In marketing, as in any other business, it is important to have streamlined and functional business processes, as this is the basis for building a profitable business. That is why more and more marketing agencies are starting to look towards ERP systems for marketing.
A number of questions immediately arise: how to choose the right system? What criteria are most important when choosing? How is an ERP system for marketing better than CRM? Let's figure it out!
ERP system for marketing: an overview of the main aspects
Let's start this article by debunking myths: there is no such thing as "ERP for a marketing agency", "ERP for a marketer", "ERP for marketing and sales" - these are just nice names that usually mean nothing.
We at ToDo have been implementing various business automation systems for over 20 years and have never encountered ERP systems that were created purely for marketing activities. So, we figured it out.
Now let's look at ERP and CRM in the context of systems that are very often compared as analogs of each other. And this is a key mistake. Let's briefly go through the main differences between these systems: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is designed to manage the relationship between you and the customer.
With this software, you can track the time and date of the last communication, mark the need to provide a special offer to a particular customer, in a word, guide the customer through the sales funnel. Instead, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a giant designed for comprehensive automation and optimization of an enterprise's business processes.
An ERP system opens up opportunities for you to optimize personnel accounting, staff training, product storage and warehouse management, and much more. Also, some ERP systems also include a built-in CRM, which makes the work process very convenient, because everything you need is at hand, in one place.
So, CRM and ERP are conceptually different systems that cannot be compared in any way. If you are interested in learning more about their differences, we recommend reading this material, where we discussed this issue in more detail.
Benefits of implementing ERP for a marketing agency
By implementing an ERP system, you first of all eliminate as much human intervention as possible in business processes. The human factor is when you “forgot to do something because you were tired,” “was late because there was a traffic jam,” “didn’t have time because you were distracted,” and so on.
The importance of all these factors should not be underestimated, because as practice and our experience show, this is the main reason for the loss of a huge amount of time and money for the company. However, do not rush to fire employees - someone has to work, right?)
The ERP system will allow you to optimize most of the purely mechanical processes that can be performed without human intervention, which will save your employees' time on performing monotonous actions.
And as you know: time is money, so implementing ERP directly affects the preservation of your company's budget and the acquisition of new capital, because all necessary actions will be performed on time. And believe me, the program will definitely not look for reasons why it did not do something.
As a result, you and your employees will have more time to solve more important issues that no one paid attention to before. And of course, this will give you the opportunity to save on the salaries of employees who were previously engaged in operational tasks, because their work will be taken over by the system.
There is another important point to consider: ERP is not a panacea if you do not have business processes described, or they are described incorrectly, have an ineffective team, or something else.
In this case, you should conduct a business audit and deal with pressing issues. ERP will help you only if you have a foundation for automation laid (i.e., at least, business processes are described and working) and have a clear vision of what you want to achieve as a result of the implementation.
Key Odoo ERP functionalities for optimizing marketing processes
We have told you a lot about the difference between ERP and CRM and the benefits of implementing ERP in an enterprise, but we have never given an example of a system that would meet all the requirements we described above.
It's time to introduce you to ERP Odoo. This is a system for comprehensive business automation of Belgian origin, which can cover all your needs: from marketing automation to a powerful CRM module built into the system.
There are many more interesting facts about Odoo that we could tell you, but we don't see the point in doing it again, because we have great article, in which we described all the advantages and features of this ERP. We recommend that everyone interested follow the link above and read it!
Here is a generalized configuration of the system modules, which, in our opinion, will suit any marketing agency:
- CRM: Will provide you with high-quality and convenient interaction with leads without going beyond the boundaries of Odoo ERP, because everything is in one system! Moreover, CRM in Odoo is not “trimmed”, on the contrary, it is a full-fledged CRM, with very wide functionality that can be flexibly configured to your needs.
- Marketing Automation: With this module, you can create marketing campaigns, track their progress, and analyze their results in detail.
- Email marketing: The case where the name speaks for itself - create email newsletters, plan the regularity of their sending, and track the percentage of emails sent and read, which will indicate the relevance of the newsletter for your readers.
- Social Media Marketing: Connect as many social networks as you want and manage them all from one place! Write posts and monitor your content metrics right in Odoo!
- Website Builder: It has never been easier to create your own website! You don't need any specific design or programming skills — Odoo will do everything for you. You just need to drag and drop the necessary blocks of your future website into the appropriate places in the template and that's it — the website is ready!
- Project Management: Create tasks, set deadlines, add responsible parties, and move the task along the kanban to see its progress.
- Employee timesheets: Now your employees don't have to use third-party Google or Excel spreadsheets to document time worked, because all this is available in Odoo with a user-friendly interface, comments, and, if necessary, disabling rights to make changes to the record made by the employee.
This is very generalized and without going into details. This list of modules can be supplemented or reduced - depending on the needs and specifics of the enterprise's functioning. This is what distinguishes Odoo from other ERPs, because it works on the principle of a designer: we leave everything we need, and remove everything we don't need.
The effectiveness of using ERP Odoo in marketing and sales
Implementing ERP Odoo will be a great solution, as it will optimize your business processes and increase their efficiency, save time for you and your employees, and, as a result, increase the profitability of your company.
Interested in the system? Want to see how it works in practice? Hurry up and sign up for a free consultation or demo presentation of the system, where our specialist will clearly demonstrate to you all the features of the system and show you how it can work with your business processes. Let's make your business better today!
