5 DISTRIBUTED MARKETING MISTAKES AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

Distributed marketing is a complicated business. Maintaining the integrity of a national brand while providing for the needs of local sales representatives is a difficult balance to strike. As your organization strives to find that balance, mistakes are bound to happen. Luckily, the most common mistakes that distributed marketers face can be easily avoided with a little insight and planning. Below we identified five of the most common mistakes in distributed marketing, and provided some solutions to help your organization avoid them.

1. Not Giving Your Local Sales Teams Enough Freedom

Distributed organizations rely on their local representatives to handle local marketing and eventually make the sale. Your local sales reps know your customers better than anyone. Consequently, it makes sense that marketing should be handled at the local level, by the teams that know your customers on a personal level. When you restrict the freedom of your local representatives to customize their marketing materials to fit their customers, you restrict their ability to make a sale – which means ultimately you’re restricting your company’s sales.

How to Avoid: Creating customizable templates for your local sales representatives will allow them the freedom to change up the messaging to fit their customers.

2. Giving Your Local Sales Teams Too Much Freedom

This is a fine line to toe. Not enough freedom and your local representatives can’t do their job – but giving them too much freedom can be a mistake, too. If you allow inexperienced local marketers the license to create their own marketing materials, you’re likely going to end up with promotional pieces that aren’t brand compliant. Which means you’re either damaging your brand image or wasting thousands (maybe millions) on marketing materials that will have to be thrown out.

How to Avoid: Give your local marketers pre-approved, brand compliant templates that they can easily customize to fit the needs of their local market. Whether you need email templates or templates for promotional pieces such as flyers, postcards, brochures, door hangers, business cards and more, a good distributed marketing tool will make it easy to create and store templates for your local sales representatives.

3. Not Segmenting or Filtering Your Marketing List

List management is one of the easiest and most effective practices for improving your company’s marketing – yet it’s something that many organizations aren’t doing. Up to 52% of marketers say that they need to greatly improve their email database segmentation, with 32% saying that database segmentation is a top priority for their company in the next year. Not segmenting or filtering your marketing lists is a simple mistake. Thankfully, it’s a mistake that can be easily remedied.

How to Avoid: With a good distributed marketing tool, list management can be a snap. Upload your marketing list directly to the tool, then take advantage of its features to segment the list by whatever factor makes most sense to your organization, whether that’s demographic or geographic location, line of business or level of seniority in a company. (For more on the importance – and benefits – of list management, see “How to Create an Effective Database List in 3 Simple Steps.”)

4. Not Automating Fulfillment

Your sales reps have enough going on without having to project manage fulfillment of their marketing materials. Automated fulfillment has many benefits. It increases speed-to-market, it reduces the amount of time your employees spend on a project, and it can ultimately save on costs. The more your sales representatives insert themselves into the fulfillment process, the longer the process takes – meaning it will take longer to get the materials into the hands of the customer, ultimately costing you money.

How to Avoid: Take advantage of the automated fulfillment options available through your distributed marketing tool. As this is the easiest option, it won’t cost you any extra time or money – and it can actually save you money in the long run as you can often get a discount for using the pre-approved vendor that comes with the system. For example, with Conduit, you can save up to 30% on production costs using the system’s pre-approved fulfillment vendor.

5. Selecting the Wrong Distributed Marketing Tool

A good distributed marketing tool can help you avoid most of these mistakes – but only if you choose the right tool. If you pick a tool that doesn’t offer the features you need, or doesn’t work with your company’s hierarchy, you could be shortchanging yourself and ultimately making a costly mistake for your organization. Another costly mistake? Going with a great distributed marketing tool, but then never taking advantage of all its capabilities.

How to Avoid: As you research distributed marketing systems, make sure that the tool that you choose has these seven elements of functionality – and that the functionality being offered lines up with what your organization needs from a tool. Once you’ve selected your tool, take advantage of all available training opportunities so that you fully understand how the system works. If you’re paying for services such as in-depth reporting, automated fulfillment and eMarketing – but never use them – you’re wasting money and missing out on a great opportunity to improve your company’s marketing. Take advantage of the training tools available to you through your system.

Avoid Costly Distributed Marketing Mistakes with Conduit

If you’re looking for a distributed marketing tool that can help you create and store easily customizable templates – allowing your local sales representatives the freedom to create customized marketing materials while maintaining brand standards – Conduit can do that for you. If you’re looking for a tool that will help you upload, segment and filter your marketing lists, Conduit can also do that. Looking for automated fulfillment? You guessed it – Conduit does that, too.

If you need a distributed marketing tool that can help you streamline processes, improve efficiencies, save your company money and help you avoid costly marketing mistakes, Conduit is the tool for you. To experience this tool’s functionality first-hand, contact us today and get your free demo started – at no cost to you.