As a franchise organization, product manufacturer or other national brand, it is critical that you enable your affiliates to most effectively generate demand at the local level.
Enabling Effective Local Marketing As a franchise organization, product manufacturer or other national brand, it's critical that you enable your affiliates to most effectively generate demand at the local level. As national ad budgets continue to shrink, and locally-produced and customized advertising and marketing become more commonplace, your business success will largely lie with your local affiliates' ability to generate local demand.
Today, national brands are not equipped to effectively enable local marketing.
Although marketing automation has gained significant traction at a national level, distributed marketers - those responsible for enabling affiliates - have not pushed that capability down to their local markets. The primary challenge national marketers have encountered is that local marketing enablement necessitates a high degree of service delivery, which doesn't scale well without the use of specialized and fully integrated technology.
Given the lack of such a scalable solution, distributed marketers typically enable local marketing in one of three ways:
1. Develop and distribute. In this model, the national brand develops creative assets and distributes them to the affiliates with the assumption that they'll be used locally. This is the least effective method because it leaves the affiliate on their own to find vendors, develop local marketing plans, negotiate rates and implement their marketing efforts. This also puts the national brand at the greatest risk for off-brand messaging and communications. 2. Multiple platforms. In this model, the national brand contracts with a variety of vendors to create platforms where the affiliates can access and customize their marketing materials. This model helps to take much of the customization and implementation work and cost from the affiliate, however it comes with three major drawbacks. First, the affiliate is required to access multiple systems to implement their marketing activities, which significantly hinders affiliate participation and nearly eliminates the possibility of true integrated campaigns. Secondly, this ties the organization into specific back-end vendors for fulfillment, which often leads to less-than-desirable pricing and service. Finally, it does not offer a strategic approach to the planning and buying of local media and marketing fulfillment - instead relying on the local business to provide this high-level strategic perspective. 3. Centralized development, planning and execution. In this model, the national brand manages all marketing material development, strategic media/marketing planning and local-level marketing implementation. The challenge in this model is that it takes all local knowledge and power out of the hands of the affiliate to affect their local demand generation efforts. Additionally, when the affiliate does try to augment the national efforts, they are not armed with the skills or materials to do it well.
Local M arketing Automation Page 2Translating National Strategies into Local Execution A fourth, far more effective method is to implement a Local Marketing Automation platform that integrates technology with services to drive enterprise-level marketing strategy and implementation throughout an affiliate network.
What is Local Marketing Automation? Local Marketing Automation (LMA) is a software plus services solution that functions across all mediums to allow distributed marketing organizations to seamlessly translate national strategies into local execution.
Built on a base of existing brand stature and CRM/customer data, Local Marketing Automation allows distributed marketers to bring enterprise-class marketing management and demand generation tools to franchise and dealer networks.
Figure 1: Local Marketing Automation Model
In Figure 1, we see a comprehensive LMA solution in action.
In the Local Marketing Automation Model, the national brand is delivering all required tools for local marketing success including brand guidelines, creative assets, marketing planning, best practices and customer data. These tools are all centered around a cohesive, consistent national strategy that unifies all local activities into a single effort.
The brand is also delivering the mechanism by which the affiliates can easily localize strategy and creative assets, across all mediums, to quickly and easily deliver a cam... [download for more]
