Most large enterprise organizations have some type of distributed marketing model in place. This means the central corporate marketing department and local business units share responsibility for marketing decisions and activities.
The result tends to be a fractured and highly complex marketing operations environment where it is difficult for corporate to maintain control of messaging and protect the integrity of the brand promise. A distributed marketing platform can help in several ways:
Centralized asset library – A centralized asset library simplifies distribution of marketing content across divisions and from corporate to local geographic markets. Keeping the latest versions of all of your branded assets in one place makes sure they can easily be found and guarantees users will always find final, approved versions of the assets.
Provide asset and program access based on business rules – One of the goals of distributed marketing is to relieve pressure from your central marketing team. That starts with being organized and providing local teams materials that are relevant to them. Permission management is the ability to manage system users, groups, access rights and permissions, including content access and customization options, approval flows, channel options and vendor and spend management. Assign user permissions that allow them to only access materials, programs and messaging they need. This will help local teams to quickly find what they need but also enable more sensitive materials to be accessed on a need-to-know basis. This also gives corporate the ability to give specialized incentive programs to higher performing partners or programs designed to help underperforming partners build more business.
Empower customization –The need to customize on the local level is critical to marketing success. It is extremely helpful to allow local teams access to campaign templates where certain content areas are locked to maintain brand and regulatory compliance, while others are open for customization.
Use gamification to encourage adoption – The ability to create gamified programs can help incentivize distributed sales teams, agents and franchises to implement new marketing programs and share new collateral and content to ultimately generate new business. A mobile gamification app encourages local teams by giving them reward points to use and share new assets. The points can be accumulated and then be redeemed for prizes. The mobile app provides up-to-the minute access, enabling teams to see how many reward points they’ve earned, their standing on leaderboards, and programs they can participate in to acquire more points.
Make the approval process easy – Sometimes approvals are necessary. Streamline both content and order approval routing and offer approval directly through the approver’s email.
For example, we have been working with a large not-for-profit healthcare system in the United States that operates 34 hospitals, 600 physician clinics, 22 long-term care facilities, 19 hospice and home health programs and 693 supportive housing units in 14 locations.
As new providers are added to the network, communication materials are created to notify both patients and other organizations within the network. Currently, each region and each organization has its own format, so there is no brand consistency. To complicate matters, there are three different marketing systems for ordering branded materials. The provider logos are inconsistent and located in multiple locations.
They needed a way to develop brand consistency and ensure compliance across all organizations and locations; create one location to store hi resolution logos and images, and enable users to download and order marketing materials; and track what was and was not being used. A distributed marketing platform helped the healthcare system simplify processes, and create a consistent branded look and feel and keep materials compliant across the entire provider network, and judge the effectiveness of marketing materials.
Lynn Smith is COO for Focused Impressions.
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