How to use Allocadia and Workfront to measure marketing spend

For organizations with intense marketing activities happening at the same time, Allocadia and Workfront can be game changers when upper management requires a 10,000 foot view of marketing spend for specific items grouped by regions, estimates on project cost adjustments for quarters or specific dates, and budget execution.

Allocadia, which markets itself as “one platform to more effectively manage all marketing plans and budgets” helps you answer important questions like “Where is my marketing spend going?” or “Is this spend efficient in terms of ROI?”

In contrast, Workfront, is a work management platform that helps you visibilize the operational situation and helps answer questions like “Are we on time?”or “Who should be working on this task and when will the task be completed?”

Here, we’ll show you some ways that you can use Allocadia as a marketing spend planner and manager, and pair it with Workfront to deal with all the complexities of professional work management.

This way, you can create real-time visibility into marketing spend and work execution: by combining Workfront’s useful insights into project execution with to Allocadia’s overview of financials, project managers can promptly review and escalate budget adjustments, and see that they are connected to corporate objectives.

Connecting marketing activities to corporate goals

As you can see here, Allocadia helps you to cascade down from corporate objectives to marketing project objectives to individual team objectives . Making the connections between marketing projects and how they connect to the business strategy, giving the company’s upper management accurate and real time information on how the company’s milestones are being achieved.

Digging into Activity Plans

Another great use of Allocadia’s automation is to get detailed budgets and the planned and executed marketing spend divided into each of the activities needed to complete your marketing effort. This is also available in an easy way to different stakeholders and platforms. Now imagine if you can connect your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Allocadia. That would feed all financials into the platform, making Allocadia even simpler to use.

Creating a Workfront Project with a single click

Allocadia and Workfront are deeply integrated, so you can transfer all this marketing financial data into Workfront with just the click of a button. Depending on your Workfront configuration, you can create a new Workfront project using a project template or trigger a new approval process or ask for resources from work managers. All activities will be created as tasks in Workfront including all planned costs and budgets. Having this level of clarity on the execution side of the project helps stakeholders to make better budget decisions.

Connect marketing spend to project execution

Lastly, not only you can track marketing financials for each task using Workfront financials, but professional project managers can use this to calculate cost performance index (CPI) and schedule performance index (SPI) and estimates of hours and costs.

At the end, if this sounds like something that you would like to implement, but don’t know where to start, we can help. At Harnon, our development and services teams are always excited to work with marketing operations teams to come with a solution for our customers. Contact us to learn more.