What is marketing orchestration?

Marketing orchestration is a holistic approach that enables organizations to execute higher-quality campaigns faster and save valuable budget and resources.

Through the effective orchestration of technologies, marketing channels, data, and teams, marketers are able to focus more time on the creative itself, without countless administrative bottlenecks and headaches.

Planning calendars, creative assets, the campaign status and performance insights are readily available to the entire team in a centralized place.

Ultimately, by aligning strategy to proper execution, marketers are able to demonstrate meaningful results.

Marketing orchestration is a transformative shift and approach towards how marketing synchronizes their teams, content, channels, workflows, and data.

These interrelated elements need to work in harmony to transcend today’s challenges

The era of marketing orchestration

Digital transformation is an ongoing conversation in the last couple of years. With new developments in the landscape, marketing organizations are expected to stay current with their marketing tech stack. In the last couple of years marketing orchestration has been a key focus for many marketing teams but many struggle to implement this methodology.

As we enter a new era of digital transformation, Content Marketing Platform has introduced a marketing orchestration platform purpose-built to strategically align teams, accelerate execution & demonstrate results.

To give you a better understanding of marketing orchestration, we’ve provided a detailed guide to the development of marketing orchestration and its value in today’s marketing landscape.

Trends in today’s marketing landscape

The lives of marketers have never been more difficult, especially due to Covid-19.

Even with vaccinations, in-person events and activations have forced event marketers to become techies overnight in their pivot to virtual events.

Creatives have had to scrap plans for in-person video shoots, forcing massive changes to campaign tactics.

Client marketers have had to change their approach to Sales proposals, with longer in-person Sales presentations moving to shorter virtual ones.

Not to mention, it’s harder than ever before to actually get the work done with noisy toddlers and pets in the background of our video calls.

Given the seemingly constant shift of priorities and go-to-market strategies, we’re left asking ourselves: What will the lasting impacts be of our remote work situation?

The truth is, Covid-19 has forever changed the way marketers work together and possibly accelerated digital transformation and remote work as a way of business by 10 years or more.

Even before the pandemic, rapid turnover of the Fortune 500 was a clear sign that companies must adapt or lose to emerging competitors and replacement products and services. These economic pressures extend to the marketing team, where leaders are constantly being asked to do more with less and remain agile. Perhaps this is one reason the average CMO tenure is just 41 months and appears to be declining.

Marketing leaders must tie their activities to real business impact in order to succeed, and as a result, we’re seeing four key trends emerge:

1. Marketing faces increased scrutiny, as there’s the need to demonstrate marketing-influenced revenue to justify budgets and headcount. The days of vanity and volume metrics are no longer acceptable by the C-suite.
2. Then there’s the explosion of martech tools available — we’re seeing heavy investment and deployment of point solutions, with a staggering 8,000 on the market. According to a 2020 Sirkin Research survey, marketing leaders are expecting to continue investment in martech solutions as we approach 2021. This Sirkin Research is further supported by Gartner’s The Annual CMO Spend Survey Research 2020, which examines how CMOs have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and their plans to regain their ROI.
3. Unlike other front-office functions, such as Sales, where each role is similar in nature, Marketing is becoming a collection of specialists. The average marketing organization now has more than 20 specialized functions, often leading to silos and raising coordination costs, as teams navigate complicated workflows between teams.
4. As a result of all of this complexity, we’re seeing the fast emergence of maestro marketing functions – cross-functional change agents who are commonly part of Marketing Operations, Integrated Marketing or Global Marketing and tasked with fostering collaboration between a range of specialist roles and geographies. These maestro roles are becoming increasingly critical in making operations transparent, efficient, and accountable. They work on both sides of the balance sheet, both improving marketing results and reducing costs. While the creation of this function has been a step in the right direction, what’s become clear is maestros can’t be fully effective without the right technology in place to help them orchestrate.

The side effects of these trends include team disorientation, slower campaign launches and a blurry return on investment. So what are the most successful brands in the world doing to become more agile, effectively demonstrate ROI, accelerate campaign execution, and ultimately, better align strategy to budgeting, planning and execution? They are turning to marketing orchestration as a holistic approach for solving these issues.

What is marketing orchestration software?

Marketing orchestration software is a tool used to enable a holistic approach to orchestrate marketing. This software is the evolution and union of several legacy software categories, including: marketing resource management (MRM), marketing project management, digital asset management (DAM), content marketing platform (CMP) and marketing performance reporting. Like a conductor needs a baton to orchestrate dozens of musicians playing different instruments, a marketing maestro needs marketing orchestration software to centralize the functions of disparate systems.

Unlike generic project management or work management software solutions, marketing orchestration software is purpose-built for the specific challenges of marketing organizations. Marketing orchestration software is effectively the connective tissue between disparate marketing technologies, marketing teams and marketing workflows to simplify all aspects of campaign ideation, creation, management and deployment for faster speed to market and meaningful insights on ROI and resourcing.