Marketing orchestration: Why you need it and how to choose the right platform

As a globally distributed team with marketing activities running across multiple markets, we had to get our orchestration in order.

— Mattias Malmer, Global Head of Marketing, Valtech

The need for orchestration

As an industry, marketing is growing in complexity in terms of technology, data, processes, execution, and expectations on growth impact and ROI. At the same time, marketing departments — as a function — suffer from a fragmented and inefficient orchestration.

While departments such as finance and human resources have embraced orchestrated systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resource management (HRM) respectively to streamline operations, marketing teams often work in a maze of disparate tools and processes.

Navigating silos and complexity

Marketing teams often juggle multiple tools aimed at various functions such as content creation, social media management, email marketing and analytics. This fragmentation leads to silos, a lack of visibility and disjointed messaging. Working in this way — without a unified system — makes it increasingly difficult to ensure brand consistency, measure ROI effectively or maintain clear stakeholder communication.

As marketing efforts becomes more intricate, challenges grow exponentially. With multiple campaigns running across various channels, regions and teams, marketers must navigate a multitude of dependencies. They need visibility into performance, the ability to react quickly to changing priorities and the structure to ensure consistency across touchpoints.

However, in most organizations, marketing orchestration remains an afterthought. Teams operate in silos, tracking projects in isolated tools that don’t connect with each other. The result? Missed opportunities, duplicated efforts and an inability to measure true impact.

In-house creative talent is essential, but without a structured approach its impact loses its value. As marketing grows in complexity, collaboration across global teams demands streamlined coordination. Online tools help navigate this complexity. Success is defined by integrating talent, technology and process in a unified system.

— Liza Maslovska, Global Content Project Manager, Valtech

The case for a marketing ERP

Finance departments capitalize on ERP systems to unify all financial processes — streamlining budgeting, forecasting and reporting into a single platform. Similarly, HR departments leverage HRMs to centralize employee information, recruitment processes and talent management. These integrations empower departments to function seamlessly and align with organizational goals.

Marketing needs its own version of this. A dedicated platform designed to orchestrate workflows, align teams and provide real-time visibility into operations. A system that enables marketers to execute at speed without sacrificing quality or consistency.

The business impact of marketing orchestration

When marketing is orchestrated effectively, the benefits ripple throughout an organization:

• Predictability. With one way of working using the same templates and automated workflows, teams can deliver on promises in terms of deadlines and outcomes.

• Stronger ROI. With a clear view of performance across all initiatives, teams can make data-driven decisions that optimize spend and impact.

• Increased agility. A centralized system allows teams to pivot quickly in response to market shifts, emerging trends or competitive pressure. 

• Better collaboration. Cross-functional alignment improves as teams work from a shared source of truth, eliminating confusion and redundancy.

• Brand consistency. A unified system ensures content, messaging and campaigns remain cohesive across markets and channels.

The future of marketing is structured

For marketing to deliver on its true potential, it needs to evolve from an ad-hoc, multitool function to a well-orchestrated business unit. Just as finance and HR have embraced structure to drive efficiency and accountability, marketing should do the same.

The next step? Choosing the right platform.

5 key factors to consider when choosing a marketing orchestration platform

With the right platform, organizations can unlock a streamlined experience across all touchpoints and pave the way for long-term growth.

1. Select a unified platform

If you’re looking to transform your marketing and drive better orchestration, the first step is to select a single platform that can manage the entire strategy.

Fragmented systems cause communication breakdowns, create silos and slow down execution. When your tools don’t work together, the process becomes disjointed, leading to missed opportunities and a lack of visibility into what’s working.

If teams have one platform to track, manage and execute their marketing activities, it becomes easier to stay aligned, scale efforts and achieve a more holistic view of performance — driving better results across all channels.

2. Choose a tool purpose-built for marketers

If you’re looking for effective marketing orchestration, then prioritize a tool specifically designed for marketing teams.

Many platforms offer broad functionality but are not tailored to meet the unique needs of marketers, often requiring specialized training or technical support. A purpose-built marketing tool empowers teams to execute their strategies without relying on external resources or IT departments.

These tools are designed with a positive user experience in mind, offering intuitive interfaces and capabilities that cater to the demands of modern marketing.

3. Enable complete visibility

Successful marketing orchestration calls for complete visibility into both long-term brand-building initiatives and short-term activation campaigns.

This visibility ensures every aspect of the marketing strategy is aligned, measurable and on track to deliver the desired outcomes. By having a comprehensive view of all planned activities, teams can avoid duplication, ensure consistency across channels and spot gaps in their strategies.

Marketing platforms that offer flexible, multi-view functionalities — like a calendar for long-term planning and a list view for detailed tracking — empower teams to stay aligned across markets and departments.

4. Embrace AI and automation

To drive greater efficiency in marketing workflows, organizations should fully embrace AI and automation capabilities.

These technologies significantly reduce the manual effort required for content creation, campaign management and performance analysis, freeing teams up to focus on strategy and creativity.

By using AI to automate routine processes, generate content quickly and refine existing materials, your organization will also reap the rewards of faster turnaround times. Furthermore, with automation integrated into content workflows and project management systems, your team can better align their content output with overall strategy and goals.

5. Ensure brand consistency

Maintaining brand consistency is a critical but often challenging task — especially when acquiring new companies with their own brand guidelines, content and processes.

To overcome this, it’s key to have a single platform that ensures every piece of content aligns with the established brand standards.

By consolidating your tech stack and using a unified workspace for all marketing activities, you can streamline approvals and enforce strict brand governance. This control mechanism ensures content undergoes the necessary approval layers before publication, safeguarding the integrity of your brand’s tone of voice, messaging and visual identity.

Valtech and Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP)

As a strategic partner to Optimizely for more than 20 years — delivering more than 350 implementations of their suite of products — CMP was an obvious choice for Valtech's global marketing team.

If it's not in CMP, it doesn't exist. That was our mindset when we embarked on the journey to implement the "ERP" for our global marketing setup. Today, everything runs through Optimizely CMP, and this is where we orchestrate our end-to-end marketing setup.

— Mattias Malmer, Global Head of Marketing, Valtech

With CMP as our unified marketing tool, we now have greater visibility into all marketing activities, with shared boards, calendars and views tailored to different functions, regions and verticals.

Teams can execute with improved efficiency, clear ownership and the ability to leverage AI to accelerate workflows. Standardized templates and approvals have also strengthened our brand governance, ensuring content aligns with our brand guidelines.

Beyond our internal operations, we also rely on CMP to streamline post-acquisition integrations. When bringing new companies into the Valtech family, migrating content and aligning marketing activities has been a significant challenge. With CMP’s capabilities, we can now orchestrate content and asset transfers with precision, ensuring a seamless transition while maintaining brand integrity across all marketing efforts. As a result, we are now able to run migration projects that include websites and global content.

Valtech and CMP by numbers in 2024:

• 300-plus pieces of content created for our website

• 170-plus pieces of content rebranded and migrated during our Kin + Carta acquisition

• 200-plus content-related projects successfully executed

• 900-plus tasks completed, improving efficiency and execution speed

• 1 centralized platform providing full visibility and streamlined workflows across regions and verticals

Our journey with Optimizely CMP has transformed the way we operate as a marketing organization. By consolidating our tools and embracing AI-driven efficiencies, we’ve been able to focus less on process and more on impact.

Whether you’re facing similar challenges or looking to take your marketing operations to the next level, our partnership with Optimizely can support your marketing transformation.