With host Darrell Alfonso
The number of devices, platforms, and channels that consumers engage on today is overwhelming. And it’s forced marketers—especially B2C marketers—to adapt quickly.
But how can B2C marketing leaders balance goals for business growth against shrinking budgets and pressure to demonstrate the value of their investments?
We spoke to Jackie Massmann, marketing budgeting and planning analyst at Land O’Lakes, about how her team uses Uptempo to plan better, pivot faster, spend smarter, and execute with confidence.
Land O’Lakes is a renowned American agricultural-based food company that has long been dedicated to providing quality products and services to customers. The company’s marketing operations are constantly evolving, with new technologies and strategies being utilized to better target potential customers and ensure that the customer journey is as smooth as possible.
Last year, Land O’Lakes established a core team across marketing and finance to better understand what was working. They focused on the metrics that make the biggest impact on the business, removing the silos, and supporting the CMOs enterprise goals. But first they needed to shift their mindset.
Instead of approaching the problems through an allowance mindset and always thinking about what needed to be cut, Land O’Lakes began thinking with an investment mindset: where are we making the biggest impact and how can we do more?
With Uptempo, decisions that would be made in weeks could now be done in minutes because they were working with real-time answers to their performance questions.
Before Uptempo, Land O’Lakes was using spreadsheets to calculate month over month and year over year comparisons for performance metrics. It often took one or two days for a team member to enter all the data points before a meeting.
Now, that report is generated in Uptempo with a few clicks. Those days spent on manual entry are now freed up. Marketers can spend more time on their programs and less time worrying about manual budget tasks. It also significantly reduces the budget anxiety marketers felt wondering if their numbers were accurate or if they were working from the right version of a spreadsheet. With Uptempo, Land O’Lakes marketers can trust the data they are using, allowing them to make decisions with confidence.
Instead of spending time figuring out why a number was different in the master spreadsheet, Land O’Lakes uses the audit trail in Uptempo to see real-time changes to budgets. And with the anxiety about data cleanliness gone, they can make decisions faster and with more confidence.
Land O’Lakes model is plan, budget, then execute. They use Uptempo to manage all their marketing investments and create a campaign tracking number that is carried through the rest of their martech stack. Having the same campaign tracking number keeps reporting accurate as different tools connect from the planning stage all the way through to performance when insights are pulled together.
To create a more efficient marketing operations process, Land O’Lakes automated and created connections to remove manual work as much as possible. This enables them to have a single source of truth for understanding their marketing performance and making decisions about how to optimize their efforts.
They connected Uptempo to Sprinklr and Datorama to manage their data more efficiently. The integration of these two platforms with Uptempo eliminates the need for manual data entry, saving time, and reducing errors. Additionally, the automated data flows ensure consistent and accurate reporting across all channels.
“One of the main takeaways for us has been visibility—getting better insights on the current spend and easy access to financial information,” says Jackie.
With real-time data and a single source of truth, teams can make decisions during a meeting using insights from Uptempo. But it’s not just more efficiency and better alignment across marketing teams. Adopting Uptempo has also led to better alignment and productivity between marketing and finance at Land O’Lakes.
Now it’s all about collaboration. Marketing and finance have an established terminology set up by the core team so everyone agrees what the terms mean and what success looks like. By involving finance in the integrations process, they were also able to create better alignment on the reconciliation process.
Before, not all the information was available to finance and reconciliation could sometimes take several days. There wasn’t a foundation of trust so processes were duplicated with each department performing similar steps. Now, reconciliation can be done within hours. “We had one FP&A employee tell us that he uses Uptempo more than Netsuite because that’s where he can get all the details,” says Jackie.
Both departments working with the same source of truth has led to better visibility, better insights, and greater efficiency. Uptempo has enabled the marketing team to be more proactive in their decision-making and they now have a better understanding of the drivers behind their financial performance.
Learn how to create better visibility, velocity, and agility with connected marketing operations