Bank of America Success Story

Challenge

To optimize marketing procedures, improve visibility of marketing spend, and better align their marketing efforts to strategic objectives, Bank of America’s Corporate Marketing and Communications team reevaluated the way they plan, execute, and measure their marketing efforts.

Over the course of their reevaluation, the Corporate Marketing and Communications identified several problem areas that they wanted to address, including:

• Inconsistent campaign management and measurement
• Too many campaign cycle iterations
• Limited visibility across all marketing projects
• Lack of marketing alignment with overall corporate objectives
• No comprehensive tracking of marketing spend

“We needed a standard project management approach for marketing the company, its products and services, and to decrease cost and cycle time. Beyond that, the team needed a way to comprehensively track the company’s large marketing spend.” – Communications Manager

Solution

Bank of America’s leadership team knew that they needed to standardize their project management approach for their marketing initiatives if they wanted to decrease their costs and improve their go-to-market cycle times. With Aprimo, they would be able to produce higher-value content and campaigns faster, and at a lower cost.

They chose the Aprimo Productivity Management and Plan & Spend solutions, deploying the solutions in a phased roll-out. “We expanded visibility of financials, moving from a PC-based, standalone Access database to a web-based system that created real-time visibility for all users,” said the Strategic Market Manager, Bank of America Strategic Planning and Quality.

Aprimo Plan & Spend

Bank of America rolled out Aprimo’s solutions in a phased-roll out. To improve the visibility of financials across previously siloed teams, Aprimo Plan & Spend was connected to Bank of America’s enterprise accounts payable system.

Plan & Spend allowed the team to dive into data-driven insights and develop ROI calculations that enabled precise tracking of marketing spend. The connection with the bank’s enterprise accounts payable system also enabled users to see payment information on invoices so they could more efficiently keep track of payments.

“Aprimo helped us shorten project approval timelines by 27%” – Strategic Marketing Manager

Aprimo Productivity Management

Secondly, to streamline asset workflows and get content to market faster, capabilities like automated notifications and reminders were enabled in Aprimo Productivity Management. With Productivity Management, all appropriate team members could now receive automated notifications and reminders about campaigns in development, speeding up approvals.

“In the first year of operations, we actually processed invoices 33% faster” – Marketing Information Management

Results

Bank of America saw immediate and measurable results with Aprimo. In addition to improved accuracy of their financial data and simpler, automated approval processes, the team saw a host of other benefits that have allowed their marketing and communications team to get back to doing the work they do best.

• Project approval
• timelines decreased by 27%
• Invoices were processed 33% faster in the first year
• Ability to leverage current financial information for smarter decision-making
• Productivity of existing personnel resources increased
• $1.2 Billion of BoA’s marketing budget managed in Aprimo
• Over 3,000 Sponsorship Activities managed
• Generated over 250 regularly distributed reports and up to 50,000 on-demand reports
• More than 600 users and 12 external advertising agencies

With Aprimo, Bank of America is creating executive dashboard reports—which include custom snapshots of key information, including project performance and Six Sigma ratings—for easier access to marketing measurements. According to the Bank of America’s Communications Manager, “Establishing a consistent process throughout our marketing organization has helped us closely align projects to corporate objectives. We now have visibility across the organization. We will build on this to identify and implement marketing best practices to maximize results.”

“The modeling capability in the Workflow & Project Management solution has helped us make better decisions.” – Communication Manager

About Bank of America

Bank of America delivers quality financial services and products to more than 30 million customers through the nation’s largest financial services network. At Bank of America, measuring process improvement is an imperative.