Enterprise marketers who oversee 50+ distributed end users—including field marketers, salespeople, channel partners, and more—need a distributed marketing solution to help them uphold their hard-earned brand while enabling teams to customize and personalize their campaigns for local markets.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s touch on distributed marketing—what it is, and what it does. A distributed marketing strategy enables enterprises with 50 or more users spread across the country (or even the globe) to deliver more effective branded campaigns with compliance, personalization, and efficiency top-of-mind. A distributed marketing platform is the technology that powers this strategy. With personalization, multi-channel capabilities, analytics tracking, and collaboration features, distributed marketing platforms are increasingly enabling enterprises’ revenue growth.
To streamline your marketing processes, optimize your resources, and achieve better local-level campaign results, you need a distributed marketing platform—but with so many options on the market, how can you select the right partner to help you reach your goals?
In this post, we explore the capabilities that bring a distributed marketing platform from “pretty great” to “ideal for me”. Read on for the information you need to make a well-informed decision that results in a better return on your distributed marketing investment.
Streamline Your Marketing Processes With The Most Comprehensive Solution
Efficiency is at the core of distributed marketing. While many distributed marketing platforms can help you store and share branded collateral across multiple locations, to get a better return on your investment, you’ll want to partner with distributed marketing experts that can do more.
According to Gartner, digital asset management comes in four forms: stand-alone, modular, integrated, and distributed. For companies that market and sell their offering through indirect channels—such as channel partners, franchises, independent brokers, etc.—you’ll want a digital asset management solution that’s designed with the purpose of managing distributed assets across locations.
A comprehensive solution should have multi-channel marketing campaign capabilities, enabling you to deliver campaigns via all types of media your clientele uses and responds to. A number of distributed marketing platforms focus solely on email automation and print, but the most effective solutions will empower you to extend your reach and deliver campaigns across more types of media, including social and other forms of digital.
Enhance Your Distributed Marketing Investment By Choosing a Customizable Solution
Your business is unique, and so are your business opportunities and goals—which is why the best distributed marketing partners prioritize your success by developing customizable solutions.
So many distributed marketing platforms seem to offer all of the bells and whistles—but are extensive features really worth it if they’re not tailored to your needs? A distributed marketing partner can develop custom modules, bolt-ons, and integrations to ensure your solution fits seamlessly into your current workflows and fills any gaps in your processes. Already using an analytics platform that you’re not ready to replace? A custom integration will allow you to track and report in a more holistic way. Have something specific on your mind that’s not covered on the “features” page? That’s the magic of a partner who willing to customize your solution.
Consider the Implementation Process to Save Time and Boost Adoption
There’s nothing more limiting than plug-and-play software. Most distributed marketing providers will offer the information you need to train your local teams on the new technology—but will they see the implementation process through?
There’s really no upside to choosing a distributed marketing partner that doesn’t assist with the implementation process. With efficiency at the fore, a partner that takes a consultative and supportive approach to implementation will save you ample time in the long run—and corporate marketers know time is money.
What’s more, a partner that’s dedicated to easing the implementation process will help drive adoption. By working with you to determine how your business and teams work, an effective distributed marketing partner can develop strategies and tactics for getting staff comfortable with their new technology, empowering them to use it to its full potential.
Find Out: Is Your Multi-Location Marketing Solution Holding You Back?
Whether you already have a multi-location marketing platform, or you're considering implementing one for the first time, you owe it to yourself to compare. Many enterprise marketers are still dealing with less-than-robust marketing asset management tools—ones that serve just a single purpose, aren’t modern enough to handle new media, don’t integrate well with other systems to offer a holistic view of marketing performance—and are, quite frankly, holding marketers back. Don't wait to benchmark your current solution or the ones you're investigating—get a copy of the comparison guide, Is Your Multi-Location Marketing Solution Holding You Back?:
