Technology has led to an industry-wide transformation of business processes and marketing is no exception. With the proliferation of MarTech platforms enabling different aspects of digital marketing over the last decade, the dynamics of marketing have undergone a complete overhaul. With businesses within organizations running their own marketing operations, there is duplication of platforms and teams across business lines and geographies. This can be resolved through shared services setup that all business teams can rely on for their collective marketing operations.

Challenges in streamlining marketing operations

Marketing today goes beyond awareness creation and customer acquisition. Organizations need to foster customer relationships post purchase in order to maximize customer lifetime value. Ongoing customer engagement through an omnichannel approach is necessary to sustain growth and build a loyal consumer community. Achieving all this requires advanced technical expertise and investments in technology, manpower, infrastructure, etc. Additionally, the CMO also has to balance globalization with regional flexibility.

One of the key challenges is to identify and invest in the optimal MarTech solution. Post that the marketing leaders need to create a team of domain certified experts to run these initiatives which again is a challenge. If different businesses within an organization have their own platforms and teams operating in silos, overall cost to the company goes up without any significant returns on investments. 

Approach to decoupling marketing strategy from operations

Organizations need to assess and rationalize MarTech platforms across the organization and centralize skills to support strategic marketing teams globally. While marketing strategy, budgets, messaging can stay with the strategic leadership teams closest to the business or geography, it might not always be pragmatic to perform all marketing operations in silos. This can be achieved through shared services team comprising specialists in varied Digital Marketing services and certified platform expertise.

Thus, by decoupling their marketing strategy from operations, business can focus on their markets and strategy while relying on central operations support team to execute on the strategy and plans. 

How Wipro helps clients decouple marketing strategy from operations

Wipro’s Marketing as a Service practice is dedicated to achieving operational excellence for its clients. We act as strategic partners to CMOs and help them scale their marketing operations across channels and geographies. Campaigns and marketing collaterals need to be tailored to the targeted platforms and customer segments. For instance, the kind of campaigns that are successful in the North America region might not work very well in Asia because of cultural, linguistic, and demographic differences. With delivery centers across the world, we help our clients not just maintain business continuity but also add regional flavor to cater to varied audiences. Our follow-the-sun model assures 24x7 availability of support across the world ensuring minimal disruption of services irrespective of where our client’s strategic marketing unit is located. We also ensure legal and regulatory compliance as well as brand guideline adherence across all countries of operation. We enable automation in service delivery resulting in greater accuracy and enhanced speed.

We have helped our clients scale their marketing operations with efficiency by eliminating duplication of efforts across business units and geographies. For instance, an American marketing services company with a roster of Fortune 500 clients had marketing teams for each client leading to duplication of talent and underutilization of specialist resources. We deployed an offshore marketing operations hub to facilitate centralization thereby reducing operations cost by 45%. We have created a centralized hub for all marketing communications for a leading retail conglomerate helping them reduce their campaign activation time by more than 90%. We have also set up a digital marketing services hub to centralize marketing operations for 4,500 SMB clients of a leading Australian marketing services company.

Our solutions are technology and data driven. We are platform agnostic and can adapt to the client’s ecosystem as required. In case our client is in the early stages of technology adoption, we help them assess their business landscape and select appropriate MarTech solutions. We have a strong team of over 3,000 marketing associates professionally trained on multiple market-leading MarTech platforms like Oracle Eloqua, Adobe Experience Manager, SAP Hybris, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to name a few. We help our clients not just deploy MarTech solutions, but also analyze and optimize them proactively to get the maximum ROI.

If you are interested in learning more about how Wipro is helping our clients achieve their vision of transformed marketing, we should talk. Connect with us.

About the authors

Hitha Uchil

Marketing as a Service, Global Practice Lead

With over 20 years’ experience in marketing services, business research and ecommerce, Hitha leads Wipro’s Marketing as a Service practice. The practice spans a range of services across the marketing spectrum – digital marketing, CRM, content & design, social media and website content publishing.  Through centralization of operations, transformation and process re-engineering, the team enables global CMOs to deliver on key marketing metrics with speed and efficiency.

Soubhik Basu

Marketing as a Service, Practice Consultant

Soubhik, post his MBA from IIT Delhi, joined Wipro as part of the Young Leader's Program. He has been actively involved in customizing marketing solutions for client needs across practice offerings like Digital Marketing, Social Care, CRM operations, etc. He brings to the practice 2 years of pre-MBA industry experience in the software development and testing domain.