Is Your Distributed Marketing Strategy Empowering Your Local Teams?

If you’re a marketer working within a multi-location business, you understand that providing your local teams with marketing content can sometimes be a challenge. A part of that challenge is keeping that content recent, relevant, and easy to find. Which begs the question, do you have a distributed marketing strategy, and if so, is the solution you’re using enough to keep your local teams on top of their game?

Without a robust plan you might be facing a few of the following outcomes:

1. Your local teams can’t easily access the proper marketing materials, making it much more difficult for them to support their sales efforts and benefit from your corporate marketing. 
2. Your reps could be resorting to creating their own non-compliant material, which leads to brand breakage, and ultimately, less impactful marketing. 
3. You don’t have the insight to adapt your marketing material based on what is working and what is not, because you don’t have a full picture of the content your local teams are using.

These issues can be avoided by clearly establishing what you want to accomplish in your distributed marketing strategy. Once you do this, you’ll be in the position to choose the right platform to power your strategy—one dictated by the goals set out in your plan.

There are several critical elements of a solid distributed marketing plan that you’ll want to make sure you have covered. Without having the topics covered, you will have apparent gaps in your distributed marketing, resulting in less than ideal outcomes for your local teams. These elements should also be addressed by the software solution that you choose. You should be looking for in a Distributed Marketing Platform that will support your overall strategy, and make sure that your local teams have everything they need to sell more effectively.

Get The Right Content to The Right People

Using a tool that can manage all of your marketing asset files and versions will go a long way in improving efficiency within your organization. In fact, Aberdeen Group found that some sales reps spend an average of 2 hours per day looking for the proper content. That’s a lot of time wasted to find material which should be readily available to them in the first place.

First and foremost, you’ll want to make sure that you can effectively supply your local teams with up-to-date, corporate-approved print and digital content. When the right people have the right material, everything else seems to fall into place easier.

In addition to being able to readily access content, the other side of the coin is the ability to publish campaigns—ideally from within the same platform. Many Distributed Marketing Platforms on the market have yet to offer publishing across digital channels like social media. This can lead to the issue of needing to manage different channels through multiple platforms. You will undoubtedly be better off narrowing your choices to all-in-one platforms versus choosing a variety of software to handle specific aspects of your distributed marketing strategy. Not only will this likely be the most cost-effective option, your local teams will more seamlessly be able to reach their customers where they spend time—which is increasingly online.

Keep Your Content Compliant

Brand compliance is much easier when your reps can access the content they need in a central hub. When your teams don’t have to look far for their marketing material, they are much less like to go rogue and start creating their own.

For organizations who may have a vast network of local teams, but a comparatively small corporate marketing team, the review process can often be backlogged. You could have a large number of teams looking to run local campaigns, but with few resources to quickly review all of the material being submitted.

Any solution you choose should give you the ability to streamline your review process, enabling your local and corporate teams to focus on doing what they do best. These proactive steps can help avoid unnecessary and morale-depleting conversations (and overall brand damage) that result from rogue marketing on a local level.

Personalize Your Marketing and Cut Through The Clutter

The marketing and advertising landscape is cluttered now more than ever. Your prospects are constantly bombarded with branded messages, which makes the need to personalize your messages even more critical. Personalized marketing allows you to cut through the branded noise that your prospects are hearing every day because it speaks directly to them—whether it is based on geography, past behavior, or even just using their name in communications.

Because of the increased value of personalized marketing, it’s crucial that your Distributed Marketing Platform empowers your local teams to customize the approved content provided to them. Local teams will feel more in control of their marketing efforts when they’re able to speak directly to their customers and put their own spin on content within the approved guidelines.

Use Actionable Data

Using a Distributed Marketing Platform to manage all of your assets across your organization is, indeed, a must for multi-location businesses—but what is a platform worth if you can’t extract any insight from it? That’s why it's crucial to choose a platform that can provide value for the future of your marketing efforts, not just focus on its current state.

This data can tell you which materials are being used most often by your local teams, providing you with insight into what makes specific content preferable in certain areas. From there, you can also determine which campaigns and particular assets have the most impact, enabling you to continually improve your overall strategy. By catering to local teams’ preferences and focusing on what works for them, they’ll be more likely to leverage the materials and campaigns you provide in order to grow your brand from a boots-on-the-ground perspective.

Must Play Nice With Others

Many software procurements have gone sideways because of the lack of integration capabilities and support offered. It is here where Distributed Marketing Platforms and tools really set themselves apart and impact your strategy as a whole.

There are no doubt tools within your organization’s tech stack which are crucial to handling specific functions in your funnel. It would be wise to look for software that can integrate well with that tech stack. Much like why it's wise to choose an all-in-one platform for your distributed marketing, choosing one that plays nice with the rest of your tech stack (such as your CRM) will give you an even more holistic view of the performance of both your marketing and sales efforts. You’ll also gain a single view of the customer without having to jump around to different platforms.

Take Your Distributed Marketing Strategy to The Next Level

While a platform in and of itself is not a strategy, the right platform can go a long way when it comes helping you execute on your strategy—empowering local teams and helping them grow your brand.

Don’t let your current Distributed Marketing Platform (or lack thereof) hold you and your local teams back any longer. Download our guide, “Is Your Multi-Location Marketing Solution Holding You Back?”, to discover what to look for (and what to avoid) when evaluating platforms and how to take your distributed marketing strategy to the next level.