Sign-up to our Salesforce Marketing ROI Beta

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Allocadia is currently accepting Beta customers for its new Salesforce connector.

The Connector enables marketers to automatically pull-in their Salesforce Return metrics - such as Number of Leads, Number of Opportunities, Value of Opportunies Opened and Value of Opportunities Won - back to their marketing Investment data in Allocadia.

The end result? Closed-loop ROI solution for marketing.

Sign-up to the Salesforce + Allocadia Return on Marketing Investments (ROMI) Beta

Forrester: B2B Marketing Budgets Rising 6.8% in 2012

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B2B marketers are increasing marketing budgets 6.8% on average in 2012, according to a survey from Forrester Research.

Across various industries, gaps in marketing investment growth have narrowed from levels reported in 2011: 

• High-tech services firms still lead the industry pack in 2012, but with a much more modest growth plan of 9%, compared with the 17% reported in 2011.
• Manufacturing firms are second with a 7% increase as they invest in digital channels. That's up 3 percentage points from 4% in 2011.
• Pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotech budgets are showing a sharp change of direction, shifting from a 3% cut in budgets in 2011, to a 2% increase in 2012. 

New MRM Case Study: StepStone

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There's a hard way and an easy way

When it came to budgeting, the marketing team at StepStone knew there had to be an easier way. The international marketing team supports eight different offices in seven countries, and for international online marketing specialist Benjamin Deigendesch and the rest of the marketing team, that meant dealing with eight different marketing budget spreadsheets.

“Each country had its own excel file for marketing budgets,” says Deigendesch, “so for us on the international level, it was a challenge because we had to combine all of those single excel files into large file with data from all of the countries.”

That led to a massive document with hundreds of line items that were updated constantly. “On a daily basis, there were up to seven different people working with this file, so version control quickly became an issue.”

An easy solution

StepStone’s marketing team now uses Allocadia to track its entire marketing budget. “We can rely on the data, and we have better control of the budget,” says Deigendesch. StepStone employees in different countries can now easily access individual budgets for each country and all of that data is aggregated into multiple views for different users.

Marketing Budgeting Software: New Recorded Product Demos

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We recently updated our recorded product demos. If it's been a while since you checked-in with us, definitely take a look as they showcase many new areas of the application. In these short recorded product demonstrations, Roger Lines from Allocadia gives a brief overview of Allocadia, based on your role.

Watch the Recordings Now

Product Update - March 2012

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The Allocadia product team has had a busy first few months of 2012! Here are a few highlights of the new features and improvements delivered to customers so far this year:

Import invoice data and map it to your marketing plan

• How this helps marketers: This solves the challenge of managing multiple spreadsheet exports from your finance system (from SAP or Oracle systems for example), and trying to mash these up with your marketing budgeting plan.
• Rule-based import: The import process is rule-based which allows automatic mapping of PO and invoice data to specific budgets, campaigns and line items in Allocadia. Rules are saved and can be used for subsequent imports, streamlining the ongoing process of bringing finance data into Allocadia.
• Built with customers: We’ve designed these capabilities by working closely with our customers. The result is a process that is easy-to-use and that meet the needs of both Finance and Marketing.
• For more information: Read out our knowledge base

Performance Enhancements

Performance is an area we have been focused on with a number of specific improvements recently:

• Report Caching: Introduced report caching to improved loading time for reports
• Rollup Panel: Improved performance of loading and saving the Rollup Panel
• Home Tab Loading: For customers with a large number of budgets, loading the Home Tab is now faster
• Data Retrieval: Database tuning optimizations for general data retrieval performance improvement

General improvements

In addition to the updates above, there have been several other improvements introduced:

• Multi-Currency: Introduced a user locale preference to specify desired currency formatting. Preference is defined in the My Account area. Currency values in all panels are formatted based on the selected locale.
• User Permissions: Added a new permission to allow the Editor role to be restricted from adding, editing or deleting invoices. This new setting is in the Permissions settings of the master rollup or standalone budget. By default permission is not enabled.
• Analytics Reporting: Purchase Order data can now be exported and synced to Analytics. This allows customers to report on Purchase Order amounts against their plan data.
• Export to Excel: New options for budget export to Excel were introduced with more user friendly formatting.

If you are a customer and would like to take advantage of these new features, please Contact our Customer Support team and they would be happy to assist you.

If you are a new customer, you can sign-up to a trial account and we will be in touch with you to learn more about your marketing budgeting challenges.

Webinar Recording: Don't spend another year smashing your marketing and finance spreadsheets together

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Watch Recording Now

Learn how Global Marketing Operations at Juniper have implemented an elegant (and you could even say ground-breaking!) solution to the marketing financial management challenge.

You will learn how they:

• Increase productivity of the marketing organization through global marketing investment transparency and alignment
  
• Map Oracle™ finance actuals to their plan, without IT involvement
  
• Bridge the gap between the office of the CMO and CFO
• Reduce staff time associated with cumbersome spreadsheet based processes
• Plan to leverage a combined CRM, Marketing Automation and MRM technology strategy
  

Watch Recording Now

The goal of this special how-to Webinar from Juniper is to help you implement best-practices in marketing operations and bridge the Marketing and Finance gap.

Announcing a revolutionary way to connect the dots between Marketing and Finance

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Introducing a simple, yet powerful way to link your planned spend with your actual spend stored in your Finance systems such as Oracle™ and SAP™.

Our new Import Actuals and Import POs functionality delivers a revolutionary way to manage your marketing budgets!

In the process, your marketing organization can save money by reducing overhead associated with cumbersome spreadsheet-based processes, and also reduce costs and increase sales with increased visibility into marketing data.

For new customers: We'd love to learn about your existing marketing budgeting process and how we can help. Sign-up to a 30-day trial or Contact Sales to receive a customized demo.

For existing customers: Your Customer Success account representative will be in touch with you to discuss leveraging this new feature or transitioning from our current "Import Invoices" functionality. Import Invoices functionality will be phased out as of March 3rd, 2012.

Read more about our new "Import Actuals" and "Import POs" feature.

For our Analytics customers: changes & updates launched last night

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Question Panel - Measure Picker

• New layout: The Question Panel (when you add a new WHAT or HOW) now pops up a Measure browser when adding a new Measure or modifying an existing one. The Measure browser presents all usable Measures in a scrollable table.
• Search: The user can search and sort by name and also restrict the list to Measures with particular tags (e.g. just "Finance" Measures).
• Format: The user can also specify overrides for Measure properties, specifically: Aggregation Function, Display Format and Null rendering. With respect to Aggregation Functions, the available overrides are presented in a pick list, and the UI indicates whether an override is in effect.
• Description: There is a Description input that you can add in so report Admins can see more information about the field.
• New Placement of Date Selection: In the HOW drop-down, select the tab in the top right called "Time".
• New Placement of "Remove": In the What and How section, to delete a Field from a report, click on "Remove".

Export Report and Dashboard as image

• Images (JPG and PNG) can be exported from an open report or dashboard. The user can set any size for export, and is offered some common sizes in 16x9 and 4:3 ratios. If the user chooses a ratio, then entered dimensions are clamped to the selected ratio.

Question "What and How" Reordering

• Users can drag and drop Measures between themselves and Groups clauses between themselves. This allows for much more convenient reordering of restructuring of report output.

New Chart Options - Support coming soon

• In the Question Panel, you will see new chart options including additional options on existing charts. Support for thee additional chart formats will be coming soon. These include:

• Headline visualization option: A new Headline visualization renders a single value (derived from the aggregate of all data presented to it like the Gauge). This visualization includes some simple options to control the display of the value and its style.

• Gauge visualization option: A new Gauge visualization type displays an analogue gauge that will display a single value - the aggregate of any data to which it is attached. This visualization includes some simple options to control the scale of the Gauge and its style, including traffic lighting for attainment thresholds.

Custom Measures in Question Panel

• This is an advanced feature for power users which will require training should our customers want to create custom measures.
• The new Measure Picker now allows Measures to be created on-the-fly in the Question Panel in addition to using Measures that are made available from the model.
• Custom Measures are created by using the Formula Editor which appears if the user selects "Custom" instead of "Model" in the top-right of the Measure Picker. If a Customer Measure formula compiles correctly, then the new Measure is available directly in the Question and is saved as a part of the Question with the report.
• Note that it is possible for a Custom Measure to be 'broken' (if an entered formula is invalid, or becomes invalid due to a dependency having changed). Broken Custom Measures are highlighted in the Question Panel and although they remain visible, they will not be used as a part of the Question until they are fixed. The user must provide a name and can change Measure properties (aggregation function, Null rendering, and display format) away from the defaults as required.

From Fast Company: 8 Bold Resolutions For Marketers

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A good article in Fast Company on 2012 Resolutions for Marketers.

Read the full article at http://www.fastcompany.com/1799807/8-bold-resolutions-for-marketers

"... To get us all on the right track, I first consulted with trailblazing marketers at Cablevision, Eloqua, Fandango, IBM, PetCo, SAP, and the Grammys. Their insights, based on longer separate interviews, form the basis for these 8 “must do” resolutions for marketers seeking a clear direction on the road ahead."

Holiday Wishes From Allocadia

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To learn more visit www.takeahikefoundation.org