HOW DISTRIBUTED MARKETING TOOLS CAN IMPACT ROI
ROI: Three little letters, one major concern. Everyone wants their marketing ROI to be better, and everyone struggles with measuring it. It’s your bottom line – what results are you seeing for the money you’re spending? Most organizations use these stats to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns – and most organizations struggle with measuring their return on marketing investments.
When it comes to measuring ROI, it can be tempting to streamline marketing expenditures as much as possible to amplify ultimate results. But sometimes, a little expenditure – an investment, shall we say? – can produce positive results that might be difficult to measure. Take a distributed marketing tool for example. Investing in such a tool is often a commitment, and one that many organizations might be afraid to make for how it will affect their bottom line. But distributed marketing tools offer a lot of benefits – many of which are quantifiable. If you’re considering a distributed marketing tool and are wondering how it might affect your company’s return on marketing investment, we’ve got five good points for you.
1. Increase efficiencies, reduce cost.
Time is money. When you waste time, you waste money. Sales reps spend up to 40% of their time creating original marketing materials and customizing messaging – a repetitive, time- and resource-intensive process. To help streamline this costly process, many corporate offices send over pre-approved templates that their reps can customize. Unfortunately, up to 40% of these assets never get used, often because the reps can’t find them. All of these inefficiencies and redundancies cut into profit.
When you reduce inefficiencies, you save time and resources, helping to reduce costs. With a distributed marketing tool you can eliminate repetitive tasks, which will help your organization save on personnel costs. With easy-to-access, pre-approved and customizable templates, you can also save on creative development costs. Local sales representatives can quickly find and create customized promotional marketing materials in just a few minutes, leaving them more time to interact with customers and make the sale – ultimately helping to improve your company’s bottom line.
2. Increase measurement.
The reporting features of a good distributed marketing tool will make it easy for your organization to see what’s working and adjust efforts accordingly to increase revenue. With the reporting and tracking mechanisms inherent in many distributed marketing tools, management can easily monitor the performance of individual locations and campaigns. When results can be quickly and accurately determined, this makes it easy to readjust campaigns to reduce or eliminate efforts that aren’t working and put more emphasis on those that are.
3. Improve speed-to-market.
Reducing the amount of time it takes your organization to complete a sales opportunity is one of the biggest ways to make a positive impact on your revenue – and using a distributed marketing tool is one of the best things you can do to improve your speed-to-market. Filter capabilities allow users an easy way to find collateral or images, and drag-and-drop functionality allow you to easily plug in photos, artwork and text – all of which helps your sales reps to reduce the time it takes to create marketing materials.
With multiple fulfillment options you can also speed up the process of getting your materials into the hands (or inboxes) of the customer. Extensive eMarketing options allow you to email your customers in different formats. For printed materials, you’ll have multiple professional printing options to take advantage of, including printing on-demand directly through the system, adding your own vendor to the system, or downloading the files and printing materials in-house. With so many options, your teams can choose the fastest and most cost-efficient method for their needs. Using the fulfillment options through your distributed marketing tool can actually help you save money, too. For example, Conduit users can save up to 30% on production costs using the system’s pre-approved fulfillment solutions.
4. Refine and better target your audience.
Spending money trying to reach a lead that won’t convert is a waste of money – yet many organizations do this day-in-and-day-out because they don’t segment or filter their lists. By segmenting your list into contacts who are most likely to use or buy what you’re offering, have shown interest in your products or services, or are actively looking in your industry, you greatly increase your chances of making a sale. Just look at the stats for email – 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates, 28% experienced lower unsubscribe rates and 24% experienced better deliverability and greater revenue.
Segmenting your list just makes sense – and with a good distributed marketing tool, list management is a snap. You can upload your own contact list and manage all your lists from one place, whether it’s for business-to-business or business-to-consumer purposes. The right tool can also do the segmenting for you, creating categories and allowing you to send relevant marketing to the most relevant contacts. Not only will you save on resources, but by focusing your efforts on the leads that provide the best chance of converting into sales, you’ll make your sales process more efficient. The more targeted your marketing, the greater the return on investment.
5. Improve brand compliance.
At first thought, you might not consider this as a factor that directly contributes to ROI, but there are obvious benefits to your bottom line to maintain brand consistency in all your marketing efforts. Establishing brand consistency builds credibility and helps make your business more recognizable to current and potential customers alike. Without this consistency, customers will lose sight of the message you’re trying to convey. Unfortunately for distributed organizations, maintaining brand consistency while still allowing your local sales team the freedom they need to customize messaging to their customers is a difficult balance to maintain. Allow too much freedom and you risk the creation of marketing materials that don’t meet national brand standards – a mistake that might mean throwing away thousands of dollars’ worth of work.
Costly mistakes like these can be avoided with a distributed marketing system. With the right tool, you can provide local reps customizable materials that meet brand standards for a wide variety of channels. Because these materials go through a corporate-level process, you’ll never run the risk of creating end materials that have to be discarded because they don’t meet brand compliance.
What’s the bottom line? Distributed marketing tools can help improve your bottom line. By streamlining processes to create efficiencies, a good distributed marketing tool will allow your local sales teams to use their time and resources more efficiently, helping your company to save money in the long run. If you want to experience these benefits firsthand, contact us today to free your free demo of Conduit, the easy-to-use distributed marketing system designed to make your life easier and boost your ROI.