How SMART is your Overall Marketing Effort?

Many believe that budgeting for and distributing corporate marketing materials and promotional items is part art and part science. However, one of the reasons why most marketing managers rely more on gut instinct for their marketing spend is that in many instances, real time data is hard to come by.

How easy is it to determine (1) how consistently are we using our promotional materials AND (2) how much of what materials are being used AND (3) exactly for what purpose. The marketing budget in most companies is significant. Managers are forced to rely on anecdotal data from the sales team on fulfilling their needs for printed marketing collateral and promotional items. This is a potentially wasteful and hard to trace. So there is a tendency to either throw unnecessary money at the problem or allocate the budget in a way that could be more effective given better data.

One of our successes at dbpchicago has been in helping our corporate clients to gain control over their marketing budgets and order economically with better data reporting. We call our program SMART, which stands for Supply chain Management and Requisition Tool.

In the simplest terms, we create a custom online order system for your corporate printing and promotional sales materials, and then help you excercise controls via access through cost center logins. We then overlay reporting functionality and control usage through predetermined budgets and order amounts.

The result is a win/win - where your sales team feels better serviced and more empowered, and management feels more in control of its marketing budget with less waste and better branding and control over its corporate identity standards.

For more information or questions on our SMART system, please email bobk@dbpchicago.com or call direct 312.377.6007.