Beyond creating brand awareness, manufacturers such as building products companies often want to help and guide distributors in generating new leads. It can be challenging to develop target lists and execute marketing campaigns in coordination with distributors because they often have multiple manufacturer relationships. But the easier you are to work with as a manufacturer – including your internal processes, systems, and technology – the better your distributor collaboration will be. Marketing Resource Management (MRM) systems can help you automate turnkey lead generation campaigns for your distributors. Below, we take you step-by-step through the campaign process.

Email can be a great channel to generate new leads and nurture prospect relationships through the sales funnel. However, there are important regulations that must be followed in email marketing. In this blog we provide background information about the key rules as well as actionable tactics for building your list.

April marks the celebration of Easter, the opening day of Major League Baseball, Tax Day and hopefully the last frost heralding the beginning of garden season for the Northern and Central Midwest regions.

If March has a color, it would be green. In its (hopefully) verdant splendor, March ushers in the beginning of spring and is also host to St. Patrick’s Day and Earth Day, providing several seasonal themes you can incorporate into creative QR campaigns. Continuing our monthly blog series providing QR campaign ideas, here’s the March line-up.

Continuing our monthly blog series providing ideas for integrating QR codes into your marketing initiatives, the following are some creative promotional campaign ideas, organized by theme, that provide relevant reasons to connect with your customers this February. Feel free to use this post as a starting off point for brainstorming your February campaigns, or to apply any themes you especially like in your vertical directly.

Printers used to be a place you went to after you had done all the thinking around “what” you were trying to communicate and “how” you were going to communicate it. For example, if you were tasked with promoting a new service offering and you decided to execute a direct mail campaign. You engaged your printer at the point you needed ink/toner on paper for the direct mail piece.

Today our communication options have broadened, you have more choices on how you communicate and there are many ways to combine communication methods to increase their effectiveness. You still need to clearly define the “what” – that’s your communication message, typically falling into the categories of education, compliance, promotion, or information. Depending on your communication objective, the communication methods selected will vary.

It’s hard to believe it is already December, which means many marketing professionals are busy planning January marketing campaigns. Beginning this month, we are going to post a monthly blog providing ideas for incorporating QR codes into your marketing campaigns. Ideas are categorized by themes appropriate for the month. You may see an idea that you can apply directly to your business. Or perhaps reading the blog will inspire you to think of a related idea applicable to your industry. Whichever the case, we hope our January QR code campaign ideas help to make your month a success.

Theme: New Year’s Resolutions - Health

Today’s marketing professionals are faced with an ever expanding marketing mix (where to spend their marketing dollars). Not only are they expected to be experts in the traditional forms of marketing, but also continue to master the new marketing options invented nearly every day. There is so much opportunity, yet still the same amount of time in the day and in today’s economic climate, fewer resources to execute on the overall marketing strategy. All these conditions warrant a very serious look at marketing program efficiencies.

One of the key aspects of marketing is to create, mold, and protect the brand. Luckily the marketing professional now has tools to accomplish this key initiative in a self service manner. What do I mean by self-service? I mean that a marketing program can now be launched across a large community and the brand control is built into the program. Local resources are able to access marketing programs, execute on initiates, in a self service manner, under centralized brand control. The focus of the marketing professional is then on strategy, innovation, and creativity – not on day to day monitoring and troubleshooting.