Just over a year ago, Microsoft acquired MarketingPilot and with it all the benefits it can offer to a marketing team. But what exactly is MarketingPilot and how can it help companies gain greater ROI from their marketing spend and achieve their objectives?

Marketing Resource Management

For so many businesses it is vital to know that the right resources are being utilised for the right project. With the Marketing Resource Management, your marketing team are able to increase their efficiency across the entire marketing function through using a system-based management approach, productivity metrics and workflow measurements. This element of the software is advanced and once it is integrated the user-friendliness means that your users can quickly begin saving time, increasing their productivity and can easily work together on projects.

With the capabilities your marketing team can efficiently work collaboratively to monitor social media, scheduling, and campaign management. They can also keep track of expense management and budgeting as well as brand, product and event management. These individually and as a whole, can help the effectiveness and productivity of your marketing campaigns and acquiring leads.

Budgeting / Spend Management

When so much of the business comes from the marketing team, being able to manage what budget is designated for certain projects is important. With the Budgeting/Spend Management in MarketingPilot, users can save times, reduce errors, forecast more accurately and make better budget decisions quickly and efficiently. This aspect of the software means there is no need to update formulas, link spreadsheets or key expenses. In fact, the detailed and customisable budgets can be updated by multiple users at the same time and shared securely with accounting and finance. This means that your team can easily see what has been a success, what has not been and what is going to be coming with your campaigns.

The capabilities of Budgeting / Spend Management means that there is no need to rekey expenses, revenues, purchase orders, media orders or bookings. In fact, multiple users can update and consolidate budgets at the same time, as well as allowing them to make daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, fiscal or seasonal budgets. This not only saves the team and the company time, but also improves the accuracy of the information.

Campaign Management

With campaigns playing a prominent role in the functions of the marketing team, it is even more important that your business has the software able to assist with keeping track of activities. The Campaign Management functionality in MarketingPilot allows users to automate, execute and monitor campaigns across all channels, including traditional methods, online and social media, allowing them to improve team effectiveness and sales alignment. They can also automate and manage across print, broadcast, digital, and experimental marketing, which means they can follow leads and coordinate with customers, boosting sales and team efficiency. As well, your marketing team can easily track campaign budgets, costs, performance and ROI, whilst email marketing and lead generation campaigns can be executed without any hassle.

With the Campaign Management capabilities, your marketing team can create, manage and execute detailed marketing plans. These also include managing the campaign workflow, monitoring creative and other digital assets, collaborating with clients and vendors, and capturing, scoring, assigning and distributing leads. Each of these can help your marketing team to improve the efficiency of their projects and campaigns, whilst ensuring they are followed up afterwards and are able to see the results and effectiveness.

Media Buying Planning

The comprehensive and robust process automation of Media Buying Planning allows your business to plan, compare and consolidate media buying quickly and easily. Saving your team from the inefficiency of working with traditional paper or spreadsheet-buying and planning processes, this element of MarketingPilot seamlessly integrates with planning, traffic, creative production and accounting.

This feature means that your marketing team can track information, whilst handling all media types in a single integrated system. Your users are provided an integrated ad database and digital asset management, whilst minimising data entry and use of spreadsheets by carrying information forward into integrated financial and accounting management functions.

 

 

What does this mean for Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

Combining the tools of MarketingPilot with those of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, marketing teams can find it easier to spread information and connect with potential leads.

The powerful behavioural and marketing analytics mean that your marketers can target and segment your customers, understand their needs and engage with them at the right time. Now that ways of connecting with your potential customers have changed, MarketingPilot enables improved execution across social media, pay per click on the web, or using email. This is a major benefit as not only will you have data on customers, companies and contacts but also the tools so that you can better understand them. MarketingPilot improves Dynamics CRM further by improving the marketers’ ability to interact with customers and measure data and track which activities are most effective.

For more information on how MarketingPilot allows businesses with Dynamics CRM to increase efficiency, productivity and the overall performance of their marketing campaigns, please contact us.