Jet Mail 4/14/22 4:54 PM

What Is Distributed Marketing?

What Is Distributed Marketing?

Marketing departments that support multiple locations, distributed sales teams, and remote employees face a unique challenge: creating, managing, and distributing marketing materials that are tailored to different regions, markets and individuals. But, that’s not the only challenge they face. Other obstacles include:

  • Manual processes that delay the delivery of time-sensitive marketing materials.
  • Competitors get their message in front of customers faster.
  • Maintaining consistent branding across marketing and sales collateral.
  • Sales reps going “rogue,” and creating or modifying marketing materials on their own.
  • Processing one-off design requests from sales reps or partners on a recurring basis.
  • Managing collateral for other departments and facilities.
  • Having a “marketing closet” with boxes of old and outdated collateral.
  • Struggling to quickly adapt to changes in market trends or consumer behavior.

If you’re experiencing any of these challenges, a distributed marketing strategy is right for your business.

Here’s what you need to know about distributed marketing.

What is Distributed Marketing?

Distributed marketing is the creation, management and distribution of marketing materials tailored to different markets or individuals.

With distributed marketing, corporate marketing teams create and share pre-designed and pre-approved templates that can be customized and tailored to the needs of each market, or personalized for individual prospects.

Just as a business would serve different website content to cater to certain markets, distributed marketing allows distributed employees and partners to customize marketing assets, such as brochures, flyers, letters, signs and more to their target audiences.

Use cases for distributed marketing include:

  • Corporate marketing teams provide marketing assets to partners, affiliates or distributors with pre-designed templates that can be co-branded and customized to meet the specific needs of that region or market.
  • Franchise marketing teams want to support and grow their franchisees, but if there are 200 locations across the country, they would need to create 200 versions of each marketing asset in order to accurately represent each store’s location, address, pricing and demographics.
  • An insurance carrier wants to promote car insurance to customers throughout the U.S. However, since each state has different laws and regulations, the insurance carrier would need to create 50 different versions of all marketing collateral.
  • A national hotel chain wants to advertise a weekend discount. But since pricing is drastically different between the New York City and Omaha locations, the discount would need to be adjusted accordingly.

Benefits of Distributed Marketing

With distributed marketing, marketing departments retain complete control of the entire process. This ensures compliance with brand guidelines, messaging, and legal or regulatory requirements.

Sales reps and other partners benefit from distributed marketing since they can customize marketing assets with content that resonates with their local audience rather than providing a one-size-fits-all generic pitch.

Other benefits of distributed marketing include the ability to:

  • Promote multiple campaigns with different content to various markets and individuals.
  • Boost marketing department bandwidth by operating more efficiently.
  • Simplify and streamline marketing asset management.
  • Enforce brand guidelines.
  • Expedite speed-to-market, such as time-sensitive sales presentations.
  • Oversight of all marketing operations.
  • Provide localized marketing assets for multi-location businesses or franchises.
  • Process requests for customized, one-off or ad hoc marketing materials with ease.
  • Ensure compliance with legal or regulatory requirements.

How to Implement a Distributed Marketing Program

The best way to begin implementing a distributed marketing program is with a marketing portal.

A marketing portal centralizes all of your marketing materials in an easy-to-use, web-based platform. The portal provides 24/7 self-service access for users to browse, select, customize and order the marketing materials they need with minimal oversight from marketing.

Once a user has been approved by admins (typically someone from the marketing department), they have self-service access to order the materials they need. Users can even personalize marketing assets in the portal, eliminating one-off and last-minute design requests.

The self-service access of a marketing portal is a game-changer for marketing departments, especially when it comes to bandwidth. Self-service access is made possible thanks to customizable settings in the portal that provide enterprise-level control of user activity, including:

  • Who can access the portal.
  • Which marketing materials each user can order.
  • How much each user is permitted to order.
  • What marketing materials can and can’t be customized.
  • Final sign-off on some or all orders through the portal’s automated approval routing.

Extensive and fully customizable reporting tools within the marketing portal make it easy for marketing teams to see what items are in stock, who is ordering what materials and how much is being spent. Admins have full control of spending and order limits and can toggle user permissions by user, location or department.

To illustrate the power of the portal, here are examples of how real-life Jet Mail customers use the marketing portal to empower sales reps and enable them to build trust, rapport and influence with their prospects.

  • Send follow-up letters after an introductory sales meeting.
  • Personalize seasonal or promotional offers that resonate with the unique needs of leads in the sales funnel.
  • Personalize “Lunch and Learn” event flyers.
  • Tailor sales collateral with prospect logos, names and images.
  • Select from a dropdown of pre-written, pre-approved copy to create hyper-relevant sales sheets that specifically address the pain points of prospects.

Distributed Marketing with Jet Mail

Since 1993, Jet Mail has delivered distributed marketing solutions that focus on speed to market, personalization, and data-driven insights to help businesses stay ahead of the curve in competitive business environments. While we deliver at jet speed, we always take the time to understand your business and work with you every step of the way as your hands-on, proactive marketing fulfillment partner.

Contact us today to learn how our data-driven approach and advanced personalization technology can boost your marketing efforts in 2022 and beyond.Contact-Us-About-Seamless-Acceptance

COMMENTS

Get Started

To learn more about our services and how we can help expedite your marketing fulfillment, start by speaking with a Jet Mail team member.