3 keys to a successful marketing system of record

A system of record that spans across your organization is the best way to coordinate your modern marketing efforts.

At Adobe, we believe an authoritative source of truth — a “system of record” — can be used to underpin and optimize modern marketing. A system of record can help with your overall daily operations and the sharing of data and promotional assets between teams. Similar to the customer, employee, system, and financial records used in other platforms, a marketing system of record like Adobe Workfront unlocks organizational productivity for creative and marketing teams.

Although Workfront has helped thousands of customers set up their own systems of record, the concept is still new to many marketers. To help you understand the platform better and where it’s going, here are three key ingredients for a successful marketing system of record.

A clear goal and purpose

A marketing system of record serves as the single source of truth to run and inform your marketing organization — it’s both operational and informational in its daily approach. But as with any system of record, information alone is not the end purpose. The goal is to enhance the experience of the people using and benefiting from this information. In this case, that’s everyone who works in marketing and anyone who receives the final message.

Similarly, the marketing system of record is not solely about the data but also about how the data is used. A marketing system of record must facilitate the operational efforts of the organization. It involves all the strategy, assets, and workflows around the way the company works across the entire marketing lifecycle, its associated costs, and the structure of its operations.

For example, every chief marketing officer wants to demonstrate the value of their team reliably to the overall company. With a marketing system of record, they can do just that. For this to happen, however, a marketing system of record must be able to track the entire marketing operation from start to finish — from developing an annual marketing strategy and ongoing resource planning to the research and development of content and execution of campaigns and analytics in order to capture and review your efforts. It’s important to understand the clear goal and purpose that you want from a marketing system of record.

Inspire questions that support that purpose

As the number of marketing channels has increased over the past few decades, so too has information fragmentation. This is a big challenge facing marketing departments today — and a key benefit of using a marketing system of record. When one considers segmentation, funnels, analytics, budgeting, and a seemingly endless array of tools along with the supporting information they provide, it’s easy to see how daunting information fragmentation quickly becomes.

Since every marketing department is different, identifying your information needs and gaps can help you build a more effective marketing system of record. For example, where does your marketing break down between strategy, execution, and measurement? How can you acquire and use information better to speed up your marketing efforts, and what specific challenges, deadlines, or targets are your marketers attempting to meet with the desired system of record?

To help understand the importance of information when armed with both operational and native data, you can ask questions like these:

• What campaigns were most successful against utilized resources?
• What are the optimal lead times required to satisfy launches across regional markets?

The fragmentation and abundance of information require a marketing system of record to make use of diverse information effectively, and an understanding of the answers to those questions is essential for defining and supporting the overall purpose.

Leverage strategic data sources

Another important characteristic of an effective marketing system of record that supports your goal and the questions you’re asking that supports that goal is information cohesiveness. This embodies how information is gathered and presented uniformly from disparate sources. It’s how information is originally sourced and extended from other sources to augment the value of every central piece of information within a marketing system of record.

To leverage and govern through your marketing system of record, you must identify your critical marketing decision points, how they integrate with other sources and channels, and how you use this information to deliver shared promotional assets and ultimately achieve or surpass your performance targets. To do this, you’ll need a unified set of data sources and an operational view of your efforts to inform your overall decision-making.

Once a marketing asset is conceived and the work associated with developing it is recorded, the marketing system of record leverages other data sources and platforms to centralize information and make it available for further analysis and decision-making. From this, optimized and transparent workflows and analytics help to yield better outcomes. A platform that wholly recognizes this optimization of information and can influence it at every possible angle is a compelling system of record.

At Adobe Workfront, we’ve built marketing systems of record that drive real-world outcomes across every industry, from retail to healthcare to high tech. With our expertise, we can do the same for your organization.

Contact us to learn more about how Adobe Professional Services can help you connect, collaborate, and execute on complex workflows. Learn how to leverage Blueprints from Workfront Professional Services to get a jumpstart towards a Marketing System of Record.

Chris Berry is a principal enterprise architect with the Adobe Workfront business unit and has been with the practice for 10 years. He has extensive consulting experience working with a diverse set of customers across many industries and is a popular speaker at Workfront events on enterprise work management.