Distributed Marketing: Benefits, Use Cases, and Examples

For companies that market (and sell) through local and regional channels such as partners, distributors, franchisees, brokers, and agents it can become a challenge to deliver consistent, professional-looking, on-brand sales and marketing materials. Distributed Marketing is the term used to describe the process of creating national marketing campaigns for delivery on a local level through these channels (also referred to as Through Channel Marketing)

Any organization that performs its sales and marketing functions through local or regional channels can benefit from distributed marketing, but here are the top six examples:

1. Organizations with multiple brands or business units

2. Companies with partner networks

3. Retail stores & restaurant chains with multiple outlets

4. Franchises

5. Direct Sales Companies

6. Companies with representatives in the field (Brokers, Agents, Sales Reps)

A distributed marketing platform provides both the central and local (distributed) teams with a fast, seamless way to work together to achieve greater marketing results.

The platform provides a mechanism for the central team to maintain control over the brand whilst simultaneously empowering the distributed teams to apply their local knowledge to a campaign. After all, they know their market best.

The local team can react quickly to sales opportunities. They don’t have to wait for the central marketing team to create their campaign materials – it is already there at their fingertips. And the branding will be consistent. No outdated logos or images. No ugly rehashing of last year’s campaign. For the central marketing team, 100% brand control is priceless.

With such a quick turnround of localized marketing collateral it is important to understand how well the campaigns perform. The reporting tools within the platform allow the central marketing team to gain insights into the effectiveness of the campaigns and the customizations made by the local teams. This knowledge can be fed back to both the creative team and the local teams for the benefit of future campaigns. The creative team can identify and share best practices with the local teams to improve their performance and productivity. Local teams learn from the success of others to improve their own campaigns.

A large, US-based, car rental company sells its vehicles at the end of their rental life. Each branch around the country has different car models for sale along with a variety of sales offers, terms, and conditions depending on the state they are located in.

The central team designs and creates the sales flyers, posters, and statement stuffers to market the Car Sales offers available. The local branches can log into the platform to order their materials. They are given a choice of sales offers based on those available within their state. They can also choose a particular model of car to appear in the imagery and all their branch details are automatically placed on the marketing collateral they order. All image choices, fonts, colors, and copy are pre-approved and specified by the central team when the template is initially setup. All small print is correct to the sales offer and state selected during customization.

Using this approach, a centrally created campaign is distributed to local markets quickly and easily with locally correct and relevant details. The central team no longer needs to deal with hundreds of individual requests to adapt materials for local branches and the local branches have access to consistent, on-brand, marketing materials relevant to their customer base whenever they need it.

We’re helping marketing teams across a variety of sectors in growing and managing their brand. See how our distributed marketing solution has benefited them:

• Hospitality & Leisure

• Telecoms

• Financial Services

• Health and Fitness