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.

Marketing professionals are called to deliver tactical marketing support while maintaining a big-picture, strategic view, and it can be hard to find balance between the two competing priorities. Tactical and strategic marketing functions can be especially hard to balance because they divide our focus between important, urgent and important, not urgent activities (think Stephen Covey’s Quadrant I & II activities). Tactical execution against strategic goals is critical for driving marketing results, but it’s important not to skew so far towards the tactical that focus on strategic activities wanes: Strategic marketing activities help to bolster marketing innovation. Here are some of our suggestions for helping to find and maintain balance.

With emerging new entrants to social bookmarking such as Tumblr and Pinterest, the social media landscape is rapidly evolving, while consumers are flocking to social networking sites en masse around the globe. Your employees, whether you are a B2B or B2C business, are powerful brand advocates for your company, which is why it’s so important for marketing to be at the hub of brand advocacy in the Digital Age, engaging with and mobilizing your employees to champion the core values of your brand. Below are some thoughts about brand advocacy in the Digital Age:

Whether you’re an insurance company with independent agents or a manufacturer going to market through a distributor or dealer channel, selling via third party sales channels presents a unique set of challenges. Because distributors and dealers traditionally coordinate sales activities for multiple product lines, how do you rely on a third party channel to market your products effectively, and how can you help to ensure that you are the brand of choice? Here’s your go-to checklist for improving distribution channel engagement.

Companies are often challenged with applying market insights gained from tactical segmentation. But once target segments have been identified, how do you maximize segmentation within your marketing promotions strategy?

There is an ongoing debate between Sales and Marketing departments that parallels the question of the chicken versus the egg. Which department drives the activities of the other? Who wags the tail of the dog? The answer is neither. Because organizational success is contingent on the activities of both functions, it is extremely important for Marketing to build cross-functional relationships that improve collaboration with all of the internal customers Marketing supports – a subject addressed in more detail in the new DocuStar Marketing Organizational Leadership Blog Series.

While social media continues to gain headway, continuity, or drip campaigns (email, direct mail or a combination) still remain a highly effective approach for nurturing prospects towards increased engagement and interaction with your brand. When coupled with an online element, such as URLs, PURLs or QR codes, measurement tools offered through marketing resource management (MRM) systems can deliver powerful analytics to optimize the sales cycle – providing a wealth of data to improve customer segmentation and content personalization.

It is important for marketing to be both tactical and strategic. As a deadline-driven and fast-paced function, however, marketers tend to juggle multiple high priority projects at various stages in the campaign management lifecycle, and it can be challenging to make time for strategic marketing planning and innovation – especially given today’s environment of staffing and budget constraints. Tactical execution without the strategy component will render marketing initiatives less effective, but strategy cannot exist in a vacuum either. Here are five simple approaches for making time to be innovative while gaining better command over tactical functions.

Many marketing departments focus on messaging to prospects to generate sales and then halt communications once the prospect becomes a customer. However, communicating with new customers once the sale has closed is critical. This is when continued relationship-building is more important than ever in order to build loyalty and increase the potential for future sales.

Overseeing brand compliance in communications with customers and prospects can be challenging for any organization, and especially challenging when going to market with a distributed sales force or through third party dealers and distributors, but brand consistency across these channels is critical. Even details that may seem subtle, such as logo size, brand colors and the tone of any messaging communicated with your branding can dramatically impact how your organization is represented by your company’s remote brand ambassadors. With a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) system, you can streamline and automate the process of creating polished, customized brand impressions. Here’s how.