Distributed marketing management software has the potential to tremendously benefit an organization. But what are the benefits? What is the point of distributed marketing management software as a marketing automation solution?
Marketing automation works well in an organization that is structured via a distributed model. In a distributed model, there is corporate marketing structure that centralizes brand management. In essence, this does not differentiate a distributed model organization from a company like Procter & Gamble, the company that truly defined the modern concept of brand management back in the early 20th Century. Distributed marketing organizations would diverge from Procter & Gamble based on having a greater reliance upon localized sales agents to represent the brands. The distributed model is quite common in insurance and financial services.
The time that it takes to deliver a message consistently across channels has increased over time, due to the complexity of the modern marketing channel environment. This stands in contrast to the commonly held notion that the world is moving at a faster pace than it once did. Immediacy is a key component of the current era, and online marketing channels are contributing factors to the expectation of immediacy amongst many people.
Since there are more places for a brand to be, brands need to have a point of view that considers an approach to all channels. The basis of a lot of current marketing efforts is online. With every year that passes, more & more brands are moving more & more money and other resources out of traditional marketing means and into online means. But online is not a one size fits all model. With online marketing, there is social media (and each social media network has its own distinct feel), email marketing, search engine marketing and optimization, and a website/microsite presence. While it might sound simple in a sentence, there’s a lot to each of these topics. Many books/ebooks containing hundreds of pages have been written on each of these marketing channels.
When complexity arises, so does the need for processes. Automation works to simplify processes. Simple is good. That’s one of the key ideas of marketing in general. And when the marketing communications process is humming along, it means that multiple elements of the mix are working harmoniously together. Distribion’s social media marketing automation web based software solution is a key part of that. Corporate marketers can create social media campaigns across the wide variety of social media channels, and their downstream local sales agent partnerships can simply opt in to the essence of the campaign. This serves as a solution for the local agent, who often loses quality sales time while working on the development and presentation of marketing collateral. A distributed marketing software solution is vital in aligning human talents to focus their efforts on what they do best. A marketing and human resource alignment through strategic software enhances productivity, and as a result, often times top line financial performance is positively affected. Gleanster was one company to put forth research to support the previous sentence, stating that organizations that use distributed marketing software are more likely to be top performers relative to their competition. And isn’t that the point of being in business? Business is a lot like competitive athletics in the sense that there’s the innate desire to achieve peak performance relative to key benchmarks.