To help companies better deliver on their marketing vision and scale their marketing business processes, managed marketing services (MMS) offshore has become a fast growing trend. According to an Everest Group® study, offshore MMS centers increased over 50% from 2019 to 2022. What’s more, the number of offshore full-time equivalent employees (FTE) jumped 115%.

What are managed marketing services (MMS)?

Managed marketing services are the outsourcing of marketing business processes, such as campaign planning and execution, content management and enhancement, marketing analytics and other marketing support (SEO, social listening and loyalty).

Traditionally, business processes tied to marketing are manual tasks completed in-house and onshore. These processes are becoming more complex as AI and automation eliminate the tasks that can be executed through technology, leaving only the most challenging work behind.

This complexity translates into higher costs and makes it difficult for marketing teams to keep up. In a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, 55% of respondents reported challenges coordinating effectively with different teams within marketing.

For big brands across all industries, today’s marketing campaigns are customized for specific audiences. These campaigns often need to be tailored to meet requirements in specific regions, which means navigating various regulations and standards.

While core creative and strategy campaigns are kept primarily in-house, marketing leaders are turning to MMS and tapping into their business and technology expertise to accelerate digital marketing operations, bridge talent shortages and fill technology skill gaps.

IBM Consulting offers managed marketing services that help clients improve their customer journeys by bringing together strategy, experience, technology and operations. IBM’s cross-functional team of experts helps companies transform their marketing organizations by taking on marketing functions.

Benefits include improved market performance and reduced costs, revenue growth through deep customer understanding and actionable insights, and exceptional experiences for customers and marketers.

Leveraging MMS for personalization at scale

Personalization builds brand loyalty by creating customer experiences (CXs) specifically designed for each audience. This leads to stronger customer relationships, which leads to higher customer value. Today, a service or retail organization might have 20 to 30 campaigns delivered to different audiences across numerous modalities (spanning paid social, email, push notification, texts and more).

The act of delivering such personalized messaging is a complex challenge. Marketing teams struggle to deliver relevant content and communications at scale.

The main areas of opportunity for businesses who leverage MMS for personalization at scale include campaign support, content management, customer experience, and marketing and media support. These components come together to create end-to-end operations efficiency, experience optimization and data optimization.

1. Campaign Support

Managed marketing services for campaign support transform marketing organizations by removing complexity across people, processes and platforms to create intelligent workflows and drive more value. MMS for campaign support includes:

• Design and planning
• Execution
• Optimization
• Performance evaluation

2. Content management

Content management with MMS involves collecting and managing content so it can be personalized and deployed at scale. When effectively managed across an organization, content can be used to engage customers, automate business processes and enhance collaboration. MMS for content management includes:

• Content localization and optimization
• Content migration
• Content personalization
• Digital asset management

3. Customer experience

Great customer experiences are built on data-driven insights. Managed marketing services provide the hyper-personalization needed to build customer loyalty and reduce churn. MMS for customer experience includes:

• User experience strategy
• Journey mapping
• Segmentation
• Predictive modeling
• Social listening
• Customer data management

4. Marketing and media support

Leveraging state-of-the-art AI solutions ensures optimization of targets, channels, messages and actions.MMS support around data and analytics answers questions such as: Who clicked on an online ad? Did that action turn into a lead? Did the customer make a purchase? What time did this occur? All this data can be fed back into the campaign’s execution to continually improve its effectiveness. MMS for marketing and media support includes:

• Commerce cataloging and curation
• Social/mobile command center
• Channel optimization

Transforming the customer experience in financial services

Recently, a national financial services company was challenged with scaling its marketing operations to address sudden growth in campaign volume and complexity while maintaining superior member experience with no increase in budget. To carry out this transformation, the organization worked with IBM to redesign its operating model.

The IBM team provided consulting services to support operational and organizational alignment around journey-based marketing that dramatically changed engagement with customers, prospects and suspects. The overall transformation simplified processes and infused automation in creative and campaign execution.

Accelerating marketing performance

By executing MMS to achieve personalization at scale, businesses have seen great success. One retailer saw a 176% increase in online revenue from target segments, a 25% increase in online conversion rates and a 10% average increase in order size after personalizing their digital presence across touchpoints with IBM iX®.

IBM’s managed marketing services provide a flexible framework that allows our clients to accelerate a shift to digital marketing and achieve personalization at scale. We do this by supplementing marketing operations to transform, automate or change workflows so businesses can innovate, keep up with evolving customer needs and stay ahead of the competition.