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From my experience leading marketing teams at Teamwork.com, I’ve seen how marketing resource management is changing the way teams and agencies organize their work, manage assets, and use resources more efficiently.
It’s a fast-growing field that’s still finding its footing, and people often have different ideas about what it means—whether they’re marketers like me or software vendors.
In this guide, I will define marketing resource management in a way that makes sense for creative agencies and marketing teams. Plus I will cover the benefits of adopting this approach and discuss six of the top marketing resource management software tools.
Let’s jump in with a definition!
What is marketing resource management (MRM)?
Marketing resource management is a wide-ranging term, including both marketing project management strategies and specific software tools that facilitate resource management and other functions important in a marketing context. MRM helps organizations and their marketing teams better manage their various marketing initiatives.
As a discipline, marketing resource management brings together all the elements needed to make marketing happen, including available resources, processes, operations, workflows, content, customer data, and more.
As a set of software tools, marketing resource management software (MRM software) helps businesses streamline and optimize several or even all these areas, pulling sometimes disparate data into a centralized information hub and breaking down silos and barriers within an organization. MRM software serves as a nerve center that handles planning and production of marketing assets along with governance, analysis, and even reporting.
The 4 key benefits of great marketing resource management
Admittedly, marketing resource management is an extremely broad and somewhat fluid term, and implementing it will look different at every company. Whatever your implementation looks like, you’ll gain benefits like these by implementing a solid marketing resource management strategy (along with the right MRM tools).
In my experience as a marketing team leader, marketing resource management is so important. For a project to be successful, you need to properly manage all resources including internal team members and external resources. Proper resource management for marketing campaigns can make everything run smoother and has many benefits:
Makes planning marketing campaigns easier: MRM software tools bring multiple functions into one place, making it easier to see the scope of campaigns and plan them out in a way that works for the entire team. Resources that used to be created once now must be refinished and reformatted dozens of times, and each version needs to be perfect for its platform and that platform’s audience.
Creates a smooth workflow (and reduces busy work): MRM helps everyone stay on the same page, so work flows better and faster. It cuts down on repetitive tasks and endless back-and-forth. That way, the team spends less time doing boring admin stuff and more time actually getting things done.
Helps with monitoring and tracking campaigns: MRM makes it easy to keep an eye on how your campaigns are doing. You can see what’s working, what’s not, and make changes on the fly. No more guessing games. Just clear data to help you make smarter decisions.
Increases branding consistency: Branding consistency is a notable concern worldwide, with 83% of marketers identifying the task as a significant challenge. By syncing resources within a centralized resource management platform, your team can keep marketing collateral on brand, following your (or your clients’) brand guidelines (and keeping clients’ digital marketing assets separate from one another).
Already convinced that your marketing team needs a better resource management tool? See Teamwork’s powerful resource management capabilities, which are already supercharging marketing departments across the globe.
What are the challenges of marketing resource management?
Managing people, time, and tools in a marketing team isn’t always easy. There’s a lot to juggle different projects, deadlines, and team members with different skills. Without the right system in place, things can quickly become overwhelming. Here are some of the most common challenges teams face:
Not knowing who’s available: It can be hard to keep track of who is free to take on new work and who’s already stretched too thin. When teams don’t have clear visibility into availability, some people end up with too much work while others aren’t used enough. This leads to missed deadlines, stress, and wasted talent. A good resource management tool can help give everyone a clear view of workloads.
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Trying to plan ahead while staying flexible: Marketing teams often need to plan campaigns months in advance. But they also have to jump on last-minute tasks. Balancing both planned and unplanned work can be tricky. If there’s no easy way to shift resources when plans change, things can fall through the cracks. Teams need a flexible system that supports both long-term planning and quick changes.
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Poor communication between teams: Many marketing projects involve people from different departments like design, content, and SEO. If these teams don’t stay in sync, there can be delays, confusion, or duplicated work. It helps to have processes in place that keep everyone updated and on the same page.
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What is marketing resource management software?
Marketing resource management (MRM) software is a tool that helps marketing teams plan, manage, and make the best use of their people, time, and budget. It gives a clear picture of who is working on what, how busy everyone is, and what tasks need to be done next. This helps teams stay organized, minimize burnout, and keep projects on track.
Quick glance: 6 best marketing resource management tools
Tool
The 6 best marketing resource management tools
Here are 6 of the best marketing resource management software solutions leading a $3.18 billion market that’s growing fast.
1) Teamwork.com
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As Head of Marketing at Teamwork.com, I rely on the platform every day to plan ahead and stay agile. I use it to map out our campaign's months in advance, forecast team capacity, and make sure we’re set up to deliver on our goals.
Teamwork.com is a powerful project management, task management, and resource management suite built for the needs of marketing teams, creative agencies, businesses that do client work, and professional services teams. It includes powerful features for managing resources on projects of all sizes and levels of complexity.
With Teamwork.com, you can map out projects over the coming months and years and forecast resources out into the future. And you can also execute day-to-day capacity planning, making sure you have the right resources available for the right projects at the right time.
While not necessarily a full-scale marketing resource management solution, Teamwork.com offers powerful functionality across many of the areas covered by MRM platforms:
Monitoring team workload
Visibility into all projects and campaigns (from planning to execution)
Ability to lay out and measure employee workload across projects
Time tracking
Powerful tools for organizing tasks and assigning them to resources
When used in combination with a digital asset management tool or content management system, Teamwork.com is a powerful component of the marketing resource management approach.
See Teamwork.com’s resource management capabilities in action.
Best features
Monitor team workload at a glance: Teamwork.com makes it easy to see how work is distributed across your team with features like the Workload Planner and the Project Health Report. You can quickly spot who’s overloaded and who has room to take on more, helping prevent burnout and underutilization. This visibility allows for smarter decisions when assigning tasks and scheduling timelines.
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Built-in time tracking to improve planning: Time tracking in Teamwork.com lets you capture exactly how long tasks and projects take, providing valuable data for future estimates. This helps marketing managers create more realistic schedules and gives leadership a clear view of how team time is being used. It also helps make sure client billing is correct and shows clearly how time is being used.
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Real-time collaboration to streamline team communication: Team members can leave comments, tag colleagues, share files, and get notified of updates all within Proofs. This keeps communication tied directly to the work it relates to, rather than buried in email threads or scattered spreadsheets. It’s especially useful for remote or hybrid teams working across different locations and time zones.
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Resource forecasting: With Teamwork.com’s long term forecasting feature you see how much work is coming and what resources you’ll need to deliver it. This makes it easier to identify gaps in capacity before they become problems, so you can hire, shift workloads, or adjust timelines as needed. It’s especially helpful for seasonal campaigns, product launches, or times when marketing activity spikes.
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Track budgets and stay on top of costs: Teamwork.com’s project budgets track project performance in real-time, from start to finish, so you always know what’s going on. You can also set up custom budgets that fit your needs and keep track of spending accurately.
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Limitations
Focused on project and resource management but doesn’t contain all components within the MRM bucket (no CMS, for example)
Impressively strong at what it does, but may require the use of companion martech tools
Pricing
Free (for up to 5 users)
Deliver: $10.99/month
Grow: $19.99/month
Scale: Contact sales
Ratings & reviews
G2 rating: 4.4/5
A G2 user, Moira shared: “Teamwork is user friendly and makes it simple to set up projects and tasks by providing the option to add new tasks or have templates ready. Once you figure out how you want to set projects up for your team, it's easy to get things templated out. Teamwork makes it easy for account teams and creatives to keep everything in one place so everyone can be aware of what is going on with a project, what stage it's at, who is currently assigned to that stage, etc. It's simple to add in a budget for each project to keep track all in one place. Overall it's very helpful to keep things organized and moving!.”
Read real user reviews of Teamwork.com here.
2) Widen
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I’ve tried out Widen Collective while looking for tools to help manage marketing resources more effectively. It’s a group of six connected apps that cover things like marketing resource management, digital asset management, and product information. The main tool is Widen, which is really focused on helping teams store, organize, and manage digital assets like images, videos, and content.
Widen was one of the first software companies to bring a digital asset management solution to market (way back in 1997), so they have a deep and rich history to draw from.
The suite of applications covers an array of functions, including:
Cataloging, managing, and delivering media-heavy assets
Connecting product data to marketing assets (and vice versa)
Insights into asset performance
Setting up portals to keep collections or brands distinct
Using powerful templates for on-demand web-to-print collateral
Workflow tools for streamlining work and content approvals
Overall, Widen Collective is extremely powerful and will certainly do everything you could need if you’re a creative agency. The question is whether the suite is too much for your needs: too complex, too bulky, too expensive.
Best features
Very powerful, wide-ranging suite of tools
Decades of history leads to superior service and a more mature platform
“Pay for what you use” pricing structure
Limitations
Designed for midsized and enterprise organizations primarily for internal asset and resource management: may not be a good choice for creative agencies
Pricing is quote-based, not transparent
Pricing
Contact sales
Ratings & reviews
G2 rating: 4.5/5
A G2 user, Stewart shared: “I think the best thing for me as a designer is that clients can access the collective and source their own images. I used to waste HOURS sourcing images for internal clients. We set them up as a user, and click, done. Client is empowered to search and source their own images, and our brand is consistently presented to them with a customizable WIDEN interface. Life saver.”
3) Adobe Campaign
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As a marketer, I’ve used several of Adobe’s tools over the years, so I appreciate how familiar and widely used they are across teams. Adobe is really building on that by offering a full campaign management suite. With Adobe Campaign, you get a mix of CRM and campaign tools that work together to help you create personalized marketing campaigns across different channels. It’s especially useful if you’re already working within the Adobe ecosystem and want everything to connect seamlessly.
Campaign offers centralized workflow management, marketing automation, personalized email marketing, customer data management, and a managed cloud experience.
Campaign isn’t a fully featured MRM system; in fact, its resource management and project management capabilities are light to nonexistent.
But if you’re looking for data-driven personalization, Adobe delivers something with Campaign that you may have a hard time finding elsewhere.
Best features
Personalized campaigns across all channels (print and digital)
Prospect search is a widely loved feature
Pricing: Campaign is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, which creative firms may already be paying for
Limitations
More an ancillary MRM technology platform than a full MRM solution
Designed for enterprise businesses with robust in-house IT resources
As a marketing automation platform, Campaign seems dated compared to modern cloud competitors
Pricing
Contact sales for customized pricing.
Ratings & reviews
G2 rating: 4.1/5
A G2 user, Caroline shared: “It is great source for marketing. It is also great when combines with other adobe software's. The built-in-reporting and targeting features has helped us to spread knowledge of our private school that would otherwise go unnoticed. we are also a nonprofit and being able to reach a wide variety of people without having to email each and every person has helped not only our administrator, but our ability to remain open and help our students with financial aid and donations.”
4) Image Relay
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I first came across Image Relay when looking for digital asset and product information tools to support our marketing operations. It originally focused on helping teams manage visual content and product data in one place which is a key part of marketing resource management.
Over time, Image Relay has grown and evolved into what’s now known as Canto, expanding its features and improving the user experience. While they call it the “world’s first fully integrated marketing solution,” I’d say that might be a bit of a stretch but it does a solid job handling content and asset management for growing teams.
Image Relay is a fantastic tool for organizing photos and other visual marketing content, along with product information. If you’re a consumer-packaged goods brand, Image Relay might be near priceless in terms of value.
But as a marketing resource management platform, Image Relay is pretty sparse. You won’t be tracking campaigns or building out projects. You probably won’t use it to actually build complex campaign content, either. It can (usually) help you find the right images and content quickly, but turning that content into what you need to create? You’ll probably want to do that elsewhere.
Best features
A great solution for businesses with large catalogs of products (with associated image and product information)
Brings order to often chaotic image-based workflows
Maintains brand consistency by creating a single source of truth for images, design elements, and product information
Limitations
Combination of hierarchical folder structure and weak search tool makes surfacing content a challenge for some users
Features very limited in scope
High price tag for limited feature set
Pricing
Contact sales for customized pricing.
Ratings & reviews
G2 rating: 4.4/5
A G2 user, Nikeeta shared: “The best thing about Canto is that whenever I update files I can simply replace the old version without having to delete the old file or reupload a new one with tags. Not only can I replace the old version but the old version is still there in the history in case I ever need to reference back at it. I also appreciate the level of organization within this platform. There is such an ease for everything and it really cuts down my time when uploading assets. The customer support is great and they are very responsive whenever I have a question. I use Canto everyday as a creative designer designer and it's a great tool that I can reference back and forth on as I'm creating content. Canto is super user friendly and I highly recommend for anyone who is in need of handling multiple types of assets within their company.”
5) MediaValet
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I’ve tried out MediaValet for managing digital files with our marketing and creative teams. Since it is cloud-based, everyone whether they are on our team or outside partners can easily get to the files they need no matter where they are. That makes working together way simpler especially when people are spread out. It really helps keep everything organized and easy to share.
MediaValet boasts high-quality support and training and can support an unlimited number of users, making it ideal for large corporations as well. The service includes simple navigation and easy-to-use tools and supports assets and files of any type and size.
MediaValet is highly scalable and very flexible, but it doesn’t claim to be anything more than a digital asset management tool. It’s similar to Image Relay in this way: Both tools are great at what they do, but they can’t assist with anything resembling project management.
That said, pairing the capabilities of Image Relay or MediaValet with a robust project and resource management tool like Teamwork.com could give you the best of both worlds.
Best features
Supports files uploads of nearly any type, with tagging and detailed metadata
Allows you to easily invite external users to the files you choose
Gives users the freedom to manage content however they want (yet keep it centralized and accessible)
Limitations
Another limited solution that may require using multiple tools for full-service marketing resource management
Dated user interface (no dragging and dropping or click and drag to select multiple files)
Lacks robust access controls (such as download-only rights)
Pricing
Contact sales for customized pricing.
Ratings & reviews
G2 rating: 4.6/5
A G2 user, Kevin shared: “MediaValet is helping my team streamline and scale our content management. With thousands of assets in our media library, we need an efficient, user-friendly, fully integrated system to help us stay organized. MediaValet will ensure we reduce waste and duplication of efforts. We especially like having the ability to create guest portals so that we can share with our partners and collaborators.”
6) Aprimo
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I’ve checked out Aprimo and it’s a content operations platform that combines a lot of features like digital asset management, work management, and budget tracking all in one place. The idea is to help marketing teams, especially CMOs, run campaigns faster and stay on schedule.
The suite boasts AI-powered workflow enhancements and “content atomization.” Forrester includes the suite in its 2020 Forrester Wave™ report as a leading full-service MRM platform.
Though Aprimo offers a wide range of capabilities, implementation takes work if you want to get the most value out of it. Be prepared for tech-heavy implementation and integration with your systems, which may require support over time.
Best features
Tracks task and campaign progress
Offers a wide range of features and functions if you have the ability to custom-build
Very well integrated with many of the apps and services you’re already using
Limitations
Out-of-the-box functionality is limited; requires implementation support
Fairly unintuitive UI and UX
Some users find the built-in workflows much less flexible than Aprimo claims
Pricing
Contact sales for customized pricing.
Ratings & reviews
G2 rating: 4.3/5
A G2 user, Amy shared: “One thing I like best about Aprimo is the stableness of the site--I'm able to visit one of my materials and it's easy to navigate and immediately find. Plus, the search feature is very helpful when I'm looking for a piece that's not linked on my company's SharePoint site. Easy to integrate into my workflows as well since I work with the Aprimo Librarian for my company and I use Aprimo daily; I can keep a stable link to the site on other applications like Excel. Overall, very efficient library source.”
Best practices for implementing MRM software
Getting new software up and running can sometimes be tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some easy tips to help you use marketing resource management software the right way and make sure your whole team is on board.
Know what you want to achieve: Before you start using MRM software, be clear about what you want it to do for your team. Are you trying to keep track of projects better, manage budgets, or speed up approvals? Knowing your goals helps you focus on the features that matter most.
Get team buy-in early: Involve your marketing team and other key stakeholders from the start. When people understand how the software will help them and have a say in the process, they’re more likely to use it consistently. Training and open communication are key to making adoption smooth.
Keep your data organized: One of the biggest benefits of MRM software is centralizing your marketing assets and information. But to get the most from it, you need clean, well-organized data. Take time to standardize naming, file storage, and workflows so everything is easy to find and track.
Integrate with existing tools: MRM software works best when it connects with the tools your team already uses, like project management platforms, CRM, or digital asset management systems. This helps you avoid doing the same work twice.
Check in and make changes often: Using MRM software isn’t something you do once and forget. Keep checking how it’s working for your team, listen to feedback, and tweak things if needed. This way, the software keeps helping you hit your goals without causing headaches.
Manage your marketing efforts & resources effectively with Teamwork.com
Marketing resource management is a deep discipline, and organizations embracing an MRM approach require numerous digital capabilities and functions. Due to the technical complexity involved, there aren’t many full-service solutions that make sense for smaller companies or creative agencies.
One useful approach is combining the power of a digital asset management platform with a robust project and resource management suite.
For the latter, Teamwork.com is a fantastic choice: Teamwork.com is the project and task management platform built for creative teams. It’s perfect for marketing project management — powerful enough to do everything you could need, but user-friendly and intuitive for marketers and creatives to use and enjoy.
More on resource management:
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