When you manage marketing campaigns and processes across a widespread region, there are often opportunities to increase your marketing productivity and create scale to connect efficiently with more consumers. But, sometimes identifying those opportunities can be difficult because marketers are so busy, and focused, on creating and implementing campaigns.

Here are four key areas where you can improve marketing processes and increase your productivity:

1. Brand consistency and compliance
2. Updating marketing materials
3. Co-branded campaigns
4. Managing local marketing budgets

Worried this list is too good to be true? It’s not! With the right tools, these four key areas can become more streamlined and easier to manage – which helps you focus your time on areas that need it most.

A marketing resource management system is the key tool that delivers the increased productivity and streamlined marketing processes you need. Here’s how it can work:

1. Brand consistency and compliance

A marketing resource management (MRM) system delivers quick access to commonly requested sales materials, like brochures, direct mail pieces, social media posts, and more. Local sales teams can customize and submit materials for corporate review – all electronically in one easy-to-use portal. Corporate teams can quickly review, approve or request changes to ensure brand guidelines and compliance regulations are met.

This electronic system helps streamline marketing processes and makes it easier for marketing teams to track approvals, manage brand guidelines, minimize compliance risk and fulfill sales requests.

2. Updating marketing materials

Brand materials often need to be updated with new products or services, recently opened locations, updated contact information, or refreshed logos. These changes can leave marketers scrambling to find all impacted materials across multiple locations.

MRM systems can help by providing a searchable inventory of marketing materials – including the ability to search by string or keywords within branded materials – saving time on materials updates, and ensuring that materials needing changes aren’t overlooked. MRM systems empower corporate marketers to quickly locate and update all affected materials and serve as a central location for corporate marketing and distributed sales channels to access the most current marketing materials.

3. Co-branded campaigns

Working with distributed sales channels to jointly implement marketing campaigns can be an effective way to reach more consumers with a powerful message. However, coordinating and personalizing these co-branded campaigns may seem challenging. Fortunately, an MRM system can help by simplifying and automating the co-branded marketing process.

Locating and customizing marketing templates with store information, co-branded logos, and more, can be streamlined with the electronic process. Individual users can log in, select a template, customize the pre-assigned areas, and route to marketing teams for approval. The process helps streamline the process, track response rate and designate who can change or access sensitive information – from branded messaging to prospect lists.

4. Managing MDF budgets, co-op funds and other local marketing budgets

When partners have easy access to MDF, co-op and other local marketing budgets, they are more likely to implement branded campaigns. Managing these funds can become a complex task. MRM systems, however, enable corporate teams to assign, manage and track budgets from one central location. Corporate teams can also gain a clear picture in understanding what’s working among partners, and share best practices across the board.

These four areas are just a few where many marketers working across regions feel pinched for time and resources. As a marketer, what are some of your biggest challenges reaching local consumers? How could an MRM system help in your day-to-day tasks? Tweet us your thoughts at @vya_systems.