Distributed Marketing: 11 Key Benefits to Help Justify the Cost

What is Distributed Marketing?

The concept of Distributed Marketing has been around for a while now, and what immediately can come to mind is that of a “Corporate Marketing Group” needing to work closely with a ‘Franchise Model’ to help them market at the local level.  But Distributed Marketing business models can be quite a bit broader today with organizations having global relationships, deep partner channels and in general a wide ecosystem of cooperative players.  Thus, over the past 5 years, many of the largest Marketing Cloud technology vendors have been aggressively constructing and rolling out platform solutions to meet the demands of the new and varied Distributed Marketing models.

The leading competitors in this space, like Adobe Campaign, offer solutions that support all the core communication channels, automate the entire marketing process and enable corporate marketers and local sales/distributors to execute effective ROI campaigns through aligned marketing resources.  And core to the solution, the beautifully-designed interfaces are allowing marketers at the local level to subscribe to corporate pre-built campaigns and execute those communications targeted at their local market.

How can you justify the cost to your exec?

As organizations move forward with implementing marketing automation that fully supports Distributed Marketing, they will need to justify the cost to executive management by speaking to how the solution will:

1. Allow them to manage the consistency of the brand and corporate content
2. Allow local entities to subscribe to campaigns that corporate has built, that make the most sense for their local market & customer base
3. Reduce redundancies in spending and duplication of efforts (particularly in cases where local entities purchase their own ESP, and/or pay for local creative designs)
4. Provide them with consolidated metrics and measurements so they can do proper analysis (e.g., single customer view, profitability of campaigns, what’s working – what’s not, what can we do to improve what we sent out)
5. Support them with a global asset library to allow assets to be used throughout any marketing communications. And, a central repository allows a change to an asset to be made once and propagate through the system
6. Give them visibility into the success rates of different initiatives at the local level
7. Streamline and accelerate the campaign approval process through automation between corporate and local users
8. Ensure consistency for the customer at every touch point (e.g., customers are more apt to opt-out if they are receiving different look-and-feel from a brand)
9. Allow them to shorten the time between campaign design & delivery
10. Reduce renegade practices at the local level which can damage the brand and result in over-communicating
11. Save money through the elimination of software and services that the local entity has secured in order to get their localized campaigns out the door

To look at this topic in more detail, here’s a link to a more detailed whitepaper that I’ve written on Distributed Marketing. Be sure to let me know your comments and any cost justifying tactics that you have found to be helpful for developing your Distributed Marketing business case! I can be reached @susanmurray or on susan.murray@celerity-is.com.