Discover How to Improve Marketing Performance With Planful Solution Hub

Planful Solution Hub is an invaluable resource for discovering pre-built solutions to common industry- and function-specific financial performance management challenges. Created by Planful experts and available for anyone to explore at no cost, these customizable solutions have detailed descriptions and interactive, self-guided demos.

Marketing teams frequently spend countless hours manually collecting and analyzing data to prove marketing’s value in the language of finance. With direct access to marketing and finance data, CMOs and marketing teams can measure marketing performance at every level, plan for optimal marketing budgets, and improve marketing execution.

In this post, we’ll dive into Planful Solution Hub’s pre-built, customizable solutions that streamline marketing performance management. We’ll explore how its interactive demos offer insights to accelerate financial performance management processes and enhance collaboration between marketing and finance teams.

Read more: Planful Solution Hub: Your Go-To Resource for Financial Performance Management

Planful Solution Hub is a robust resource for finding smarter, more effective solutions to marketing and financial performance management challenges. It enables teams to discover best practices, proven processes, and targeted solutions that enhance efficiency, improve accuracy, and unlock the full potential of the Planful platform.

Through interactive demonstrations and targeted use cases, Solution Hub provides a clear view of how Planful solves specific financial performance challenges while helping teams deliver measurable results.

Whether streamlining financial reporting, refining planning, enhancing models, improving forecasts, or eliminating manual processes, Solution Hub provides a comprehensive set of pre-built, customizable solutions. These solutions are ready for rapid implementation, helping teams work faster and more efficiently.

Designed by Planful experts and trusted partners, Solution Hub also offers function-specific solutions such as:

• Marketing budget management
• Workforce planning
• Contribution margin analysis
• Incentive compensation planning
• ESG performance and initiatives management

The decades of expertise built into each solution equips teams to automate and accelerate key processes, improve financial performance insights, and enhance strategic planning efforts with more informed decisions. Planful customers can add Solution Hub offerings to the Planful platform for efficient use and customization, extending the solutions to new and unique applications.

Marketing efforts vary widely and are unique to individual industries, markets, and goals. Solution Hub provides a streamlined approach to overcoming specific marketing challenges for any organization with solutions marketers can easily customize to scale and adapt to unique organizational requirements.

Marketing teams often rely on complex spreadsheets and manual processes to gather data from scattered marketing automation systems. Instead, they can use proven solutions that save time and effort, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks. Solution Hub offers a collection of streamlined, accelerated approaches to ease these and other marketing productivity challenges.

Let’s look at three of the most effective solutions for marketers.

1. Annual marketing planning: Strategic goal attainment through detailed plans and budgets

Building an annual marketing plan requires significant effort to collect disparate data, rise above a tactical focus, and avoid budget surprises throughout the year. Too often, marketing teams struggle with complex, disconnected, and error-prone spreadsheets to meticulously build and painstakingly manage annual marketing plans.

Planful’s annual marketing planning solution offers a clear path to marketing success with better marketing planning. It lets teams quickly build, execute, and measure strategic marketing plans that boost agility. The solution also enables teams to integrate marketing goals, campaigns, budgets, and performance metrics to track the ROI of every marketing effort throughout the year.

Planful is also optimized for modern marketing planning, which invites marketing operations, demand generation, and other sub-teams to collaborate on marketing planning. When it comes time to execute and evaluate performance, the solution provides deep and detailed visibility into cost per outcome, ROI, LTV, and more.

Planful Solution Hub’s annual marketing planning solution also helps teams:

• Track progress toward key goals and metrics, whether quantitative or qualitative, and also assign customized goals to specific campaigns, activities, and budgets.
• Gain increased flexibility to accommodate complex marketing campaigns with integrated, cross-functional, global, and multi-vehicle attributes, all with ease, speed, and accuracy.
• Improve visibility into key marketing projects with timeline views across campaigns and tasks, detailed task lists and attributes, and a centralized content management repository.

Explore the interactive demo: Planful’s annual marketing planning solution

Marketing typically has a large budget, yet can rarely pinpoint how that money is spent and the returns on each marketing investment. Spreadsheets don’t offer easy or confidence-inspiring visibility, and marketing automation tools tend to keep data siloed, forcing even more marketing efforts into spreadsheets or cumbersome and complex business intelligence systems.

Planful’s marketing campaign expense management solution empowers teams to enhance their strategic impact with complete spend visibility across campaigns. This allows teams to eliminate manual budget tracking and reconciliation while increasing agility with data-driven decisions. The result is easy monitoring of campaign expenses by integrating with purchase order systems, with deeper capabilities to add general ledger codes and simplify plan-versus-actuals analysis.

This tailored solution provides expanded insights so teams can quickly redirect unused budgets to higher-impact initiatives. To maximize campaign ROI, it also allows for detailed expense tracking so marketing teams can easily identify the best-performing strategies and channels.

Planful’s solution for marketing campaign expense management empowers teams to:

• Visualize annual budget and plan data for the insights necessary to identify budget shortfalls, swiftly pivot or adjust scenarios, and put more resources into the channels that will provide the most impact.
• Amortize campaign spend easily by breaking it down into monthly snapshots for enhanced visibility and a more accurate month-end close of current campaigns.
• Seamlessly integrate with back-office systems to automatically match expenses with purchase orders to provide visibility as costs are incurred and matched against general ledger codes.

Explore the interactive demo: Planful’s marketing campaign expense management solution

Manual processes impede clarity and speed. Setting up annual budgets, allocating resources, tracking expenses, and comparing budgets versus actuals in spreadsheets or ill-equipped tools creates a productivity drain for marketing teams.

Planful’s marketing budget management solution pulls Marketing out of manual processes to give decision-makers the capabilities to manage even the most complex budgets and visibility to make more informed decisions for better outcomes. The solution provides a comprehensive approach to building better budgets, creating plans, applying budgets to activities, and tracking the right metrics.

As Marketing executes campaigns, it’s easy to tightly manage expenses and keep marketing teams aligned toward common goals. The solution gives marketing teams the visibility to refine campaign mixes, reallocate budgets quickly, and monitor performance against plan continuously.

Planful’s marketing budget management solution helps Marketing:

• Break top-level marketing budgets into manageable segments, allocate funds to business units and initiatives, and make adjustments in real time.
• Track marketing spend as it happens to identify and react to budget variances and course-correct with confidence.
• Compare budget projections with actuals across periods, identify trends, adjust strategies, and align marketing budgets and spend with marketing and organizational goals.

Explore the interactive demo: Planful’s marketing budget management solution

Planful Solution Hub is free for anyone to discover customizable industry- and function-specific solutions covering a variety of financial performance management needs for marketing, finance, HR, accounting, and more. Solution Hub delivers integrated performance management capabilities that teams in large, dynamic organizations require to navigate fast-changing business environments.

Explore Planful Solution Hub to interact with solutions designed by Planful experts to solve your marketing team’s most pressing financial performance management challenges.