In today’s world everything is driven by technology and digitization has become way of life. And yes marketing is also no longer an exception for same. Customer engagement across the lifecycle with Omni channel approach has become success mantra for keeping the customers hooked to your brand all the time.

This granular or micro-segmentation approach of customer engagement has forced marketing managers to deal with an unforeseen complexity of data, technology and vast variation in the content. This requires team of specialized people that are subject matter experts to handle the activity. Sometimes having the required technical competence spread across the company is not sufficient to manage the marketing interventions.

 Marketing operations today require new management skills, controls and a technology / data driven approach – and a tweak in organizational structure. That is why you will see CMOs of all medium to large organizations all over the world are in the process of centralizing marketing operations and want to bring marketing transformation. 

They are bringing in critical parts of their marketing functions at a central place which is nothing but establishing the Marketing Center of Excellence. The Marketing COE is focusing on servicing the rest of the organization and P&Ls with marketing technology, data management and operations of multi-channel programs and other marketing interventions.

To have better control over security, scalability and to bring the cost effectiveness it requires to get all marketing functions at central place. Todays marketing leaders don’t want to run Marketing as a decentralised, independent and ad-hoc organisation anymore. 

And this is the reason why more and more marketers are drifting away from the model of having multiple agency partners on boarded for various interventions. For the same reasons setting up   marketing COE and pooling of service providers at one place is on the to-do list of many CMOs today.

What Is Marketing COE?

Marketing Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a centralised function that takes care of (often data/technology-driven) marketing activities at an organization level. It is often a support function, and it serves the different business areas of an organisation. In other words it as an internal  unit or the facilitator to carry out marketing interventions with improved ROI. 

A Marketing CoE is your brand’s extended outsourced marketing team or a central function that comprises of marketing experts, both thinkers and doers ably supported by specialized skillsets across Marketing technology, Data analytics and processes that help in achieving marketing excellence.

It helps you improve specific capabilities or areas that are important for achieving critical business results such as Business revenue growth, customer acquisition numbers etc. by bringing in a marketing transformation in the organization.

Marketing Centre of excellence has these four key functions as an integral part – 

People – The Marketing Centre of Excellence is driven by a dedicated team with wide range of skills

Process – The Marketing Centre of Excellence is governed by water tight processes that will be agreed by the steering committee consisting of senior leaders from Xerago and the client.

Marketing Technology – A comprehensive MarTech stack is essential to execute marketing activities at scale with greater accuracy and better control

And,

Data Analytics -In Marketing Centre of Excellence, all marketing efforts are measured and optimized with the help of analytics.

Why organisations should have a Marketing COE set up?

• Single aligned team: The Marketing CoE comprises of multi-disciplinary, yet aligned team with complementing thought processes resulting in maximum efficiency.
• Agile Processes: It is governed by agile processes for faster execution of marketing interventions across all digital channels.
• Single window of communication: a senior business leader with cross-functional expertise as the single point of contact for both the client and the CoE delivery team leaving no scope for communication Gap.
• Aligned Goals : By aligning the Marketing and Tech functions’ goals, potential bottlenecks are avoided and focus is kept to achieve desired business outcomes.
• Minimum Redundancy: Through Marketing COE redundant skills, technologies and unnecessary overheads are eliminated bringing in more efficiency.
• Scalability: It is scalable and flexible enough to tune with market conditions & business priorities without compromising on its competencies.

Marketing COE Comes With Host Of Benefits:

• Increased Efficiency: It Boosts marketing efficiency and velocity by centralizing the functions at Marketing COE .
• Establish Visibility And Focus: By having dedicated team the entire organization can align on business priorities and goals.
• Optimizes Tech, Process And People Costs: With help of technology stack with better communication, risk prevention, time savings, and intelligent automation cost optimisation can be achieved.
• Brings Consonance between Marketing and Tech Goals: Since central team consisting of experts from various functions manages the COE it aligns the marketing, Business and tech goals effectively.
• Increase Adoption : Organizations that adopt Marketing COE’s have a much shorter learning and adoption curve to best practices and can realize the ROI benefits of Martech investments much sooner.
• Elimination of redundancy: At COE the resources and business priorities are synchronized eliminating redundancy.
• Flexibility: They have the flexibility to innovate fast, fail fast, and become a laboratory for success. They can do various POCs and can replicate the best ones for better outcomes.

By having a marketing COE in place, Marketers can focus their energy into well-orchestrated marketing strategies that are aligned with company business objectives and goals, and can take up the entire marketing function at organization to the next level with implementation of best practices all across.

Has your company moved to a marketing COE model? Yes…Then that’s a great start to achieve your business goals in year 20-21 and if not then its time for you to set up one.

By Seema Thakur.

seema@xerago.com 

The author is having over a decade of experience in strategic marketing spread across different sectors and presently working with Xerago as a Sr. Functional Consultant for Marketing. 

Xerago is an Integrated Marketing Services Provider that is helping many global brands with their Marketing Transformation, by setting up and running Marketing Centre of Excellence. 

To know more visit – www.xerago.com