration. MRM can help improve communication and collaboration between marketing team members by bringing all resource information into a central repository.
- Increased speed of execution. MRM can help marketing teams focus on producing higher-quality work faster by reducing the need for manual resource coordination and tracking.
Joe Karasin, CMO at Circleit says, “Implement an MRM solution early on. You could end up with a huge mess on your hands with files in different Drive accounts. This kind of inefficiency can lead to plenty of wasted time.”
If you're wondering when the right time to implement an MRM solution is, that time is now!
Marketing resource management software: What to look for to choose the right solution
The tool you choose should foster collaboration and be easy to use and adopt. That means your team should be able to quickly adapt to it and integrate it into their work system. In addition, look out for the following features:
1. Budgeting and planning
Marketing budgets are dynamic, and it often takes a lot of work to keep track of the different marketing roles and varying rates of resources used (contractors, ads, etc.). That's why you need a system that makes things easy.
Look for features like:
- Cost center tracking
- Resource forecasting
- Project budgeting
For example, Float shows you how many hours each team member has left so you can forecast resource capacity for a project. You can set fixed dates for contractors’ availability, and enter rates for each person on the team for accurate budget tracking.
2. Project management
Businesses lose 11.4% of total investment due to poor project performance. And according to Project Management Institute, organizations that undervalue project management fail more often (67% more!) than their counterparts who do not.
You’ll need a way to plan, track, and execute projects to keep work focused.
Look for features like:
- Project templates
- Capacity planning
- Resource scheduling
- Time tracking
- Task management
- Project timeline views
If your tool doesn’t have project management features, it should integrate with project management software.
3. Capacity views
Your MRM software should make it easy to see who is working on what, find the right person for the job, and make changes to scheduled tasks on the fly. A single view of capacity will help you maintain healthy workloads for your team and track availability for fixed-term marketing contractors.
Some capacity planning software will also provide you with the ability to keep a skills inventory for matching the right people for the task—for instance, identify a senior performance marketer for a high-budget SEM campaign.
4. Reporting
Ideally, MRM software will offer reporting tools (or integrations) to help teams track and measure the success of their work. This can be a tricky thing when so much stuff is qualitative and appears non-measurable, like brand visibility and product awareness.
The reports you need depend on your goals. For example, if you want to know on which tasks your team spends their work hours, you can use a time tracking tool. Reporting on estimates vs. actuals will make for more efficient campaign delivery.
Look for features like:
- Marketing campaign reporting
- ROI tracking
- Customizable dashboards
5. Integrations
Finally, the best MRM software will offer integrations that extend its functionality so you don't have to change any of your current tools or learn a new software solution from scratch.
A tool like Float offers a number of integrations across calendars, project management tools, billing software, and Slack. You can also build your own integrations with Zapier or the API.
6. Digital asset management
Almost 50% of marketers say that searching for the right assets hampers their productivity.
Google Drive may do the job of course, but if you have a team with lots of creatives, you may need to have DAM features or integrations with relevant tools in your platform.
How to implement an effective marketing resource management process
Here’s how to implement marketing resource management for your team.
Define your goals and objectives
What does your team need to be more efficient? Some possibilities include:
- Stronger communication
- More visibility into team members’ workloads
- Improved matching of people and skills to project work
- Better prioritization of high-value work
Once you know your goals, you can select the right software and features to help you achieve them.
Assess your current marketing operations
Before making any changes, it’s important to assess your current marketing operations to see where you need to catch up.
- Take note of the tools in your toolbox and how you use them.
- Also note how long it takes to complete a campaign, task, etc.
- Look at where your team members spend the most time during their workday
- How well are your team members utilizing the tools available to them?
- What (if any) are their blockers?
Once you know what your biggest workflow issues are, you'll understand what to prioritize in an MRM solution.
Select the right MRM tool
After you identify your pain points and priorities, you can compare MRM systems to find the best fit.
When evaluating systems, consider:
- Your current marketing software stack—Is there an existing tool you’d like to integrate with?
- Functionality—Does the tool support all phases of marketing operations?
- Workflow—How well does it fit your current workflows?
- User experience—Is it user-friendly and easy to use?
- Price—What does it cost? Is it within your budget?
Try the #1 resource planning software for project work
Plan and execute campaigns and marketing projects more effectively with a single view of your team’s availability, capacity, and skills. More than 4,000 of the world’s top teams choose Float to plan, schedule, and track their team’s time.
Try it freeImplement and test the system
Things don’t always go as planned. Technology may fail, and hypotheses may prove invalid.
That’s okay.
Start by testing your new system with a small group of users to work out any kinks and optimize the user experience.Then, you can gradually roll it out to the rest of your team.
Train your team
Finally, create and standardize training material, so everyone on your team learns how to use the system on their own.
Remember to include this training in your onboarding process as well!
Marketing resource management FAQs
What is MRM vs. CRM?
Marketing resource management (MRM) and customer relationship management (CRM) are two different but related concepts. While CRM focuses on managing customer relationships, MRM focuses on managing marketing resources.
What does marketing resource management software do?
The best MRM software will offer budgeting and planning tools to help marketing teams track and forecast resource utilization. In addition, they’ll provide project management, people management, and marketing performance reporting.
How much does marketing resource management software cost?
The cost of marketing resource management software depends on the features and functionality you need. You can expect to pay anywhere from $10 to $200 per month per user.
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