Marketing leaders in large organizations are facing an array of formidable challenges. One of the most difficult is the need to develop and execute relevant, customized, multi-channel marketing programs on an accelerated basis. The reality is, marketing today needs to move at Internet (or even Twitter) speed.
To keep up with today’s rapidly changing marketing environment, one key is to reduce the cycle time required to create and deliver marketing programs. Short cycle times enable marketers to be more responsive to competitive conditions and deliver fresh marketing content on a frequent basis. Short cycle times also indicate that a company is using streamlined and automated marketing processes, which usually means greater marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
Last year, white paper that offers interesting insight on the characteristics of marketing cycle times in large enterprises. The white paper describes the results of a survey of 973 executives who are responsible for Web operations in large global businesses. Although this survey dealt specifically with online marketing, many of the findings are generally applicable to other kinds of marketing activities. What makes this survey particularly relevant for marketers in global enterprises is that the results pertain to companies that publish marketing content in more than five languages.
The Lionbridge survey revealed that marketing cycle times vary significantly. About 30% of respondents reported average cycle times of two weeks, approximately 35% reported average cycle times of four to six weeks, and another 35% said their cycle times averaged eight weeks. So, in other words, high performing companies can develop and execute marketing programs four times faster than laggards.
The Lionbridge survey also contained two findings about marketing cycle times that are counterintuitive. First, the survey found that the length of marketing cycle times is not correlated to the number of languages that an enterprise uses for marketing content. In other words, many companies that publish content in few languages have long cycle times, and many companies with short cycle times publish in many languages.
The survey also found that marketing cycle times are not correlated with company size. Companies of all sizes have short and long cycle times.
Lionbridge argues that long cycle times are primarily caused by inefficient content execution processes, which include content localization (translation, etc.), web production, and content marketing. Lionbridge also contends that an effectively deployed digital asset management system is one of the key enablers of short cycle times because DAM solutions are specifically designed to support streamlined and automated content execution processes.
This post was previously published on the ADAM Software blog. . .
