People, process and technology in marketing. How do they relate to modern marketing operations?

In marketing, on a daily base, from initial concept through to contact with a customer or channel partner – across the end-to-end process - several operational activities take place. These activities can be clustered in functional areas, subsets that require specific skill sets, knowledge and technological solutions.

At a high level there are three broad categories based on the need to create, produce and distribute marketing materials. Drilling down, these can be broken out into 10 different areas.

Each single area can be optimized in itself, but “the win is in the integration”. For each market, each corporate strategy and marketing strategy, you will find that a different set of functional areas are important.

1. Content: Creating, managing and storing images, texts, logos, audio- & video files
   
2. Publishing: Creating, managing and storing templates, placeholders, brand guides used to combine content elements and prepare it for publication/production
   
3. Ordering: Capturing “demand” for the production of marketing material
   
4. Production: Procurement and production of the actual material
   
5. Channel: Distributing the (trade)marketing material via a channel partner
   
6. End User: Distributing the (consumer)marketing material directly to a potential customer
   
7. Planning: Keeping track of deliverables and deadlines from A to Z on a program or project level like a campaign.
   
8. Budget: Keeping track of spending from A to Z on a program or project level
   
9. Knowledge: Keeping track of knowledge, documentation, roles and responsibilities in processes and user management in software
   
10. Reporting: Keeping track of marketing operations (all 9 other areas) using reports, KPI’s and dashboards

Read more here in the Journal of Digital Asset Management. The article is called: "MRM; making DAM and CRM stick together".