Good Fundamental Tool for Actual Spend, Some Voids on Planning Capabilities
November 22, 2013

Good Fundamental Tool for Actual Spend, Some Voids on Planning Capabilities

Adrienne Spohr | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Aprimo Marketing Studio (On-Premise)

Modules Used

  • Marketing Operations

Overall Satisfaction

  • Enables the allocation across brands of various marketing activities, essential for multi-brand executions that we do freuently.
  • Connects seamlessly to IBM Cognos to create comprehensive reports that allow analysts and managers to see their budgets at any given point in time.
  • Interface is easy to navigate, with an ability to customize based on your usage needs.
  • Improved forecasting and planning tools, currently Aprimo does not enable teams to easily delineate starting budgets, actual spend, planned spend, and remaining budget.
  • Better filtering mechanisms - we rely on text lookups that can easily create problems if employees input misspellings.
  • Needs a capability to show snapshots of given points in time, for example, what the budget and plan looks like at the outset of the year vs. halfway through vs. end of year.
  • Aprimo enabled our team to efficiently deploy a $10M budget; in prior years we returned unspent funds to the corporation with little ROI benefit
  • Increased employee efficiency in researching spend on various programs - allowed our team to leverage one ananlyst vs. two across our pet and consumer business units
While Aprimo provides the fundamental tools to track our actual spend, it has a major void when trying to plan for future programs. Our teams often have offline Excel spreadsheets to track actuals spend vs. our original budget, and lay out the future programs against which we plan to use budget funds. Would also appreciate reporting mechanisms which could splice data in non table format. For example, we often use marketing calendars to display programs/spend over time. This helps our team ensure that programs which are intended to run concurrent with in-store sales executions are happening in the correct time frame. The visual is simply easier to follow.
I would advise him/her to meet with an Aprimo consultant to understand all of the capabilities of the software. I have a feeling that Aprimo does have the planning capability we urgently desire, but the training platforms Aprimo offers are very limited. Perhaps a valuable proposition would be for certain employees to become power users who are constantly seeking out improvements within our company's use of Aprimo.

Product Usage

50 - Brand Marketing, Marketing Support, Finance, Shopper Marketing
2 - Superuser capability with the software, and a strong working knowledge of how our company integrates software. When we need support, we have to arrange time with an Aprimo consultant to explain any challenges we are having or capabilities we are seeking from the software. Would be excellent if Aprimo offered more in-program training options.
  • Managing actual spend against marketing programs.
  • Allocating spend by brand for marketing executions and agency retainer payments.
  • Tracking invoices against budget amounts for the individual costs within programs.
  • Feeding ROI models that provide insight on Shopper Marketing ROIs.
  • Generating reports that show the percentage of cost allocated against a given brand across multiple programs.
  • Tracking unspent funding that can drop to the bottom line at the conclusion of our fiscal year.
  • Planning future spend.
  • Improved communication with software used by other cross-functional teams to manage funds collaboratively.

Usability

Relatively easy to learn the basics, but there are a significant number of nuances. The system does not have user-friendly ways of allowing mass data manipulation in order to track large budgets over time. The only solution seems to be exporting into an Excel data dump and then performing analysis from there.
ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Feel confident using
Unnecessarily complex
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Viewing actual invoices against planned budget.
  • Percentage cost breakdown by brand.
  • Documentation behind each program, and associated costs.
  • Searching activites without relying on text lookups.
  • Planning spending and future programs.
  • Viewing budget spend in a more visually intuitive, non-table format.