What Is a System of Record?

A system of record is a program that is used to manage your overall daily operations and share both data and assets between teams. Your sales team has a system of record (such as a CRM platform like Hubspot or Salesforce). Your finance team has one too, (financial management tools such as SAP or Peoplesoft), and so do your HR and IT teams (think Workday, Peoplesoft, or ServiceNow).

But your marketing team? Probably not.

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Most marketing teams store their target customer and campaign-related data and assets in a disparate set of tools including:

  • Online chat systems

  • Web analytics platforms

  • Marketing automation and workflow tools

  • Project management tools

  • Email platforms

Marketing drives your business. Isn’t it time your Marketing team had their own centralized system of record, too? Definitely, yes.

The good news here is that marketing budgets allocated to marketing technologies are gaining and continuing to increase:

Source: LXA (Martech Alliance) 2021/2022 Martech Report

How Does a Marketing System of Record Work?

A marketing system of record provides a central place for managing work across the end-to-end marketing lifecycle from planning your annual strategy and budget, to executing the work, through storing the assets. Not only does this help manage your marketing work, but it enables all data and information to be accessible to your team as well as leadership, to show the ROI of your marketing efforts and learn from work that didn’t perform well.

 It’s a single place where teams can:

  • Collaborate on ideas, exchange information and execute omnichannel campaigns
  • Share and review work with both internal and external stakeholders
  • Manage content creation
  • Automate highly-complex marketing processes
  • Perform resource allocations and balance workloads

Why Do You Need One?

With the continued acceleration of the digital transformation, marketers must innovate quickly and be agile enough to quickly respond when your strategic direction changes. With a marketing system of record, all work is visible, organized, trackable and actionable, allowing you to create end-to-end processes for any contingency.

A marketing system of record incorporates all the strategy, assets, and workflows around the way your company works across the entire marketing lifecycle. It accounts for any associated marketing costs and provides the foundation for your marketing operations. All of this drives teams toward greater efficiency and effectiveness, and ultimately, it helps provide consistency to creative work and your integrated campaigns.

A marketing system of record is the key to understanding your omnichannel data—what messages fit together and what business goals those messages are associated with.

Not only does a marketing SOR help you prepare more consistent omnichannel campaigns and a cohesive customer journey, it helps your end users who submit requests to marketing within your organization as well with one stop shopping to enter and track all requests.  

Considerations and benefits:

  • Scalability to support your growing needs
  • Flexibility / agility so you are able to react to changes
  • Optimize your end-to-end processes and implement a uniform data model
  • Clearly define your goals and objectives for the SOR
  • Identify your information needs and gaps
  • Define your strategy before you delve into tactics so you can build a strategy that resonates with your customers
  • Guide your customers through their journey so you can build a marketing plan that exceeds their expectations along the way
  • Create content that can meet your customers through each step of their journey
  • Establish a process so you can develop leads through your priority channels
  • Access to real time data to make informed business decisions
  • Track your KPIs
  • It’s not just for marketing! It must be expansive and collaborative across departments.

How Do You Select the Right One?

With the acquisition of Workfront a few years ago, Adobe is a big player in this SOR space and continues to gain traction in this area with Adobe Creative Cloud to create assets, Marketo, AEM to store the assets, and Workfront to track and manage the requests and work. Other players include Salesforce, Percolate by Seismic and Hubspot.

Source: Adobe Workfront

Help your Chief Marketing Officer demonstrate the value of your team with data to the rest of your organization. Cella Consulting specializes in reviewing your marketing operations, tech stack, goals and requirements and can help evaluate which platform best suits your needs. Contact us for help evaluating what is best for your needs. Reach us at [email protected] or talk with a Cella Consultant today!