Creating innovative marketing campaigns across multiple business units is no easy feat. With so many units managing their own marketing tools, data can naturally become siloed, making it difficult to create a consistent customer experience across brands and regions. Maintaining this consistent experience can take an army if you are having to wrestle your MarTech stack to meet your needs.  

Establishing a “One CRM” digital transformation initiative can reduce bottlenecks and unclear processes, so you can ensure that the customer experience is smooth and consistent, no matter their location. 

What is a “One CRM” Digital Transformation Initiative?

Developing a “One CRM” marketing hub empowers an organization to establish consistent inbound marketing processes across marketing teams while allowing deep customization capabilities that address each market and their associated audiences.

A marketing hub has many benefits as it:  

1. Eliminates silos across business units by establishing a modernized and centralized MarTech stack  

2. Enables business units to share, analyze, and act on data to inform the business and respond to regional needs  

3. Creates a single view of the customer, enabling marketing teams to deliver highly personalized experiences 

While the benefits can be transformational for both your organization and your customers, it’s easier said than done. Fortunately, you don’t have to evaluate and establish a marketing hub on your own. With the right marketing partner, you can transform your internal processes with a single, integrated marketing platform.  

Challenges to Consider When Evaluating a Marketing Hub

You must consider the different processes each business unit has implemented. Also, there are other internal challenges such as managing implementation timelines across units, increasing buy-in between stakeholders, and coordinating meetings across different time zones. 

Considering these challenges, it’s important to have a management partner alongside you who takes the time to understand your channels, data consent, tools and technology, and your audience's and internal stakeholders' needs. One who works as an extension of your team to overcome these challenges.  

Best Practices for Establishing a Marketing Hub

The strength of your marketing hub’s foundation sets the tone for your organization's digital transformation. Without a standardized data infrastructure and updated procedures, it’s going to be difficult to build a marketing hub that's easy to maintain across business units. To build a solid foundation for your digital transformation efforts, consider following these best practices: 

1. Perform an In-Depth Discovery Phase  

Before implementing a marketing hub, it’s critical to understand your different business units' needs and the customers they serve. A typical discovery includes:  

• Meeting with different regions/business units to understand their unique strategic and technological needs  
• Performing market-specific assessments via a requirement and gap analysis review as this helps determine your audience's needs and expectations  

This discovery assists in creating a roadmap that weighs business value against implementation efforts, addresses cross-team dependencies, and identifies risk. This way, you can increase buy-in across your organization and project stakeholders. 

2. Establish a Marketing Hub Implementation Team

With so many stakeholder voices, it’s critical to establish a team that not only manages the project and expectations but also can deploy the new hub. On this team, we recommend having a project manager and several solutions architects and business architects. Project managers help reduce roadblocks and breaks in communication, while solution architects and business architects work together to ensure the technical implementation meets the needs of the business.  

3. Standardize Across Business Units as Much as Possible

While each of your business units may have their own intricacies, it’s important to standardize where you can. Consider the value of a centralized marketing hub. Establishing this hub makes it easier to report and implement changes system-wide. To realize this value, you must standardize shared data structures and processes, as it helps simplify internal processes and ensures consistent marketing experiences across regions.  

4. Start Small and Scale from There

Scope creep is one of the biggest challenges and roadblocks that can arise from implementing a marketing hub. It's easy to bite off more than you can chew, considering how many intricacies each unit and region can have. Start with some smaller markets and establish commonalities between them. Then establish standardized processes to address the common elements between their platform instances.  

5. Digitally Transform Your Marketing Operations with a Trusted Partner

Establishing a global marketing hub can be daunting, especially if your organization has never built one before. We recommend seeking out a marketing partner who has a proven track record of implementing forward-thinking strategies and MarTech stacks. They will help you establish a hub that meets your needs and builds a foundation for future initiatives the first go around.  

At Lev, we’ve helped several global organizations or companies with large product portfolios develop a marketing hub that empowers organizations to deliver personalized, consistent experiences across all their segments and brands.

Reach out to us today to discover whether establishing a one CRM marketing hub is right for your strategic needs, and we’ll work alongside you as an extension of your team to turn it into a reality.