How to Sell Marketing Automation to the Boss
A few weeks ago, I attended a luncheon where Danesh De Silva, Vice President of Marketing at Orametrix, presented a great case study on how he had used marketing automation technology to transform his company’s marketing operations and the ROI he’s gotten. When Dan was finished with his story, one of the people at my table shook his head sadly. “He’s so right. I know that I could do great things if I just had the right tools. But how do I ‘sell’ marketing automation to my boss?” It’s a common question. A marketing director or even vice president of marketing becomes convinced Read More
What is distributed marketing automation?
I was talking to a prospective customer the other day, and he wanted to know exactly what I meant when I said that my company delivers multi-channel distributed marketing automation solutions for companies like his in regulated industries. “Just what is distributed marketing anyway?” he wanted to know. The simplest way to explain it is to say that distributed marketing is the business model where a corporation with one or more brands sells its products and services through a network of regional or local channels. The channel might be a local branch, an independent distributor or reseller, a franchisee, or an Read More
How Closed Loop Reporting Speeds Year-End Tasks
If you’re a marketer, and you haven’t finished your 2012 marketing budget, then it’s probably number one on your to do list. And that, inevitably, means you’ve been looking at all of the marketing metrics and reporting available to you in order to make your case for spending. We’ve been doing that in my office, too. But I’m lucky: I have a closed-loop reporting system that aggregates the data that matters to my management, so it’s easy to find the information that supports the marketing department’s contribution to revenue. In fact, the closed-loop reporting system is part of the product Read More
Why Marketing Automation Matters for 2012
By Edgar Rodriguez, EVP Marketing, Distribion, Inc. Marketing automation isn’t a new idea. Software platforms that enable marketing and sales departments to increase lead conversion by leveraging captured data to automate and streamline communications and audience segmentation have been around in various forms for almost two decades. Distributed marketing platforms are a bit newer – they’ve been around about five years. These advanced systems provide an integrated set of online tools so that local users can easily search, find, select, assemble, customize, distribute and track campaign assets across multiple channels at the local level while allowing central or corporate marketing Read More
How to Create Contagious Content
Earlier today, Distributed Marketing Blog Editor Deb McAlister-Holland joined MyPRGenie for a session on the tips and techniques that marketers can use to help content “go viral” – even without a video. It was a huge success, attended by a wide range of PR people, marketers and bloggers who want to be heard and draw traffic without spending a lot. Usually, the phrase going viral brings to mind videos that score millions of hits overnight. But the word “viral” just means content that is so contagious that it gets shared far beyond its original audience. Any kind of content can go Read More
Defining Measurable Value for Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
Guest Blog By David Potter, Vice President, Professional Services, Distribion, Inc. One of the basic assumptions this blog makes is that its readers are marketers who are interested in improving their multi-channel marketing results through almost any means possible. Another is that there is a place for technology in almost any distributed marketing organization – that it in any situation where there is a centralized corporate marketing department and one or more field or local marketing and sales organizations that use marketing materials created by corporate marketing to reach local prospects and customers. But is that an accurate assumption? Can Read More
Drawing a Distributed Marketing Strategic Roadmap
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about two topics: The increasing complexity of sales organizations. How sales costs are outpacing revenue growth. In highly regulated industries like insurance, health care, pharmaceutical, and financial services, where distributed marketing channels are the norm, it’s even more important to look at ways to resolve these issues – and increasingly, companies are looking to technology to deliver increased productivity across the sales organization. Technology was once viewed as having only a tactical role in sales enablement, but companies that take a more strategic view of marketing automation have a better chance of Read More
DAM Compliance: Using software to minimize compliance hassles
Digital marketing has forever changed the way companies communicate with employees, resellers and partners, prospects, and customers. It’s faster, more personal, and less expensive than ever before. With digital marketing assets, it’s possible for corporate marketing to create the campaign, and allow local marketing teams (franchise owners, field sales, independent agents and resellers, brokers – anyone who sells the company’s products or services) to personalize or customize it with just a few mouse clicks. That flexibility comes with a whole new set of corporate compliance headaches. Luckily, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can streamline the process and enforce brand Read More
Why TV’s Mad Men Would Fail Today
The hit TV show Mad Men is TV’s look back at the world of traditional marketing. In the 1960’s, a handful of white, male ad agency executives in New York controlled nearly everything the public saw and heard in the media. They showed us glamorous images, and told us what the product was and how it was going to help us – and we responded by buying exactly what they were selling. That was then. Now, anyone foolish enough to try the same approach would fail miserably. There are three key reasons for that. To start with, consumers have choices Read More
