Choosing the Ideal Local Marketing Automation (LMA) Platform for Your Organization

As a corporate marketer, you seek to ensure global brand consistency and campaign authority, all while providing locally-relevant messaging and managing ever-increasing levels of marketing complexity. Keeping up with rapidly changing marketing, industry and customer demands at the local level can be an overwhelming myriad of objectives.

In order to provide timely, relevant marketing collateral and campaigns to an increasingly distributed channel in less time and with fewer resources, you need to automate. The right LMA platform will help to develop and maintain collaboration between corporate marketing departments and their channel partner and affiliate network.

Here are some criteria to consider to aligns the best marketing technology platform to fit your needs:

	1. Powerful, rules-based Variable Data Publishing (VDP) engine to create production-ready output into multiple formats including: email, print, HTML, etc. This criteria cannot be emphasized enough on how important it is. It is the VDP engine that manages fonts, images, and layout in a rules-based, responsive design and content environment. If your VDP engine is not top-notch than the output is going to look like it was poorly designed.
	2. Scalable, highly-reliable environment to support the growth of your channel. You want to make sure that the platform you choose can support a high adoption rate of your local affiliates. That means it is best delivered as a SaaS solution with 24/7 monitoring, secured, and can meet the strict compliance guidelines.
	3. Think global, act local user experience to engage your channel to quickly and easily pull the marketing resources and campaigns provided by corporate with the flexibility to localize these materials and programs with local images and messaging.
	4. Automation is the name of the game. The more tasks that can be automated, like versioning one product data sheet into 20 different affiliate-branded collateral pieces can be time consuming for your agency or graphic design team - not to mention the introduction of risk for errors. With automation comes rapid response to your channel marketing needs and mitigating the risk of errors.

Local brand affiliates are in constant need of marketing materials in a variety of formats to distribute to clients and prospects. LMA solves these needs through sales enablement by facilitating the automation of complex brand and content across multiple channels. And with a few clicks, your channel can order and deliver localized marketing materials that meet corporate and industry standards while conforming to an increasingly onerous regulatory environment.

Through cutting-edge LMA technology focused on distributed channel marketing, organizations can become more successful in maintaining brand standards while adding a local flavor. Rather than competing for time and resources, sales and marketing departments can complement each other and aide the overall growth of an organization by streamlining communications and materials. The Pando Platform from Pageflex, for instance, offers a variety of features including integrating content and data sources to build a marketing resource and campaign library. The Pando Platform also gives users the ability to co-brand and personalize pre-approved marketing templates stored within the platform, route orders through an approval workflow, and easily integrate with third-party solutions like the Salesforce CRM, digital presses of your favorite printing service providers, data acquisition list providers, and more.

Building a global brand requires organized marketing efforts at the local level. However, the reality is the “think global, act local” mantra generates challenges for marketing executives across their organizational processes, agency relationships, and technical infrastructure. These challenges are frequently compounded by distributed, market-by-market budgets, which can hinder the adoption of central governance structures and weaken global campaign authority. Additionally, some content might need to be carefully controlled and managed due to regulatory and company guidelines. Forward-thinking global brands are moving to LMA to balance local, multi-channel applicability with global storytelling, brand consistency, and economies of scale.