New SAS® Customer Intelligence offering accelerates, automates and streamlines marketing planning activities

CARY, N.C., July 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With a laser-like focus on digital marketing and customer experience, many organizations have allowed their marketing operations and planning efforts to lag behind the technology curve, thereby sacrificing efficiency and demonstrable accountability. SAS, a leader in marketing technology, fills this need with the launch of SAS 360 Plan. SAS' latest customer intelligence offering optimizes marketing operations from start to finish ? from strategic planning and budgeting to resource and marketing content management to global execution and analysis.

Marketing resource management (MRM) technologies like SAS 360 Plan provide marketers with the ability to be more agile in their planning and execution, while boosting collaboration and productivity.

"Today's MRM tools address the shortcomings of their monolithic forebears and provide a modular, marketer-friendly approach to managing money, people, content and brand strategy," writes Rusty Warner, Principal Analyst at Forrester, in the firm's report Vendor Landscape: Marketing Resource Management (October 2017). "MRM can improve marketing's ability to demonstrate the firm's brand promise while optimizing spend and productivity."

SAS 360 Plan enables marketers to work faster and smarter to deliver marketing plans, with an added layer of transparency and accountability that have maximum impact on ROI.

Key capabilities of SAS 360 Plan include:

• Strategic planning. Users can store marketing plans, schedules and supporting documents in a central, transparent location, allowing for easy collaboration among team members no matter their location.
• Financial management. Marketers no longer have to stumble through spreadsheets to know their investment. SAS 360 Plan offers an integrated and aligned budget, so users can track progress and effectiveness of their marketing activities down to the campaign level.
• Calendar management and workflow. Every organization wants to ensure projects are completed on time. SAS 360 Plan offers an integrated calendar to manage and track resources throughout execution, providing greater transparency, collaboration and accountability across teams. Workflow management gives all users real-time visibility into project timelines, as well as a process to assign tasks and deliverables to owners inside or outside of the organization.
• Digital asset management. Marketers have the ability organize their digital assets using tagging and cataloging, allowing for easy search and distribution. A secure infrastructure lets users manage and control multiple versions of an asset to ensure no work is lost in the shuffle.
• Integrated analytics. The backbone of SAS 360 Plan, integrated analytics offers the ability to track and evaluate success. Marketers can measure ROI for plans, programs and activities in a single interface in real time, and then make faster, smarter decisions based on analytical insights.

"Marketers face mounting pressure to achieve optimal results with budgets, resources and customer expectations that are constantly in flux," said Wilson Raj, Global Director of Customer Intelligence at SAS. "Disparate data and insights lead to misallocation of resources, lack of accountability and misaligned efforts. With SAS 360 Plan, we envision a future that gives marketing departments a continuous edge to get the highest return out of every marketing investment."

SAS 360 Plan is wholly integrated with SAS Customer Intelligence 360. Marketers can also take advantage of the open APIs to easily connect with other platforms.

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