The Ultimate Guide to Distributed Marketing

So, what is distributed marketing, anyway?

Distributed marketing is the process of providing end users with centralized, templated marketing materials, empowering them to create co-branded campaigns that are customized for their local audience. By providing your end users with professional marketing materials that have been reviewed and approved by the corporate marketing team, you can ensure your brand is consistent and recognizable—even if you manage hundreds or thousands of channels. Distributed marketing also uses automation to deliver these campaigns to prospects and customers, saving time and money for both corporate marketing teams and their local channels.

A distributed marketing platform is a system which promotes coordination between corporate marketing decision-makers and local affiliates. An effective distributed marketing platform allows corporate marketing teams to control brand consistency, all while providing end users with a way to develop and deliver customized marketing campaigns across traditional and digital channels.

An effective distributed marketing platform should integrate seamlessly with your marketing strategy, working for your organization as a driver of market share and revenue at a local level. Corporate marketing teams can use a distributed marketing platform to ensure all existing collateral is in line with brand objectives and regulations, and end users can access approved materials anytime within an organized, easy-to-use, centralized software system. By empowering end users to speak to their local audiences in a relatable way, corporate marketing is enabling an even better customer experience.

With an increasing amount of marketing messages reaching consumers on a daily basis, it’s no surprise that people are craving a more human approach. Data from Infosys shows that 86% of consumers say personalization plays a role in their purchasing decisions, and while corporate marketing teams have a deep understanding of their brand—no one has a better understanding of an organization’s customers and their needs than the people who work with them face-to-face every day.

With a distributed marketing platform, corporate marketing teams can provide their local distributors with the ability to tailor marketing materials in a way that resonates with their specific customers. By personalizing marketing messages with employee headshots, store hours, and other local content, brands show their customers they care about their needs. While empowering this level of localization, brands also maintain their own corporate messaging and imagery with corporate-created and approved collateral. This level of consistency promotes a more seamless customer experience across all channels, helping to drive customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty.

On top of personalization, distributed marketing platforms allow for an automated creative process where end users can apply localized assets to templated collateral that’s already been approved by their corporate marketing team. Local end users are empowered to create effective marketing campaigns when they have branded marketing materials at their fingertips, increasing employee ownership, coordination—and in turn—morale.

When local end users aren’t scrambling to create their own collateral to suit brand guidelines, they’re more likely to focus on sales and outreach—including finding more effective ways to collaborate with corporate brand initiatives. This can deliver gains throughout the entire company.

Effective distributed marketing platforms track and manage branded marketing collateral, multi-channel marketing campaigns (including email, print, web, and social campaigns), and compliant product information. This visibility ensures brand compliance and consistency, and also gives corporate marketing teams insight into local marketing campaigns through analytics. By identifying successes and issues on a local level, marketing teams can strategize to continuously improve their marketing activities. Corporate marketing teams can identify which templates work best for each location, which messaging is most effective for each audience, and the types of localized assets customers react to best.

The “think global, act local” mantra generates challenges for marketing executives across their organizational processes, agency relationships, and technical infrastructure. These challenges are often the result of distributed, market-by-market budgets which can hinder the adoption of centralized governance and structures, weakening global campaign authority.

In addition to these challenges—particularly in highly-regulated environments—marketing content often needs to be carefully controlled and managed. Forward-thinking brand owners are moving to distributed marketing to balance the distributor’s local, multi-channel messaging with global storytelling and brand consistency.

In today’s marketing landscape, brands are expected to engage with consumers on a local level to meet their needs. Local end users are in constant communication with their customers and deeply understand their service area, so by empowering them with an effective distributed marketing platform, they can help drive brand authenticity and reputation by speaking to their audiences in a contextual way.

Distributed marketing provides solutions that regular marketing automation overlooks, including message coordination and consistency. Lack of alignment between corporate marketing and branding strategies lead to challenges like delays in approval, customer dissatisfaction, and higher production costs, all of which are a result of redundant time and effort spent on developing (and ultimately reproducing) resources. Automating the creative process when it comes to marketing collateral keeps costs down while retaining global brand equity at the local level.

At the core of an effective distributed marketing platform is a powerful variable data composition (VDP) engine, and Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Platform is a parent VDP composition engine relied on by many household global brands. The magic of this flexible VDP engine is a rules-based responsive design and content environment that not only creates and manages digital content, but produces production-ready, printable files and large format signage. Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Platform simplifies the process of creating personalized, customized, and localized marketing materials and promotional items like signage, labeling, and digital and print campaigns by allowing the channel to access corporate-approved collateral that can be personalized to fit the local market’s needs.

For enterprises to maximize their local marketing efforts, marketers must adapt to—and embrace—new technologies and methods. With a solution like Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Platform, both corporate marketers and end users have the means to produce brand compliant content that’s customizable for specific markets, dramatically improving key metrics like revenue growth, local market engagement, cost savings, and employee satisfaction.

With unrivaled capabilities, Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Platform makes the most of a brand’s distributed marketing investment. In the process of driving corporate brand reputation and compliance, Pageflex helps local distributors grow their businesses while removing the cost of redundant technology and design modification expense, saving brands considerably on overhead.

What makes Pageflex’s Distributed Marketing Solution the best option for your enterprise?