In the Chinese market, FMCG companies have complex sales systems. In order to maintain brand visibility and market share in a highly competitive market, companies have to invest large sums of money in promotional activities, advertising campaigns and various market incentives, while also paying high logistics and warehousing costs and providing continuous consumer service to ensure the rapid flow of products and consumer satisfaction. This series of investments in channel partners and market maintenance constitutes a huge amount of expenses for FMCG companies in the channel. Take a company with annual sales of 3 billion as an example, its channel expenses are about 5-900 million. Therefore, it is important to manage these expenses well.
In today's increasingly competitive market, the so-called "involution" era, FMCG companies have increasingly stringent requirements for marketing expense management. Enterprises not only need to effectively monitor and optimize marketing investment, but also ensure that every expense can generate real economic benefits to maintain their advantageous position in the fierce competition.
In this context, what kind of marketing expense management can fully adapt to the specific needs of enterprises at different stages of development? For this, we specially
Connect with Sun Zhonghua, R&D Director of Marketing Integration of Cyberway Information Technology (hereinafter referred to as Cyberway), to share the new generation of panoramic marketing expense management.
It is understood that Cyberway has been focusing on the field of large-scale consumer digital marketing for many years, and its marketing expense management is at the leading level in the industry, and it is also a long-term digital marketing partner of many Fortune 500 companies and well-known brand enterprises.
Sun Zhonghua shared that Cyberway's marketing expense management has developed to the stage of excellence. In marketing expense management planning, we divide it into three stages to meet the different needs of enterprises for marketing expense management at each stage.
Phase 1: Basic Marketing Expense Management (TPM)
Its core competence lies in consolidating the foundation of marketing expenses and realizing full-link closed-loop management, including before, during and after management and data analysis. Currently, about 50% of businesses have reached this level of competency.
Phase 2: Advanced TPE
The core performance of advanced is in two aspects: linking, efficiency improvement, and scalability analysis. Linking and efficiency improvement refers to the effective connection of marketing expenses with the existing application system of the enterprise to achieve efficiency improvement. Scalability analysis is not limited to the analysis of ROI, but also includes the analysis of corporate net profit. Through systematic interfaces and data integration, performance management can be improved. About 20% of businesses have reached this level of competency.
Phase 3: Marketing Expense Management Excellence (TPO)
On the basis of consolidating basic management and accumulating a large amount of data, AI algorithm models are used to make intelligent predictions and assist decision-making. About 10% of businesses have reached this level of competency.
These three phases clearly demonstrate that Cyberway not only focuses on cost control, but also focuses on improving the efficiency of expense management. This is in line with the higher requirements of enterprises for marketing expense management. Next, Sun Zhonghua will interpret the three stages of Cyberway's marketing expense management - TPM, TPE, TPO.
TPM lays a solid foundation:
Closed-loop management of full-link marketing expenses
In the basic stage of TPM marketing expense management, a complete management closed loop is formed from the precise control of the budget to the in-depth analysis of marketing activities. This process not only realizes the whole process of online operation and real-time monitoring, but also makes the input and output of marketing expenses transparent and clear.
Standardized management of master data and unified mapping of business and finance
Unified master data management standards to ensure consistency and accuracy of business and financial data. This includes the standardization of key data such as customer information, product information, price lists, etc., to provide a reliable data basis for subsequent business processes.
The whole process is online and process monitoring
A comprehensive online platform that supports the planning, execution, monitoring, and analysis of marketing campaigns. Real-time data updates allow managers to keep abreast of the progress and effectiveness of marketing campaigns and adjust strategies in a timely manner.
Business planning decisions are based on evidence
Reshape the marketing expense process and complete the accumulation of enterprise digital assets. It allows decision-makers to move from relying on experience and offline data to multi-dimensional and more accurate business analysis.
Financial actions such as settlement and write-off are fully automated
Automate the financial close and write-off process to reduce manual errors and time delays. The system automatically matches invoice and order information to quickly complete financial settlement.
The peripheral system is fully opened
Realize the integration with external systems, such as CRM, ERP, SCM, etc., to ensure smooth data exchange and business collaboration. Improve transparency and responsiveness throughout the supply chain, optimize inventory management and logistics distribution.
The basic stage of TPM marketing expenses mainly focuses on data standardization, process automation, decision support, system integration and performance visualization to improve the transparency, efficiency and adaptability of the entire marketing system. This phase consolidates the foundation of expense management and ensures that the budget is closely aligned with the actual execution to achieve the desired goals. At the same time, it expands the organization's horizons, making it clear at a glance and making it easy to make horizontal comparisons. Empower all departments of the marketing center to manage the expense process to ensure that they can respond to market changes in real time and keep up with the market rhythm.
TPE Capability Advancement:
Automation capability support, more refined management
Sun Zhonghua continued: "Through the support of TPE's automation capabilities, we can achieve 90% automation, such as summarizing, verification, and withholding can be completely completed by the system, and only 10% of special scenarios require manual assistance. In addition, campaign effectiveness analysis (PEA) has become an important tool for enterprises to improve the efficiency and refinement of expense management. It not only accelerates the operation of the whole process of promotion expenses, but also further promotes the optimization of the process. By expanding business scenarios, PEA provides powerful empowerment for refined business management and promotes the development of refined management. “
Process automation is further optimized
Reduce manual intervention and increase processing speed and accuracy through highly automated processes. Realize automatic summarization, write-off and provisioning functions to ensure the efficiency and consistency of data processing. Flexible human-assisted operation options for special scenarios to deal with complex or non-standardized situations.
Optimization of the promotion analysis system
Enhance campaign effectiveness analysis (PEA) and use advanced data analytics techniques to evaluate campaign performance. Provide real-time feedback and insights to help you adjust your strategy and optimize future promotions. Integrate multi-dimensional data, including sales, inventory, customer feedback, and more, to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of promotions.
Refined management of business scenarios
Expand the application of business scenarios, so that TPE can cover a wider range of marketing and management needs. Customized solutions are available to meet the unique needs of businesses of all sizes and industries. Empower users to improve decision-making quality and business results through refined management.
In-depth report analysis
Enhance the capabilities of reporting tools to provide more in-depth and complex data analysis capabilities. At the same time, it supports customized reports, allowing users to generate the data views they need according to their specific needs. Leverage data visualization technology to help users understand data trends and key metrics.
TPE's capability advancement aims to provide enterprises with faster, more efficient, and more accurate expense management and promotion effect evaluation through a higher level of automation, more refined business scenario management, a more optimized promotional activity analysis system, and more in-depth report analysis. This advancement can help companies increase business agility and respond quickly to market changes, while achieving cost savings and efficiency improvements, ultimately driving continued business growth and success.
TPO Excellence Improvement:
AI intelligent decision-making, comprehensive improvement of capabilities
When it comes to the TPO excellence stage, Sun Zhonghua said that the TPM and TPE we talked about earlier are all for our TPO. At the heart of our TPO Excellence phase is the ability to improve capabilities across the board through intelligent forecasting and analytics to optimize promotional expenses and assist companies in making more informed decisions.
Sales forecasts
Using advanced data analysis technology, TPO is able to accurately predict future sales trends. This feature is based on historical sales data, market trends, and historical performance of promotions, and is trained by machine learning algorithms to accurately predict future sales. This not only helps companies plan inventory and resource allocation in advance, but also provides data support for more effective promotional strategies.
Supply chain pull-through
Optimize supply chain management by integrating data from all links of the supply chain. Through real-time data analysis, companies can instantly grasp the status of the supply chain, adjust production and supply plans in a timely manner, and reduce the risk of inventory overhang and supply chain disruptions. In addition, it can optimize supplier selection and management through the evaluation of supplier performance, and further improve the efficiency of the supply chain.
Powered by AI algorithms
In the TPO stage, the application of artificial intelligence algorithms is the key to improving the quality of decision-making. AI algorithms are not only applied to sales forecasting, but also involve various aspects such as promotion effect prediction and customer behavior analysis. Through deep learning and data mining technology, AI can extract valuable information from large amounts of historical data and provide enterprises with scientific decision-making evidence.
Optimization of peripheral system system
In order to maximize the efficiency of expense management, the optimization of peripheral systems is also crucial. The Cyberway Marketing Expense Management System is highly scalable and flexible and able to adapt to changing market needs. Seamless integration with CRM, ERP and other systems to ensure unimpeded data flow, business process automation and intelligence. Such system optimization not only improves operational efficiency, but also reduces human error and improves overall business performance.
TPO Excellence Enhancement dramatically improves the optimization of promotional expenses and the effectiveness of joint promotion programs through the introduction of intelligent forecasting and analytics. At the same time, with the cooperation with the School of Mathematics of Sun Yat-sen University, Cyberway has obtained in-depth research on artificial intelligence algorithms, and the whole process intelligence not only empowers enterprise decision-making, but also achieves significant expansion in the management of marketing expenses in all fields. These advancements provide strong support for businesses to stay ahead of the fierce market competition.
That's all for this connection.
In fact, over the past two years, we have seen Cyberway become increasingly active in the market, having been established in the early days of the internet and since then has been working alongside top top FMCG companies in the digital marketing space, while still evolving and accumulating. Our interview aims to provide more thinking and reference for brand enterprises in the industry in terms of marketing expense management.