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Iceberg Marketing
In 1995, Iceberg Marketing, a full-service direct marketing agency based in Northampton, began looking for a next-generation software platform to support its impressive growth record.
It had developed a range of creative agency and print management services which it delivers to leading brands including Bridgestone Tyres and The Children’s Society. Managing Director Simon Knibbs explains how the company evolved:
"Iceberg was originally conceived as a marketing consultancy but it very quickly grew into a direct marketing agency operating on the basis of one house with many doors. We offer a wide range of client services including data provision, consultancy, traditional agency skills and creativity (design, channel and media selection) and also have a print management division.
Some clients use all of those services, and we have a number of clients who chose to outsource their entire marketing function - from concept development and strategy through to tactical implementation and analytics. Other clients use us purely as a print management house, where we’re providing print expertise and resources for a whole cross-section of businesses - those who operate both marketing print and transactional/day-to-day business print."
With Iceberg’s continuing growth ,automating time-intensive manual tasks such as workflow management and reporting became key goals:
"As our business grew, and we won more and more clients, we came to a point in our evolution where we really needed a software system that could automate key aspects of our operations to improve our own efficiency, beginning with stock control and management reporting in our print management division.
Our decision then was whether we wanted to develop an in-house solution (as a number of our competitors had done), or buy an external solution that we could customise to our specific needs. At the time we made our selection, we weren't aware of marketingunity. Unfortunately, despite coming from a large 'dot-com' vendor, the solution we selected fell woefully short of our expectations.
When it came to evaluating vendors for the second time, Iceberg were ‘once bitten, twice shy’, so had clear and exacting objectives:
"We were looking for a solution that could measurably improve our efficiency (and therefore our return on investment) and, ultimately, help us to provide a far better service for our clients. Our first decision factor was the Holy Grail of usability - the ability for our staff and our clients to use the system with a minimum amount of training, but without compromising on maximum functionality.
Secondly, we wanted a system that we could implement relatively quickly. Having gone down the route of implementing a system and finding that it didn’t deliver as we expected, we wanted to avoid going through another lengthy training and bedding-in process.
The third and final aspect was cost. It’s vitally important that we have a platform that delivers return on investment for us as a business."
"Marketingunity achieved all of these criteria. Having evaluated the market very extensively and thoroughly, they were the clear leader, and the functionality that the suite delivers against the cost of purchase made it a very attractive proposition for us."
The rich functionality provided by the Marketingunity suite created a clear competitive advantage to Iceberg, without imposing an onerous training and support burden on the agency. According to Simon:
"In order to deliver what our clients want - which is control and access - and to provide us with a management and audit trail, we needed a facility that could do all of this, but most importantly, would also be user-friendly. One of the highlights of the Marketingunity solution is that the interface is very user-friendly.
We’ve gone through the process of training staff on all aspects of the suite, including training over 150 clients around the UK in conference facility. All of them have found the Marketingunity software extremely easy to control and to become comfortable with. Our entire client base has found it very simple to use." Following a swift and straightforward implementation, Iceberg was able to gain immediate benefits in a number of key areas, including traffic management,which had previously represented potential pain-points for clients:
"An area where Marketingunity really excels above the rest of the marketplace is in streamlining workflow. For example, it automates the approval process by enabling clients to review, request changes to, and approve or reject artwork online. It is very powerful. Clients like it, because it tidies up and simplifies the process - and makes it transparent to all appropriate parties, so job progression (or bottlenecks) are immediately obvious.
Crucially, though, the system is also monitoring and controlling the production process, so as deadline dates approach, it starts pinging emails and keeping people on track. That is a great capability, and elapsed approval times have dropped dramatically. The system also maintains a total audit trail, which allows us to highlight any internal weak points or client-side bottlenecks.
This allows us to drive continuous enhancement of our internal processes and procedures, and also to make pro-active suggestions to clients that can speed up their own approval times."
“Digital Asset Management (DAM) is also vitally important, and a key part of the solution we offer to clients. Clients love to know that all of their digital assets are in one place, locked away in our secure system. As well as minimising asset storage and retrieval times, DAM helps them to control their brand, and also eliminates the risk of losing valuable, sometimes irreplaceable assets.”
Having initially implemented Marketingunity to take care of its stock management and reporting functions, Iceberg quickly found the DAM and Approval Manager modules to be enormously beneficial, and derived more value still from the comprehensive supplier management and audit tools available in the suite.
This value grew further when they passed on feedback from their Financial clients to Marketingunity, resulting in them developing a further new module – Compliance Manager, as Simon recalls:
“We work with a number of city organisations who are heavily governed by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), so it’s vitally important that any information in documents that they put into the public domain is flagged when its compliance is due for renewal. We pointed this requirement out to marketingunity, and they responded by creating a new module to address it, with the result that we are able to provide this full compliance-tracking facility across all processes. For these clients, who are managing hundreds – if not thousands – of consumer-facing documents, being able to automatically police document status and notify all the relevant parties when an individual document is due for re-compliance is invaluable.”
“Compliance is also crucial for a large number of our clients in the not-for-profit sector, who need a complete audit trail from start to finish. The online job management system provided in the Marketingunity suite is brilliant for providing that complete flow of detail. As an example, for clients working in the medical field, it’s vitally important to know who signed off a particular piece of work, where it is in the production process, and whether it’s compliance has been confirmed. The Marketingunity system ticks all of those boxes and provides that for them.”
In terms of the benefits to Iceberg as a consultancy from implementing the Marketingunity platform, the gains have been significant:
“When we are selling outsourced services such as print management to our clients, the system that we put on the table is a vital part of that. We have to be supported by the software package. When we demonstrate the capabilities that Marketingunity offers, clients are always very eager, and really like the fact that it is delivering all this capability in one single system.
Marketingunity also provides us with internal audit facilities and control, and a measurable improvement of our own efficiency. We’re reducing the time spent on each individual job and now starting the process of reducing the amount of paperwork. For example, the steps required to move print into production – whether it be letterhead or corporate stationery – are the same for 100 copies or 1,000,000, so the ability to make efficiencies is crucial to our business.”
And for the future? The Marketingunity suite is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of Iceberg’s best practice and processes, and the agency is actively looking at additional modules:
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Iceberg Marketing
Efficiency Gains Just the Tip of the Iceberg
In 1995, Iceberg Marketing, a full-service direct marketing agency based in Northampton, began looking for a next-generation software platform to support its impressive growth record.
It had developed a range of creative agency and print management services which it delivers to leading brands including Bridgestone Tyres and The Children’s Society. Managing Director Simon Knibbs explains how the company evolved:
"Iceberg was originally conceived as a marketing consultancy but it very quickly grew into a direct marketing agency operating on the basis of one house with many doors. We offer a wide range of client services including data provision, consultancy, traditional agency skills and creativity (design, channel and media selection) and also have a print management division.
Some clients use all of those services, and we have a number of clients who chose to outsource their entire marketing function - from concept development and strategy through to tactical implementation and analytics. Other clients use us purely as a print management house, where we’re providing print expertise and resources for a whole cross-section of businesses - those who operate both marketing print and transactional/day-to-day business print."
With Iceberg’s continuing growth ,automating time-intensive manual tasks such as workflow management and reporting became key goals:
"As our business grew, and we won more and more clients, we came to a point in our evolution where we really needed a software system that could automate key aspects of our operations to improve our own efficiency, beginning with stock control and management reporting in our print management division.
Our decision then was whether we wanted to develop an in-house solution (as a number of our competitors had done), or buy an external solution that we could customise to our specific needs. At the time we made our selection, we weren't aware of marketingunity. Unfortunately, despite coming from a large 'dot-com' vendor, the solution we selected fell woefully short of our expectations.
When it came to evaluating vendors for the second time, Iceberg were ‘once bitten, twice shy’, so had clear and exacting objectives:
"We were looking for a solution that could measurably improve our efficiency (and therefore our return on investment) and, ultimately, help us to provide a far better service for our clients. Our first decision factor was the Holy Grail of usability - the ability for our staff and our clients to use the system with a minimum amount of training, but without compromising on maximum functionality.
Secondly, we wanted a system that we could implement relatively quickly. Having gone down the route of implementing a system and finding that it didn’t deliver as we expected, we wanted to avoid going through another lengthy training and bedding-in process.
The third and final aspect was cost. It’s vitally important that we have a platform that delivers return on investment for us as a business."
"Marketingunity achieved all of these criteria. Having evaluated the market very extensively and thoroughly, they were the clear leader, and the functionality that the suite delivers against the cost of purchase made it a very attractive proposition for us."
The rich functionality provided by the Marketingunity suite created a clear competitive advantage to Iceberg, without imposing an onerous training and support burden on the agency. According to Simon:
"In order to deliver what our clients want - which is control and access - and to provide us with a management and audit trail, we needed a facility that could do all of this, but most importantly, would also be user-friendly. One of the highlights of the Marketingunity solution is that the interface is very user-friendly.
We’ve gone through the process of training staff on all aspects of the suite, including training over 150 clients around the UK in conference facility. All of them have found the Marketingunity software extremely easy to control and to become comfortable with. Our entire client base has found it very simple to use." Following a swift and straightforward implementation, Iceberg was able to gain immediate benefits in a number of key areas, including traffic management,which had previously represented potential pain-points for clients:
"An area where Marketingunity really excels above the rest of the marketplace is in streamlining workflow. For example, it automates the approval process by enabling clients to review, request changes to, and approve or reject artwork online. It is very powerful. Clients like it, because it tidies up and simplifies the process - and makes it transparent to all appropriate parties, so job progression (or bottlenecks) are immediately obvious.
Crucially, though, the system is also monitoring and controlling the production process, so as deadline dates approach, it starts pinging emails and keeping people on track. That is a great capability, and elapsed approval times have dropped dramatically. The system also maintains a total audit trail, which allows us to highlight any internal weak points or client-side bottlenecks.
This allows us to drive continuous enhancement of our internal processes and procedures, and also to make pro-active suggestions to clients that can speed up their own approval times."
“Digital Asset Management (DAM) is also vitally important, and a key part of the solution we offer to clients. Clients love to know that all of their digital assets are in one place, locked away in our secure system. As well as minimising asset storage and retrieval times, DAM helps them to control their brand, and also eliminates the risk of losing valuable, sometimes irreplaceable assets.”
Having initially implemented Marketingunity to take care of its stock management and reporting functions, Iceberg quickly found the DAM and Approval Manager modules to be enormously beneficial, and derived more value still from the comprehensive supplier management and audit tools available in the suite.
This value grew further when they passed on feedback from their Financial clients to Marketingunity, resulting in them developing a further new module – Compliance Manager, as Simon recalls:
“We work with a number of city organisations who are heavily governed by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), so it’s vitally important that any information in documents that they put into the public domain is flagged when its compliance is due for renewal. We pointed this requirement out to marketingunity, and they responded by creating a new module to address it, with the result that we are able to provide this full compliance-tracking facility across all processes. For these clients, who are managing hundreds – if not thousands – of consumer-facing documents, being able to automatically police document status and notify all the relevant parties when an individual document is due for re-compliance is invaluable.”
“Compliance is also crucial for a large number of our clients in the not-for-profit sector, who need a complete audit trail from start to finish. The online job management system provided in the Marketingunity suite is brilliant for providing that complete flow of detail. As an example, for clients working in the medical field, it’s vitally important to know who signed off a particular piece of work, where it is in the production process, and whether it’s compliance has been confirmed. The Marketingunity system ticks all of those boxes and provides that for them.”
In terms of the benefits to Iceberg as a consultancy from implementing the Marketingunity platform, the gains have been significant:
“When we are selling outsourced services such as print management to our clients, the system that we put on the table is a vital part of that. We have to be supported by the software package. When we demonstrate the capabilities that Marketingunity offers, clients are always very eager, and really like the fact that it is delivering all this capability in one single system.
Marketingunity also provides us with internal audit facilities and control, and a measurable improvement of our own efficiency. We’re reducing the time spent on each individual job and now starting the process of reducing the amount of paperwork. For example, the steps required to move print into production – whether it be letterhead or corporate stationery – are the same for 100 copies or 1,000,000, so the ability to make efficiencies is crucial to our business.”
And for the future? The Marketingunity suite is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of Iceberg’s best practice and processes, and the agency is actively looking at additional modules:
back to top of page