What Is Distributed Marketing? A 101 Guide for Enterprise Brands

Enterprise brands need to market themselves across various channels and through different teams, so it can be hard to be consistent in their messages. This is where distributed marketing comes in. Distributed marketing is a scalable marketing strategy where corporate teams provide on-brand, customizable marketing assets to local branches, franchisees, sales teams, business units, and regional partners. It allows a central organization to support local marketers, ensuring brand consistency, regulatory compliance, and efficient marketing execution across industries. Here, we discuss distributed marketing, how it works, and how enterprise brands can use it to their benefit.

How Distributed Marketing Works Across Industries

Distributed marketing is beneficial for businesses in various industries, including eCommerce, technology, finance, and healthcare. Franchised businesses and enterprises with regional teams are particularly assisted by distributed marketing, as they need to manage marketing strategies across different locations and markets. The way that distributed marketing works across industries is through:

• Corporate-to-local enablement: The corporate organization equips local dispersed teams, including resellers, regional teams, and more, with marketing assets, templates, and tools. This helps to maintain brand control and provide customers with consistent messages that are the same even in different locations.
• Marketing automation & asset management: Businesses utilize tools like marketing automation software that automates repetitive marketing tasks and Marketing Asset Management (MAM), which organizes and stores marketing assets, so they are easy to access and consistent for different marketing channels. This helps streamline campaign execution, approvals, and asset distribution across teams and locations.

By utilizing corporate-to-local enablement, marketing automation, and asset management, businesses in different industries can keep their brand messages aligned and ensure customers get up-to-date information that boosts brand recognition and customer trust.

Challenges & Solutions

Distributed marketing offers enterprise businesses a way to resolve common challenges they may face when marketing across different channels and locations. They include:

• Brand consistency: Having a consistent brand message is of utmost importance when marketing a business, as it helps build customer trust and brand recognition. Businesses may struggle with keeping their brand voice consistent when they have both central and local marketing teams. Distributing marketing helps resolve this issue and enhance brand consistency by having the corporate marketing team provide local teams with assets like logos, messaging, and visuals. This ensures they will stay on-brand and offer customers consistency.
• Compliance & regulations: When businesses market their products or services, they must comply with industry regulations, such as the CAN-SPAM Act, FTC guidelines, and data protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA. Companies in certain industries also have to meet industry-specific guidelines like HIPAA or financial disclosures. This can be difficult for local marketers if they aren’t familiar with all of the regulations. By providing approved marketing assets, distributed marketing helps all marketers meet compliance and regulations, helping their businesses avoid legal issues.
• Scalability: Franchised or enterprise businesses need to market their goods and services in several locations. Without distributed marketing which helps businesses leverage a wider network of partners and employees, organizations can struggle to scale their marketing efforts. Fortunately, distributed marketing helps scalability by providing marketing materials and brand messages across various channels and locations, expanding their reach. 

Distributed marketing uses these solutions to help businesses in different industries thrive.

Exploring Distributed Marketing Platforms

You may be wondering how distributed marketing strategies are incorporated across different corporate and local partner networks. Distributed marketing platforms use numerous tools to help businesses with a vast geographic presence keep consistent brand messaging across their various locations, agents, or teams. 

These platforms make it easier for enterprise and franchised businesses, as well as those with regional markets, to configure their marketing assets, materials, and templates. They do this by centralizing marketing assets into one hub to prevent irregularities and ensure consistency, improving their brand experience and overall marketing messages. 

Distributed marketing platforms also offer comprehensive tools for delivering assets and content blocks to end-users, improving efficiency and keeping operations running smoothly.

Key Benefits of Distributed Marketing Platforms

Distributed marketing platforms are a way to easily implement distributed marketing in an enterprise or franchised business. They provide tools that help these businesses provide a consistent and cohesive customer experience. Along with enhancing brand consistency, distributed marketing platforms also offer several other key benefits for businesses. They include:

Centralized Brand Management

A major benefit of distributed marketing is the centralized brand management it offers. Distributed marketing strategies often employ a Brand Management Portal, which is a centralized online platform that stores, manages, and shares a company’s assets and brand guidelines. This serves as a single source of truth for all marketing assets and ensures consistency across all touchpoints. Brand Management Portals contain assets like logos, graphics, videos, marketing templates, and more. This allows local-level marketers to easily access the materials they need, enhancing collaboration.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Another key advantage of distributed marketing is Digital Asset Management (DAM). When a corporate organization needs to distribute its marketing assets to local branches and teams, it’s extremely helpful to have them all organized and stored in one place. DAM platforms help your business build a brand-centric library using AI-powered search and tagging, which improves efficiency in asset retrieval and usage. This helps make sure your assets are available when needed and in different locations. 

Full Workflow Automation

Full workflow automation is another benefit of distributed marketing platforms. It refers to using technology to automatically execute all steps of a process from start to finish. This automation integrates approval processes, marketing platforms, and tech stacks for seamless collaboration between corporate distributors and local teams. It also helps to streamline tasks and improve overall efficiency.

Regulatory & Brand Compliance

Meeting regulatory and brand compliance standards is another advantage of distributed marketing. The last thing you want is for your business to get in legal trouble for not following industry rules and regulations, which can lead to fees and other sanctions. Distributed marketing lets you ensure all your business’s branded materials adhere to industry-specific standards and legal requirements. Using consistent assets with clear compliance gives you peace of mind that your business is operating within the law. 

Customizable Dynamic Templates

Distributing marketing platforms often provide businesses with custom dynamic templates, which is another benefit of using them. This provides local teams with the ability to quickly customize approved templates that the corporate organization has created, allowing them to personalize marketing collateral to their location while maintaining corporate brand integrity. These templates are one way that businesses keep their marketing consistent across different levels and channels.

Data-Driven Insights & Optimization

Another benefit of using distributed marketing platforms is the insights and optimization they offer. With any business, usage analytics and insights provide valuable information on what tactics are successful, how certain strategies perform, and more. Distributed marketing platforms offer analytics that track marketing material usage, performance, and ROI to refine strategies. This helps businesses determine what strategies are most helpful for their local teams and what they should create more of. 

Key Tools & Features for Effective Distributed Marketing

To be effective, distributed marketing strategies need to utilize a few main tools and features. Most platforms have the following to help provide the best results:

Painless Collateral Distribution

Traditionally, sharing assets between corporate and local teams required a lot of email chains and back-and-forth communication. With distributed marketing platforms, you can distribute collateral seamlessly with a central platform that offers easy access and a single source of truth. Painless collateral distribution ensures teams always have access to the latest, approved marketing materials and can customize them to fit their needs. This helps ensure the assets are in line with the brand message while still being personalized to different locations and markets.

Usage Analytics & Insights

When sharing marketing materials with local branches, regional partners, and franchisees, it’s essential to understand which assets and campaigns are most helpful in these areas. Distributed marketing platforms utilize usage analytics and insights to identify which marketing campaigns and materials perform best across different locations and markets. Without this information, corporate organizations can’t make data-driven marketing decisions. They may be prioritizing the wrong materials, which can lead to decreased effectiveness and lower sales. Analytics and insights also help businesses determine what is working and what they should continue to use going forward to maintain their competitive advantage.

Distributing marketing platforms often integrate with other marketing software like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. These systems help track customer data and interactions to build and maintain customer relationships and loyalty.

Multi-Channel Support

Distributed marketing involves marketing through various channel partners and in different locations, which requires multi-channel support. Some markets may respond better to social media marketing, while others may be more receptive to print and in-store promotions. Distributing marketing platforms use brand management portals to allow for easy management of branded assets. Different teams can share, download, and order branded assets to use via email, print, SMS, social media, in-store campaigns, and other channels. They can also access customized templates that are easily personalized for specific uses and audiences.

Approval & Access Controls

Another key feature of distributed marketing platforms is approval and access controls. Many times, the corporate organization doesn’t want all assets to be accessible to all parties. Therefore, they can create role-based permissions that allow secure access to assets and campaigns. The admin chooses which users and groups can access certain asset collections, which allows for more targeted access and makes sure specific items stay secure. Admins can also set up approval rules for certain approvers that streamline workflows and boost efficiency.

Measuring Success and Optimization

As businesses implement distributed marketing, they should continuously monitor its effectiveness. By measuring success and optimization, businesses can determine what is working well and what needs to be adjusted. They can do so by using:

Performance Dashboards

Performance dashboards feature tools that allow marketers to monitor engagement, conversions, and compliance adherence related to distributed marketing. It helps them identify campaigns and strategies that are performing well and leading to the most clicks or sales, as well as determine ones that are not. These dashboards also help track compliance by evaluating key performance indicators (KPIs) and data metrics related to it.

Campaign Refinement

If the performance dashboard has determined areas that can be improved upon, campaign refinement may be used. Marketers will adjust marketing materials and assets based on real-time analytics and feedback. This helps improve performance and achieve better results.

Scalability & Efficiency Gains

By using performance dashboards and refining current campaigns, businesses benefit from greater scalability and boosted efficiency. Making data-driven decisions around marketing strategies and which work best allows teams to reduce manual effort while enabling faster, more consistent marketing execution. With more consistent marketing execution comes improved customer loyalty and trust, and therefore improved customer experience.

Access Distributed Marketing Solutions at MarcomCentral

If your enterprise business can benefit from advantages like brand consistency and centralized brand management, consider implementing distributed marketing strategies. Distributed marketing empowers multi-location businesses and enterprises to scale marketing while maintaining brand integrity, compliance, and efficiency. 

MarcomCentral provides a distributed marketing platform and a wide range of related distributed marketing solutions to help businesses thrive. Discover how Marcom’s solutions can help centralize, automate, and optimize your distributed marketing efforts across industries. For more information on how Marcom’s services can benefit your business, get started and request a demo today.