Last week I was in Nashville with Vya’s Kandi O’Connor and Tracy McIntosh attending the ABA Bank Marketing Conference 2016 – a terrific event for bank marketers to zero in on the latest trends in digital marketing, branding and customer engagement.

Speaker Kimberly Capps, COO of Southern Bank, perfectly captured the overall spirit of the event when she shared this quote by Jeff Yabuki: “The only thing moving faster than technology is customer expectations.”

Tags: brand consistency, social media, financial services marketing

Branch employees are the face and voice of your company to local communities. Engaging local branches and ensuring they use appropriately branded and compliant marketing material is a challenge that can seem insurmountable. It’s essential to achieve the right balance between empowering branches to reach local audiences with relevant messages and the clear need for oversight in order to maintain compliance and brand consistency.

Tags: brand consistency, marketing resource management, legal and regulatory compliance, financial services marketing, streamline marketing, marketing platform

I just returned from Atlanta with my colleagues after attending this year’s Franchise Consumer Marketing Conference. What a terrific event for sharing local marketing best practices. We met a number of truly inspiring franchise marketers and came away with some fresh thinking about marketing through franchisees that can apply across industries with distributed marketing models.

Tags: local marketing, franchise, distributed marketing

Managing local grand opening events can be a challenge when you operate in a distributed marketing model. As a corporate marketer you want to support the success of the new location and ensure brand consistency. At the same time, you want to enable your local team the flexibility to create an event that resonates with their local market.

We’ve supported many clients’ local grand opening events. From franchisors facilitating new franchise openings to banks launching newly acquired local branches, here are some guidelines based on our experience:

Tags: brand consistency, franchise, financial services marketing, distributed marketing, franchisee marketing, grand opening event ideas

Often we are approached by companies that are experiencing tremendous growth. Sometimes it’s a bank that has made an acquisition and is in the process of integrating many new bank branches into their corporation. Other times it’s a franchisor who has many new locations under construction or has several new franchisees under contract. It’s exciting to be part of a growing business; but it can also be stressful, especially for the corporate marketing department.

Tags: localized marketing, marketing productivity, marketing resource management, local marketing automation, franchise, financial services marketing, scale local marketing, franchise marketing software

There are many industries that use some form of MDF, co-op, or local advertising funds. Whether it is manufacturing companies selling through dealers or franchisors selling through franchisees for example, these industries who don’t sell directly to consumers can find it challenging to get a complete picture of their customer at the local level. Fortunately, by effectively managing and tracking how local marketing dollars are being spent, you can gain marketing insights that you may be missing today:

Tags: localized marketing, local marketing, MDF funds, local marketing budgets, sales support, sales and marketing alignment, marketing budget management, co-op dollars

Marketing collateral materials are an important prospect touchpoint: In a matter of seconds, they create a brand impression, convey your product or service’s unique value proposition, and ideally capture the prospect’s interest. Marketers invest a significant amount of resources in developing marketing materials. However, all too often these materials go under-utilized or unused by Sales, and tons of outdated printed pieces end up being thrown out.

Tags: marketing ROI, print on demand, marketing resource management, marketing asset management, marketing systems, marketing resource management ROI, sales support, sales and marketing alignment, print management, marketing hub

We’ve all heard it before: Content is king. But how are you getting the most out of your content? A big part of what makes content “good” is context – where is the content showing up and who is reading it? Did the audience discover the content on their own, or did the content find them? In other words, localization of content is incredibly important. Local sales channels need to be able to utilize messaging that’s directed toward their audience, not be stuck with a one-size-fits-all approach.

Tags: localized marketing, local marketing, local marketing automation

Overseeing brand consistency in communications with customers and prospects can be challenging for any organization, and especially challenging in a distributed marketing model. When going to market with a large, disperse sales force - including agents, branches, franchises or dealers - brand consistency across these channels is critical. Even details that may seem subtle, such as logo size, brand colors and the tone of messaging can dramatically impact how your organization is perceived.

Tags: brand consistency, marketing resource management, distributed marketing

The onset of the Digital Age has added layers of complexity to the challenges faced by marketing leaders. For those in a distributed marketing environment, where corporate marketing and local sales channels simultaneously represent a single brand, the increase in complexity is exponential.

Tags: marketing resource management, local marketing, distributed marketing