When it comes to driving business growth in distributed organizations, the importance of local marketing campaigns cannot be overstated. How quickly you get campaigns to market across your footprint, your system or your regions is critically important for staying ahead of the competition or for responding to changing market conditions.

In industries with distributed marketing and sales models, like franchising, insurance and banking, among others, where marketing not only needs to mobilize itself but also a distributed field of franchisees, agents, branches and loan officers, or other local staff and representatives, effective marketing distribution and the ability to support local grassroots efforts is imperative.

Consider the pandemic and how restaurants responded to supply chain and staffing challenges with flexibility and creativity, or how banks responded to the chaos created in the industry when individual banks failed. Indeed, the ability to adapt and respond can influence your customer relationships. Deloitte’s Global Marketing Trends Consumer Pulse Survey found almost four in five people could cite a time a brand responded positively to the pandemic and one in five strongly agreed it led to increased brand loyalty on their part.

It is critically important to give your frontline staff and representatives the ability to quickly get campaigns to market to address changing conditions specific to their local area, like when a new competitor moves in, weather-related events or local sports victories. A brand that responds to a local event is seen as more engaged with or more connected to the community. During California wildfires several years ago, businesses found ways to help their local community, as Fortune reported in “From the Standard Hotel to Shake Shack, Here’s How Businesses Are Helping California’s Fire Victims and Evacuees.”

Supporting these kinds of local grassroots efforts calls for efficient activation of local-level marketing campaigns, including the creation, distribution and implementation of marketing materials in a timely manner. This is where marketing technology plays an essential role.

How Marketing Resource Management Can Help in Local Marketing Activation

Local marketing campaigns can often be slow to activate, causing frustration and missed opportunities for businesses. A marketing resource management system is an essential tool to enable corporate marketing to quickly make materials available to their frontline representatives. With this technology, distributed organizations can:

• Centralize their marketing operations: By using a centralized marketing portal, organizations can ensure frontline representatives have access to the same marketing materials, ensuring consistency across all locations.
• Automate their marketing campaigns: By automating the creation, distribution, and execution of local marketing programs, organizations can streamline their marketing operations and reduce the time and resources required to execute campaigns.

What to Look for in a Marketing Resource Management System

Marketing resource management encompasses things like centralized asset management and local customization of templated materials, which enable corporate marketers to efficiently execute marketing campaigns across their distributed organizations.

Here are some key features to look for in a marketing resource management system to effectively increase the speed of activating local-level marketing campaigns and programs:

• Auto-customization of materials: Variable fields on templated materials can be auto-populated with data from user or location profiles.
• Templating that enables highly customizable materials: Templates with multiple image selections and freeform headlines and content boxes.
• Campaign automation and subscription services: Enable frontlines to subscribe to participate in recurring campaigns, for which marketing assets are automatically ordered and distributed for them. With ongoing marketing programs running automatically, frontlines have more time to mobilize when a local event requires a unique response.
• Automated approval workflows: It is recommended that you have an automated review and approval process, particularly if you allow extensive customization of your marketing materials. Automated reviews and approvals streamline the process compared with the inefficiencies and potential for errors when materials are circulated for approval via email.
• Custom creative requests: When a situation calls for marketing materials that fall outside of your system’s approved templates, enabling the frontlines to request custom materials within the system streamlines the process and gets custom materials to your local markets quickly.
• On Demand Direct Mail and EDDM: Enables frontlines to quickly get their messages physically into the hands of their local audiences.

More Tips to Increase the Speed of Campaign Activation in Local Marketing

In addition to using tools like marketing resource management to streamline marketing operations and reduce the time and resources required to execute local marketing campaigns, corporate marketers can also support local-level marketing activation by:

• Providing training and support to frontline representatives to ensure they have the resources and expertise necessary to execute effective local marketing campaigns.
• Setting clear objectives and timelines to ensure local marketing campaigns are executed quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion

Local marketing is a critical component of any distributed organization's marketing strategy. However, local-level marketing campaigns can often be slow to activate, leading to missed opportunities and lost revenue. By using marketing operations tools, such as marketing resource management, organizations can streamline their marketing operations, respond quickly to local and grassroots marketing opportunities, and improve the consistency and effectiveness of their local-level marketing campaigns.