MarTech Interview with Mirko Holzer, CEO of BrandMaker

A more streamlined marketing ops process enables multiple departments to operate more efficiently and deliver better ROI, Mirko Holzer, CEO of BrandMaker chats with us about the growing importance that marketing operations plays in the B2B marketing realm:

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Hi Mirko, welcome to this Martech Series chat! Tell us about your journey through the years. We’d love to hear about the BrandMaker platform and its growth story in 2020-21 amid the pandemic?

Since our inception in 2008, BrandMaker has been focused on our vision to tame the complexity of global marketing. BrandMaker is now trusted by over 300 of the world’s largest companies, including Best Buy, Daimler, Zeiss and Avantor, to provide unparalleled visibility and control of their marketing processes and spend. BrandMaker’s software addresses use cases related to budgeting and spend management, campaign orchestration and planning, brand management, and content management.  

By providing a single, integrated SaaS platform to manage, simplify, optimize, and automate the entire marketing value chain, BrandMaker brings much-needed collaboration, visibility, and agility to marketing operations and the ability to manage, measure, and continually improve marketing return-on-investment. Our award-winning platform solves the complexity of marketing operations by removing silos and providing seamless marketing operations orchestration.

This year, despite the headwinds of the pandemic, we have helped our clients advance their marketing operations strategies, particularly in North America, by empowering enterprise marketing leaders with best-in-class operational capabilities that drive measurable results. 

Earlier this year, we announced a strategic investment from Rubicon Technology Partners, enabling us to accelerate our growth further through organic investments and strategic acquisitions. We are very excited to have made the first such strategic acquisition in joining forces with Allocadia.

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Tell us more about the BrandMaker-Allocadia acquisition?

This combination is all about growth – for our teams, our customers, our products, and our combined company. This transaction sets the stage for us to define and lead the marketing operations management space by combining our talented teams, highly complementary solutions, geographies, and customer bases. The strong market presence of our two companies provide the perfect opportunity to create a leader in Marketing Operations. The incredibly positive response we’ve received from our customers and employees is a great indication that we’re doing something monumental in the marketing operations category. 

How, according to you, will the Marketing Ops market shape up in the next few years: what are some of the in-demand features that will innovate further to change this niche and to suit business and sales/marketing needs?

Efficient marketing will be paramount to survival: Marketing has often been hindered by cumbersome manual processes, lack of visibility across the organization, and multiple versions of the truth. These shortcomings came back to haunt organizations during the Covid crisis.

Marketers need to prioritize financial control: More than ever, CMOs must demonstrate value to CEOs and CFOs, because in any crisis, CMOs are known to be the first to have their budgets cut. Recent research by Forrester found a significant gap between perceived budget effectiveness and actual operational performance in marketing organizations today. The study highlighted marketers require greater agility through automation to meet customer expectations and business demands. 

Marketers must strengthen customer engagement through relevant content: Remote work, even in a post-pandemic era, is likely here to stay. Many employees will continue working from home instead of returning to the office, even after it is safe to do so. This changes the game for marketing departments because when their target customers no longer deal with one- and two-hour commutes, they have more time to consume marketing content. And, frankly, they’re getting overwhelmed with all the ads and marketing messages they see as they spend more time online and connected to their devices.

How are you observing challenges and needs at the CMO-level evolve today? How can stronger marketing operations processes and systems help? Can you share some top best practices? 

Over the past year, the marketing and sales pipeline and revenue forecasting at major brands have been thrown into turmoil.  As marketing teams rethink their marketing strategy and seek to fine-tune campaigns on the fly, marketing operations – often seen as a tactical/administrative process – has quickly come under the spotlight. Its potential to give global marketing teams the ability to work at an unprecedented pace with agility and scale has become strategic and vital.  Collaboration, automated workflows, campaign visibility, financial visibility, and reporting – all are no longer ‘nice to haves’; they are quite literally mission-critical.

Can you share a few thoughts on the importance of sales / marketing teams being more strategic in the sales ops and marketing ops solutions that they choose as part of their tech stack, especially to improve inter teams alignment; what are some flaws that you still see in adoption and usage trends today, in these technologies?

According to a recent pulse survey by BrandMaker, only 10% of CMOs are fully satisfied with their technology. Or look at it another way, 90% of CMOs are not happy with their martech investments. This means operational efficiency and strategic advantage are not only evading the marketing department – it also means enterprise-wide insights and efficient integrations with areas such as sales and finance are not being realized.

A major frustration among enterprise marketing leaders is the difficulty of juggling a potpourri of siloed point solutions. Siloed solutions are dead ends without an on-ramp to an integrated future, of the ability to think bigger about marketing operations.

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When it comes to driving “effective” marketing operations in times of global uncertainty, what are some of the biggest best practices you feel smaller/mid-sized/growing teams need to be focusing on more?

The BrandMaker pulse survey showed an ongoing lack of operations maturity at organizations everywhere. It asked respondents to imagine a scenario in which a significant new market opportunity has appeared. Then it asked them to imagine that the executive team wants an immediate report on the status of plans and initiatives—including budgets, campaigns, and ROI across campaigns, regions, countries, and functions—to capture that opportunity. It asked: What would be your gut reaction to this request?

Disappointingly, 33% of all executives said they would react with fear if they needed to pull together an emergency status report because they couldn’t do it quickly and accurately—even with all the martech tools currently at their disposal.

But these tools are disparate and disconnected. Vendors have supplied solutions that address only a small piece of any business challenge. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a conductor for the entire orchestra of solutions in your technology stack. This entails finding the right partner—a strategic partner and not just a technology partner.

We are now entering the next wave of digital transformation, a wave in which many organizations embrace the diversity of their technology stack and arrange all their various tools in harmony. Organizations that do this will have an orchestra that plays in sync. They’ll have agile and connected operations, and they’ll be able to unleash their talents to create exceptional programs that produce the very best results.

Can you talk about a few ways in which you’ve seen leading brands change their sales / marketing game with marketing operations solutions?

Marketing agility requires the highest levels of alignment and collaboration throughout a retail organization. This can’t be done successfully without technology to streamline the collection and analysis of data, automate key processes and engage the appropriate audiences.  

The benefit is not just operational excellence; it goes straight to the top line, as one large global retailer learned first-hand.  The company’s marketing team was relying on spreadsheets to support its commercial activity development, planning, and execution.  This lack of efficiency was compounded by the fact that global and local plans were not integrated or connected, and performance management and metrics were entirely manual. By optimizing its marketing operations, the retailer removed the spreadsheet madness, collapsed workflow and information silos, and created seamless collaboration and visibility across 50 markets, 400 stores, and 170k employees. 

This new marketing operational maturity is on track to drive a 1% increase in sales – which translates to a triple million dollar figure.

A few must-dos that every marketing team should follow when implementing a new tool / technology to drive better impact?

To truly achieve enterprise-wide digital transformation, organizations must first increase their operations maturity. This involves determining where your current gaps exist and then doing the hard work to close those gaps. For instance, do you have visibility and control of budgets in each geography for each product line and campaign? Do you have the ability to see and optimize performance across product lines, campaigns, media, and geographies in real-time?

Only by asking such difficult questions and determining your current situation can you achieve automated and integrated platforms for business operations. You must optimize your processes first. It may sound boring, but organizations need to go through this operations maturity process before reaping all the benefits of martech.

Many marketing and technology executives are finally starting to understand this. They realize that there is no magic in software, no secret sauce. You first need to get your operations in order, and then you can use digital tools to take your business to the next level.

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