How Zoho Uses Creator #2 - Marketing at the speed of tomorrow with automation

With Creator, the possibilities are endless, and that's not just a tagline. From citizen developers to enterprise engineering teams, our customer community has time and again used our low-code platform to build innovative solutions that even we are in awe of. In our previous blog, we read about how our HR team uses Creator to automate day-to-day processes. Now we're going to go into another tech-spiring story from the central marketing team of ManageEngine, Zoho's enterprise IT management division.

Modern marketing moves at a breakneck pace. In today's business world, marketing teams must be capable of changing direction and making new plans in a heartbeat. The business landscape will alter, and course corrections will be necessary to take advantage of new opportunities. Productive marketing requires automation because it helps marketers gain data visibility, accelerate decision-making, and produce desired results. So what made ManageEngine's central marketing team build a customized solution on Creator?

Roadblocks to easy and efficient marketing

Marketing campaigns can be demanding to organize and run, especially when you have to multitask and collaborate with numerous teams. From creating and managing creative assets to addressing internal feedback, streamlining the process can be tedious.

"The central marketing team handles a multitude of activities, like global events, social media, public relations, content review, design, branding, video production, and so on. Our work also involves collaborating with various product marketing teams within ManageEngine for many of the above-mentioned activities. With so many moving parts, we wanted to centralize and automate workflows so that it was easy for all the stakeholders to collaborate seamlessly on various projects. That was the spark that led to the marketing dashboard. This was in 2013, when even Creator was in a more nascent stage. But we believed it had the potential to become the backbone of the dashboard." - Ajay Kumar K.G, Head - Global Marketing, ManageEngine

Centralized marketing management dashboard

With 450+ users accessing the dashboard every day, it wouldn't be wrong to assume that the ManageEngine marketers and designers start their workday with this game-changer.

"Whenever a new feature is required, we check for feasibility and add it to the dashboard. We've discovered new Creator features while working on the dashboard. It's been a process of learning for us too. Ideally, to create something like this from scratch, using any traditional programming language would've taken us up to three months. With Creator, it took us only a week. It drastically reduced the development time." - Vinoth Raja & Manikandan Arumugam, Senior Web Developers, ManageEngine

From a single place: From generating content to measuring key metrics like ROI, marketers can track the entire lifecycle of their work from the centralized dashboard. They can raise requests for content review and design. Real-time access to detailed reports helps them make informed decisions, and managers can effectively delegate tasks because they know how busy each marketer is.

Resource repository: The dashboard acts as a database for storing brand identity collaterals, like guidelines, logos, presentation decks, and other creatives. With such an organized and intuitive hub, everyone can find what they need within seconds.

Social media made easy: The Social module helps marketers schedule posts on different channels and visualize the content pipeline with an intuitive calendar report.

Hands-free events: Event organizers use the dashboard to upload event agendas, allocate rooms based on registration counts, and trigger emails with certificates configured from Creator's existing template collection. Participants use the QR scan feature during registrations and to download event-related documents.

Syncing marketing with reality

Marketing management systems in many organizations are static and confusing, with many spreadsheets and little automation. This leads to slow manual processes, collaboration difficulties, and poor visibility across teams. It's hard to be agile when your team is knee-deep in spreadsheets. The solution? Automation.

• Powerful insights: Recognize lackluster campaigns and identify areas where resources can be reallocated. Real-time access to spending and performance data helps marketers make strategic changes quickly and get a step ahead of competitors.

• Greater transparency: Integrate natively with existing systems, as well as with third-party systems, such as CRM and email automation software. Empower your partners and vendors with self-service portals.

• Advanced analytics: Enable your teams to work effectively and efficiently with detailed reports and dashboards based on collective data.

Why Creator might be the right choice

"Creator's use is not restricted to any departmental boundaries. From an organization's perspective, different functional teams can use the platform, be it HR, marketing, finance, legal, or even admin. That's the power of Creator. You don't have to be a developer or know coding in-depth to create solutions, since it's low-code. All you need is a clear idea of your requirement and you can build an application in a day. I would recommend Zoho Creator to anyone looking for quick development and an even quicker turnaround time." - Ajay Kumar K.G, Head - Global Marketing, ManageEngine

It's impressive what a great idea and a brilliant development team can do with a low-code platform like Creator. In the next blog, we'll talk about how our content review team uses a Zoho Creator application to link the flow of documents from one person to another on the other side of the world. Stay tuned!

Zoho creator is a pioneer in the low-code application development space, empowering enterprises across industries for over a decade. With over 13,000 customers across the globe and over six million solutions built on the platform, Creator continues to empower digital transformations. What are you waiting for? Sign up now.