Marketing Procurement: Strategies to Maximize Value

In today's fragmented attention economy, marketers face the challenge of reaching customers across an ever-expanding array of platforms, devices, and screens.

To succeed, they must develop capabilities that enable them to operate effectively in this modern marketing environment.

These include tools for building quality data and customer segments, generating real-time customer insights, automating customer journeys with omni-channel messaging, enabling real-time decision making and personalization, and maintaining a robust content supply chain to support complex personalization needs.

This is where procurement teams have an opportunity to become strategic partners to the marketing team by developing expertise in the dynamic marketplace, offering strong perspectives on engaging the market effectively, and designing efficient and effective supply chains, said marketing procurement experts in a GEP podcast titled Strategies for Optimizing Your Marketing Spend.

Aligning procurement and marketing goals can lead to greater agility and focus on strategic priorities.

It starts with stay informed about market trends, consumer behavior shifts, and emerging technologies.

Top 3 Marketing Trends Today

1. 3rd Party Cookie Deprecation: As third-party cookies phase out, brands need to develop alternative solutions. These include first and zero-party data strategies, identity graph solutions, contextual targeting, and the use of data clean rooms for facilitated data sharing.

2. Generative AI in Marketing: AI is revolutionizing marketing by automating time-consuming tasks, allowing marketers to focus on high-value activities. This technology is being used to accelerate research and data mining, automate customer segment building, generate creative content and copy, and streamline various operational tasks.

3. Rise of Retail Media Networks (RMNs) and Walled Gardens: RMNs are quickly capturing a large share of the paid media market. Additionally, data trading is emerging as brands recognize the value of their first-party data to other brands.

Adapting Marketing Procurement in a Changing Landscape

• Procurement teams must be adaptable with their processes to move at the speed of marketing.
• A core competency of procurement is to lead the development of clear and accurate requirements and articulating them to the marketplace so that you get accurate proposals in return.
• Building a humanistic RFP process that engages the vendors in a way that makes them want to work with you and solicits their best proposal.
• Design a process where vendors have to demonstrate how their tools or capabilities fit or match with your use cases and requirements (custom demos or proofs-of-concept) and that there’s a fit with culture and ways of working.
• Negotiate deals that are flexible and that enable the client to buy the service based on how they want to utilize it or how they operate.

By adopting these strategies, marketing and procurement teams can work together more effectively to drive business success in the face of ongoing market changes.

Listen to the podcast now.