Huddle for MarketingIncrease your return on marketing investment through seamless, secure enterprise collaboration

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Huddle for Marketing

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 Executive summary

4 Marketing touches everything

4 Why SharePoint and marketing are unhappy bedfellows

5 The ‘must-haves’ for an enterprise collaboration platform

6 Huddle has the answer

7 Fast, secure collaboration across all marketing disciplines

7 Corporate communications

10 Marketing operations

12 Product marketing

13 Marketing communications and branding

14 Field marketing

15 Drawing it all together: the conclusions.

15 Increase your return on marketing investment with Huddle

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYIt’s the call every chief marketing officer dreads. “Hi. It’s the Chairman’s Office here. That press release announcing our quarterly results was leaked 24 hours early today – and the wrong version went out too, drastically underestimating our revenue. The Stock Market has gone mad. Could you come upstairs? The Chairman would like a word.” An extreme example perhaps, but one that reflects the dangers of marketing collaboration being reliant on fragmented, non-secure platforms like email, FTP sites and consumer file storage tools.

Your marketing organization is the hub of the company; the custodian of the brand; the shop window into the world. Marketing collaborates not only with your entire company internally, but with a range of agencies, customers and consultants externally. Everything from brand development, to digital asset management, internal communications and press announcements, to print/broadcast content, events management and partner marketing. It demands a single, powerful enterprise collaboration platform.

A collaboration platform like Huddle combines the power of social networking, content creation, and real-time communications and project management. It delivers a secure, cloud-based platform that enables your marketing staff – whether they work in corporate communications, marketing operations, marketing communications or field marketing – to quickly connect with the people, content and resources they need to get their work done. The end result? More effective marketing that drives bigger, faster deals and revenue growth.

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MARKETING TOUCHES EVERYTHINGMarketing is too important to be left just to the marketing department. It touches almost every aspect of your day-to-day operations – whether it is identifying new sales leads, announcing new messages, or discovering new ways to increase customer loyalty. Marketing works extensively with external partners: agencies, analysts, consultants, customers and partners. Marketing also connects with every discipline in the company: sales, customer service, business operations, finance, legal and other areas. Traditionally seen as the interface between engineering and sales, marketing is now evolving into a digital powerhouse touching every aspect of client engagement.

So why is it so tough for marketing teams to collaborate among themselves, with the rest of the organization and with external third-parties? Chances are, you rely on email, you share via non-secure files servers, you work with colleagues on the phone or in face-to-face meetings. But email only includes the people you think to include; it’s not discoverable by others. The conversations tend to sink beneath the surface of your inbox. And they’re disorganized: a message about a critical client issue ends up wedged between the corporate blast about expense policies and the email about someone offering free kittens.

WHY SHAREPOINT AND MARKETING ARE UNHAPPY BEDFELLOWSMaybe you’re using Microsoft SharePoint as the corporate standard for information sharing. You probably wish you weren’t. By common consent, it is not popular with users owing to the unintuitive interface. SharePoint also makes it difficult to share marketing content across the firewall, with your advertising and PR agency, freelance writers, media buyers and digital designers. Make no mistake: on-premise deployments of SharePoint are designed to keep marketing content locked inside an organization – not allowing users to share documents outside the company firewall.

Tools like Dropbox, Hightail and USB sticks are also popular for sharing the latest marketing graphics, video clips and other large digital assets. Security alarm bells should ring at this point. With these tools you risk losing your intellectual property whenever an employee accidentally shares the file with an unauthorized third-party or leaves the company with the content in their hand. Moreover, there is no way of tracking the data with these consumer storage tools, maintaining audit trails or retaining version controls.

This reliance on non-secure, fragmented tools is a real problem. Research by Huddle highlights that almost every employee in the organization is taking great risks with the security of their data. For example, 91 percent use their personal device to store, access and share documents; 64 percent store work documents on external hard drives; and 40 percent store work documents on consumer cloud services.

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Content collaboration for the mobile workforce

THE ‘MUST-HAVES’ FOR AN ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION PLATFORMIt’s time to establish a few ground rules. Marketing collaboration needs to adhere to some basic parameters:

1. One centralized source of marketing content. You have 20 journalists attending your product press launch. However, there are so many versions of the event schedule document on people’s hard drives that no-one has a true record of who is presenting and when. The four approved press releases are inaccessible because they’re sitting on a marketing manager’s laptop…and she’s on a plane. And the product images are on a DVD buried in a pile of press cuttings. Sounds familiar? All the tools you need for marketing communication and collaboration need to be consolidated in one place: file sharing, document management, notes, Outlook and so on.

2. Security. Marketers are charged with extremely sensitive information that needs to be secured, such as earnings announcements and prospect databases. As we have seen earlier, platforms like email and consumer storage tools neglect security. Confidential marketing data can leak out of your organization either accidentally (copying a colleague from a competitor on an email, for instance) or by more malevolent means (a dismissed employee deciding to share next year’s marketing budget plan with a rival, for example).

3. External collaboration. Have you ever counted up how many third-parties you engage with: the PR and ad agencies, the freelance writers, digital designers, event organizers, sponsorship organizations, video crews and customers, partners or prospects? You need to synchronize activities with your entire extended team in order to boost the return from your marketing investment.

4. Mobility. More and more marketing is done on the move: reviewing a product announcement press release, approving campaign creative, or fine-tuning a forthcoming WebEx event. The platform you choose for collaboration must have seamless mobile integration.

5. Self-service. Marketing is a pressure environment: deadlines count, you have a lean team and budgets are under pressure. Your staff need to be able to quickly and easily access and manage content themselves. They don’t want to spend hours learning the vagaries of unintuitive systems like SharePoint (see above). And they certainly don’t want to call on Tech Support to help download the latest segmented database of prospects. The collaboration platform needs to be easy to use, intuitive and flexible.

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SuperchargingSharePoint for external collaboration – the Huddle way.

6. Straddle the globe. You’re doing a series of customer showcase roadshows in 14 European cities, the event organizers are based in London, the budget stakeholder for the next event is in San Francisco, and you’re at the airport gate in Stockholm. Your collaboration platform needs to straddle time zones and geographies, working wherever your events, customers and management team happen to be on that day.

7. Multichannel support. Your collaboration platform needs to integrate every type of media, including large, high resolution graphics, video and images.

Take KIA Motors for example. This fastest-growing, global vehicle manufacturer was struggling to communicate consistent marketing messages across borders, languages and cultures – safely and securely. The company wanted to ensure that the messages conveyed to customers during special events, press conferences, television and print advertisements matched their expectations in Kia Motors’ showrooms and dealerships. Brand messaging also needed to be consistent globally, yet embrace cultural differences.

A lot of Kia Motors’ messages and confidential photos were also being leaked to the press and the company couldn’t identify the origin of these leaks. When launching integrated marketing campaigns worldwide, retaining version control and incorporating local feedback into marketing materials was also challenging.

HUDDLE HAS THE ANSWERAt Huddle, we have listened to the concerns of our marketing peers at companies like KIA Motors and others to innovate the easiest, most secure way to store, share and work on marketing content.

Huddle for Marketing is an enterprise collaboration platform that combines the power of social networking, content creation, real-time communications and project management. The cloud-based platform enables your marketing staff to quickly connect with the people, content and resources they need to get their work done.

Learn about Huddle security

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Huddle for Marketing breaks down organizational silos with easier enterprise collaboration across departments, geographies and even other enterprises – so you can engage seamlessly with ad and PR agencies, event organizers, brand custodians…even customers. Huddle increases productivity, leverages relevant cloud, mobile and social content, while delivering a secure environment that empowers teams to create, share and deliver the decisive intellectual property demanded by enterprises everywhere.

Let’s turn back to Kia Motors. Huddle has enabled the Korean automotive giant to retain a tremendous amount of control over the messaging released to the public. “The coordination of our campaigns has improved,” says Pamela Muñoz, Assistant Manager, International Communications, Kia Motors. “When documents were distributed via email, we’d often get more than 50 emails back with numerous questions, different viewpoints to consider and multiple comments from people in the same region. Huddle has enabled teams to participate in discussions and help each other.”

FAST, SECURE COLLABORATION ACROSS ALL MARKETING DISCIPLINESWe will now examine some marketing discipline scenarios where Huddle helps drive fast, easy and secure collaboration.

CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONSSomeone once said that in marketing you must choose between boredom, shouting and seduction: Corporate Communications is where all three of these come together. The activity helps your company explain its mission, and combine its many visions and values into a cohesive message to its audiences. This may include employees, media, channel partners and the general public.

How does Huddle help here?Managing the internal approvals process

Here’s the problem. You have multiple stakeholders across the business, all needing to review and approve content by a specific deadline – quarterly financial statements, press releases, or case studies for example. Many of these teams want to provide additional feedback and thoughts; and all versions of a document have to be stored if you need to revert to a previous iteration. However, email and FTP are leading to multiple, overlapping versions of the document and you’re wasting too much time sifting through these fragmented platforms hunting down the right version of the document.

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With Huddle, everything is securely stored in one central location. Stakeholders have permission-based access to the content, so they can quickly review and approve the content – on the move if they choose. External agencies can easily join the conversation. And you have a complete, unified record of events for audit trails and compliance, should the need arise.

Take this Executive Briefing you’re reading now, for example. Once written, it was posted to a Huddle workspace. It was assigned to and shared with individuals in corporate communications, plus other stakeholders – product marketing, legal, customer success – along with an approval deadline. Each person in the workspace could see who reviewed the Executive Briefing, with all comments and feedback stored alongside the document. Huddle automatically chased individuals when their assigned approval date on the Executive Briefing was due; a traffic light system ensured stakeholders could see who had approved the Executive Briefing; and a comprehensive audit trail identified who had done what with the document.

More than 100 staff at Panasonic Europe use Huddle to update and keep track of monthly reports and the latest messaging. It also provides a platform to create projects for European events where large files of creative materials need to be exchanged. Huddle’s clear audit trail makes it easy to see who has updated content and when the updates have been made.

Working effectively with external agencies

When content is stored on a company’s servers, external agencies – PR and advertising companies, digital design companies, events organizers – cannot gain access to campaign materials, images and documents. Everything has to be sent back and forth via email, FTP or by non-secure consumer file sharing tools. There is no secure, central place where agencies can access all the campaign materials and messaging. And there is an ever-present threat that the wrong version of a media announcement or artwork will be distributed.

Setting up a secure Huddle workspace with each external agency ensures everyone can access the content they need, when they need it. A folder structure can be created for media announcements, images, events, campaigns, opinion pieces and so forth. Moreover, everyone has full visibility of which versions of campaign materials, articles and press releases are final. And approvals, feedback and tasks are managed centrally, so there is no confusion as to what was decided, when and by whom. Just in case that rogue press release is sent out over the wire before the embargo ends.

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Panasonic Europe has a number of external suppliers working with Panasonic teams via Huddle. Each Spring, Panasonic organizes a product launch fair and needs to collaborate with a number of suppliers to make sure the event runs smoothly. Huddle enables the team to collaborate on large documents, especially the presentations, which both internal teams and external audio visual agencies need access to.

Coordinating projects with freelancers

You probably wish that freelancers were sitting next to you, as opposed to another company. You spend hours running through briefs for content creation over the phone or by email. Background information and plans then have to be sent back and forth via email or shared via non-secure links like Dropbox. And providing feedback and approving content is a lengthy process, involving numerous phone calls and emails.

With Huddle, all background information and content plans associated with a campaign can be uploaded into Huddle and the participants notified. Initial content drafts can be uploaded into the secure workspace and the relevant people asked to provide feedback. The approvals process is easily managed and tracked. And there’s no confusion over deadlines or feedback as everything is linked directly to the piece of content.

Working with a number of external agencies, security is essential for Panasonic Europe. Huddle enables the company to select who they invite into each workspace and who can access which documents. Panasonic also performs frequent user checks to see who the admins and users are, and make sure that anyone who has left the company is removed from the workspace.

Collaborating with analysts

All analyst briefings must be tracked centrally and numerous team members have to update the master tracker. All reports – up coming and appeared in – have to be recorded. And when working with analysts on third-party content projects, documents like backgrounders, case studies and other information need to be accessible across the firewall. Email is not a practical option in these circumstances.

Huddle streamlines and enhances the end-to-end analyst relationship. For example, a master analyst tracker can be maintained in a central Huddle workspace where briefings and reports are recorded. The approval of, and feedback on, a customer questionnaire can be managed via Huddle. And customer contact details can be stored centrally so an analyst house can access information for survey distribution.

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Managing the customer advocacy program

Customer advocacy/reference programs can be a logistical nightmare to manage, and you’re probably relying right now on a mass of spreadsheets, with no clear idea of which candidates offer the optimal opportunity for referral. For example, you need to keep a record of where the customers are in the advocacy pipeline, whether they are a press release, case study or speaker opportunity, and revisit that data at the appropriate moment in the nurturing cycle. This tracking process needs to be accessible by the director of corporate comms, PR managers, reference program managers and possibly sales too. Content approval needs to be seamless as well: both internally with stakeholders and externally with customers.

With Huddle, you can harvest more customer advocates and deliver more endorsements for your products. Huddle enables you to create a central tracking system for reference candidates, containing details of media announcements and the case study pipeline, all stored in a corporate comms folder. Case studies and media announcements for approval can be uploaded into relevant files and deadlines set. Customers can be invited to join secure folders to review and approve their content. Even awards entries can stored in the relevant file for approvals.

MARKETING OPERATIONSMarketing Operations plays a vital role in ensuring day-to-day marketing processes run smoothly. In essence, we are describing the proverbial oil that keeps all of the marketing parts moving without grinding to a halt. Marketing Operations is part oversight and part insight. It is often responsible for planning, budget management, pricing, packaging and training marketing staff. It interfaces with Sales Operations and IT to ensure the smooth running of the marketing infrastructure. Marketing Operations also demands seamless, cross-functional collaboration of time-sensitive and often confidential documents – to accelerate the approval process with senior leadership.

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How does Huddle help here?Pricing and packaging

Huddle enables Marketing Operations teams to collaborate seamlessly and securely with product managers, sales leaders, the CEO and other functional teams in pursuit of pricing and packaging decisions. Huddle also offers the flexibility to engage quickly and easily with external sources for pricing advice, such as analysts and specialist agencies. The dashboard also surfaces only the pricing and packaging content that is important to you.

Infrastructure changes

With Huddle, you can manage the marketing infrastructure on behalf of the marketing team. For example, if you want to introduce a new email marketing tool, you can set up a secure workspace, inviting the appropriately experienced individuals to contribute to the review. Changes can be documented, shared and approved across an extended team of sales, IT and marketing staff. Documentation with each solution can be reviewed, commented on and shared; you can upload files directly from Outlook; and maintain a complete audited record of the selection process.

Marketing enablement

To be effective, your marketing team needs the right tools, training and techniques. You can manage all your marketing knowledge and training with Huddle. For example, you can keep content in a central, secure space to reduce the time spent searching for information. Huddle also allows enablement information to be stored centrally and to be accessible to anyone who needs it. Consequently, knowledge flows more freely and efficiently across your organization.

Let’s imagine you are introducing a new marketing automation system, such as Marketo. Using Huddle, you can schedule training programs on the new platform with the appropriate candidates, maintain a single record of all the training materials and examine who has undertaken the online training, what they reviewed and when. Moreover, candidates have the flexibility to schedule the training whenever they want – and view it on their iPad while traveling if they prefer.

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Budget planning

Huddle allows you to work with functional leaders across marketing and finance to create, maintain and approve the marketing budget plan. You maintain a single version of the budget, which everyone can share from any device; reviews and comments can be included; and you have complete control over who has access – so only the approved stakeholders review the figures. Budget reporting and analysis is streamlined too: again everyone has access to the same information, content and documents in one central location. And if a post-event audit is required, it is there.

PRODUCT MARKETINGProduct Marketing deals with several of the seven ‘P’s of marketing: product, pricing, place, promotion, physical environment, process and people. While Product Management deals with the nuts and bolts of product development within a firm, Product Marketing deals with marketing your product to prospects, customers and others.

However, Huddle’s Enterprise Information Landscape study of 4,000 office workers found that 70 percent of office workers – including Product Marketing – continue to revert to email when it comes to sharing documents with people across the firewall. This means they waste time, risk errors and experience many frustrations when relying on these legacy communications tools. The worst case scenario is a marketing program error that damages the brand, costs money to resolve and delays the sales process.

Using Huddle, your Product Marketing professionals can manage projects, share files and collaborate with people inside and outside of their organization. Content and conversations are combined in one central view and users have a workable preview of files without the need to download them. For example, you can collaborate on road maps. Work with analysts on MQs and sponsored content. Engage seamlessly and securely with engineering, sales, and other consultants on competitive analyses. And if you’re interested, also write and share blogs, white papers, demos and presentations.

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MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS AND BRANDINGMarketing Communications (marcomms) is focused on the product or service, as opposed to corporate communications where the focus of communications work is the company itself – issue management, mergers and acquisitions, litigation and so forth. It’s often termed the engine room of marketing. As a marcomms professional, have you ever tried organizing your annual customer user conference or other event with email and spreadsheets? If you have, you’ll be familiar with the problems: an overflowing email in-box, a fragmented view of event content, and siloed groups of marcomms professionals working in isolation, with no central location for current files.

Huddle redefines the marcomms process, introducing fast, easy file sharing for powerful collaboration. Let’s use that example of an event to color what we mean. You’re organizing your annual customer event in San Francisco. Some 5,000 customers are attending. With Huddle you have one, shared, secure forum for everything associated with the event, from registrations, location management and speaker presentations, to partner stands, site branding and event survey forms. Nothing is lost – everything is shared for prompt approval. You can collaborate just as easily with external partners like stand builders as you can with colleagues across the floor. And the information is available to anyone, anytime, on any device.

It’s the same with the corporate branding process. Huddle enables you to collaborate across the firewall with branding design agencies and other third-parties. You can create and approve the brand guidelines. And publish pre-defined templates to the company and to agencies.

Huddle also supports digital marketing processes: quickly taking over from traditional print advertising as the key platform to engage with customers. Huddle drives the demand generation engine, utilizing content provided by the marcomms team in collaboration with Product Marketing, Sales and Field Marketing. Whether the demand is created from computers, tablets, smartphones, cellphones or digital billboards, Huddle ensures everyone is aware of what is happening.

For example, if you are executing a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, Huddle provides a unified and collaborative place for all stakeholders to share SEO strategy documents. The solution ensures everyone is working on the right version, audit controls are in place to determine who did what and task management keeps the entire marcomms team on top of deadlines.

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FIELD MARKETINGWith the advent of social media and other emerging channels, Field Marketing has changed beyond all recognition in recent years. It was traditionally positioned as a one-way communication tool, with the brand message delivered to the consumer whether through samples, a piece of merchandise or literature. Today, Field Marketing is a powerful function that aligns closely with sales to drive programs across all marketing channels and engage with the target audience. Many consider it to be the face of marketing to sales – and vice versa.

Huddle can streamline and accelerate the Field Marketing process:Event management

Organizing field events requires planning, sales alignment and seamless execution. Let’s imagine for example you are organizing a partner event. In most cases, your team rely on emailing attachments, possibly an extranet and/or an intranet, FTP sites and consumer file storage tools to manage the document approvals process associated with the event. Huddle removes the pain here. You can allocate approvals to people, all comments are attached to the version of a document they’re referring to, and internal and external colleagues can securely access documents. Budgets can be tracked; stand designs collaborated on. Moreover, you have complete visibility of who has reviewed and approved a file – and a full audit trail.

Campaign management

Running programs in the field requires excellent communication and careful planning. Lead follow-up necessitates a careful process to ensure the right people understand what is happening, why leads are being delivered and when to process them by. Field Marketing is the face of marketing to the Sales organization. Huddle facilitates a clear way of sharing plans, gaining feedback and ensuring approvals. With Huddle all actions are audited so you know exactly who has reviewed materials and you’re prepared for action!

It offers an operational workspace in which Field Marketing process documents can be created, worked on and maintained.

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DRAWING IT ALL TOGETHER: THE CONCLUSIONS.Marketing touches so many disciplines, within and beyond the organization, that collaboration can’t be left to fragmented, non-secure and sometimes difficult to use platforms like email, cloud storage tools or even SharePoint. Huddle provides a central repository for all your marketing content: a repository that can be shared with colleagues and external partners like freelance writers, PR agencies and graphic designers. Huddle is secure too, being trusted by more than 100,000 organizations worldwide for content collaboration. And Huddle is flexible: allowing you to work anywhere, anytime for example; and to share everything from large video files and documents, to notes and Outlook.

INCREASE YOUR RETURN ON MARKETING INVESTMENT WITH HUDDLETo find out how Huddle enables your dispersed marketing team to collaborate securely inside and outside the firewall for greater marketing success, visit www.huddle.com

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