IT Support is More Than Cables and Hardware
Information technology is expanding, and administrators are beginning to utilize IT support skills in nearly everything. At Rivera Group, our clients need custom IT support and solutions, which requires experience in unique IT work.
To maximize the return on investment for the Army’s marketing activities, the Army Marketing and Research Group (AMRG) turned to our experienced Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) team who is able to use their IT skills to manage the marketing budget and track engagement with potential recruits.
What is EMM?
EMM is a computer-based system for managing the U.S. Army’s marketing budget. Marketing dollars are used to promote and recruit for the Army and range from billboards, cinema and magazine ads to booths at community events throughout the country.
With a massive amount of marketing dollars spent each year, the Army needs to verify the return on investment (ROI) of each marketing activity and see whether the money spent had positive results.
Rivera Group’s EMM Team
How is ROI measured?
A major metric for tracking positive ROI is lead generation. Getting an interested candidate’s name and contact information at a specific event or campaign can be tracked and counted as a lead. This information is passed on to a recruiter who then contacts the candidate to determine if the Army is a good fit. More leads mean a better ROI and determines whether the event should continue the next year, have changes made or dropped.
What role does EMM play?
EMM does quite a bit to manage marketing events for the Army, like:
financial planning, data entry of events, asset tracking of the Golden Knights/Army Semi-Truck/Rock Walls/etc., email campaigns, as well as usage of magazine/billboard/radio generated ads that can be modified to market to a specific location by providing local recruiter contact information.
How does the team manage all these details?
EMM is a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) browser application from Teradata utilizing Java, Java Scripting, .NET, SQL Server 2014 and Crystal Reports and is supported by a group of 8 team members in the roles of development, creative graphics, email specialist, support and project management.
With a customer base of approximately 1,400 users located throughout the United States, EMM supports GS, Agency and Army soldiers and interfaces with numerous internal and external systems. EMM provides a central location to enter data, generate reporting and manage marketing events.
Sounds complicated. How do you keep everything straight?
Modifications to the EMM product include the addition of a mapping tool which pictorially displays Army events, enabling drill down on event data good for briefings and high-level overview of marketing activities. Another major modification to EMM currently underway is the addition of merging ad graphics with text. The text is placed on an ad graphic indicating a local recruiter’s contact information, web link or a personalized message to promote the Army to a target audience.
Tim Robinson is the chief technical developer and has been with Rivera since 2014. He’s excited about the benefits this new process brings to EMM as Teradata no longer supports this function. Tim recreated Teradata’s dropped functionality, and by starting from scratch, he has been able to better integrate the process, saving the end user 2-3 minutes when generating graphics in EMM.
Tim’s work also has him creating web services to interface with EMM’s multiple external vendor’s systems to efficiently transfer data across many different platforms.
Brian Howell, EMM’s email expert is streamlining the process of email campaign messaging. This can be quite sophisticated, as contact information such as name, age and Army job interest can be used to create specialized automated emails to better market to the individual. Email metrics such as link clicks and interests are tracked to provide an Army recruiter contact information as well as the ability to opt out. The focus of this work is getting the best job fit for the candidate to ensure they have the most positive impact when joining the Army team.
Our team is full of highly qualified Rivera folks like Tim and Brian along with our graphics and support team servicing the Army EMM contract since 2009.
