Originally posted on https://www.intelligencebank.com/blog/the-power-of-one

At IntelligenceBank, we are passionate about providing marketing departments (especially those in regulated industries) with a seamless, integrated process to manage the entire marketing lifecycle process. From briefing in a project or creative brief, to assigning budgets, workflows, due dates, talent usage rights and resources, getting creative approved and distributing it to the world, our integrated suite of tools help marketing teams deliver great work on time, on brand and compliant.  When we speak to customers about the clear benefits of having ‘everything in one place’ there are the obvious cost savings and synergies you get by streamlining everything into one system.

In a recent meeting with one of our clients it became obvious that there’s an even bigger benefit to having fewer tools that can accomplish several tasks; and that’s user adoption across the whole business.

While the importance of user adoption may seem obvious, it is often overlooked by clients. The full benefits of marketing operations software only become clear when they can see how processes across their whole business could be streamlined.

It’s kind of like when you are in the market for a red car. When you are aware of them, that’s all you see driving down the highway.

Here are some quotes we have heard from our clients recently:

‘We used to have a separate project management tool which we liked and a Digital Asset Management System, now it’s all together with IntelligenceBank and the wider business is using these tools much more efficiently within the same platform.’ – Creative Operations Director at an FMCG brand.

‘Prior to using IntelligenceBank we had our brand guidelines in a separate portal from our Digital Asset Management Software which meant that no one used them because people couldn’t be bothered logging in to two different systems.’  – Head of Brand at a Global Travel company.

‘We sort of had a basic creative compliance process which involved email, a simple project management tool, a shared drive and creative approvals via email.  It worked in theory, but our head of medical compliance asked us to streamline this approval process as she couldn’t easily login to see the creative approvals and there was no decent audit trail or version control. This was a major compliance risk for our company. ’ – Head of Marketing Operations at a large healthcare company.

In the land of enterprise software where there is a solution for every business problem, companies are still facing challenges not because there is a lack of capability in the software, but rather people tend to get in the way.  In other words, if you can fix user adoption you can generally fix a business problem.

On a higher level, a debate that happens amongst analyst circles all the time, is whether a customer should buy a suite of tools provided by a single vendor, or best of breed individual applications.

From an overarching marketing tech stack perspective (this is thinking about all software and services used for sales and marketing), it is common knowledge that companies are better off purchasing best of breed tools that fit together, vs. turning to a single supplier to cater to it all. While this debate rages on (you can read more about Real Story Group’s take on it here), one thing that often gets missed out of this broader discussion is who will actually be using each tool and how integrated it is within their day to day processes.

Based on our discussions with some of the leading marketing departments from around the world, purchasing the tool that will get the job done best, shouldn’t be the only consideration.  Assuming there is a base level of quality of products and implementations, you will get higher usage and efficiencies if you can combine as many tools and processes within a single platform as possible.

This is exactly where IntelligenceBank comes in. Contact us today if you want to learn more about our fully integrated Marketing Operations software with Enterprise Digital Asset Management, workflows, approvals, project management and online brand guidelines.

CONTACT US