Gleanster recently surveyed over 135 distributed marketing organizations and found that over 93% indicated their largest challenge was balancing the conflicting needs of local marketers and corporate marketing. Top performing companies surveyed were 7x more likely to have implemented a distributed marketing software platform to overcome this challenge and better connect corporate and local marketing initiatives. In a similar study, the Aberdeen Group found that over 22% of top performing distributed marketing organizations leveraged distributed marketing software platforms to execute “On Behalf Of Marketing” tactics.
So, what is On Behalf Of Marketing and how can it benefit your organization? Tim Storer, President & CEO of Distribion, a leading provider of multi-channel distributed marketing software solutions, weighs in and provides his thoughts.
http://youtu.be/tuOlMzuXDhU&w=560&h=315
Transcript:
[Tim Storer] The Aberdeen Group recently completed a study where they stated that 22% of top performers in the area of lead management leverage On Behalf Of Marketing or OBO Marketing for short.
I feel that Distribion really helped coin that phrase as we have been a pioneer and leader in OBO Marketing Automation for awhile now.
To clarify, OBO Marketing is when the central corporate marketing organization is responsible for conducting campaign efforts on behalf of their local offices in a manner that makes it appear as if the local office is the one actually sending the campaign.
OBO Marketing is often necessary when organizations struggle to get local offices, partners or franchisees to conduct campaigns on their own or within established corporate, regulatory or brand standards.
The way it typically works is that Local representatives simply opt-in to campaigns, upload or select contact lists and then rely on the corporate office to execute campaigns on their behalf.
As campaigns are executed, the local representative will receive an e-mail confirmation that the campaign was sent along with a campaign report link that provides real-time campaign performance statistics.
More sophisticated platforms such as the one we provide at Distribion can also highlight campaign recipients that the local representative should contact based upon automated lead scoring calculations that take into consideration campaign activity and contact attributes.
Automating social media efforts on the local representatives behalf is also a hot new opportunity within the area of OBO marketing automation. Many agents, franchisees and other local representatives express interest in leveraging social media as a sales and marketing channel but have yet to fully adopt social media due to four primary factors:
The first is the time commitment that is necessary to effectively utilize and monitor the social media channel.
The second is training – there are still a large number of users that don’t understand how to truly build and engage an audience.
Third is the inability for users to find or produce relevant content worth socializing about.
And the fourth factor has to do with corporate and regulatory compliance concerns that have resulted in companies either limiting or not utilizing social media at all.
A big opportunity to drive social media adoption can be realized by organizations that can help their local representatives overcome these challenges.
That’s why we recently released a new distributed social media marketing module that allows corporate marketers to publish social media campaigns so that local representatives can opt-in and have content posted on their behalf out to their social networks just as if they posted the content themselves.
In short, OBO Marketing Automation can provide significant time savings for local representatives and provide a steady stream of highly qualified leads.