You just invested in a distributed marketing automation tool – now what? What do you need to know right now to escalate the creative potential of the software?
To maximize corporate-local alignment, prove a positive return on investment, and carve your path towards increased brand equity, you need the tool to start working for you and your brand right away. Fortunately, we know exactly what it takes to get started quickly and help multi-located businesses, just like yours, unlock the power of distributed marketing automation every day.
Based on our work with hundreds of industry-leading brands, we've prepared four rules to help you maximize the effectiveness of your distributed marketing automation tool. Use these expert insights to streamline system adoption, implementation, and management.
4 Things Your Brand Can Do to Achieve Distributed Marketing Automation Success
The savviest corporate leaders and brand managers know that distributed marketing automation tools are designed to help brands solve an increasingly complex series of challenges involving brand compliance and consistency, campaign management, and time to market. Unfortunately, traditional marketing automation solutions are not designed to handle challenges unique to the distributed environment.
By investing in a distributed marketing automation solution, your brand can deliver a unified and consistent message across the entire distributed network. Moreover, local affiliates are empowered to deliver on-brand, localized marketing materials at scale. The fact is, without a distributed marketing automation tool in place, even the most successful multi-location brands struggle to deliver consistent messaging.
After making the investment, here's what you need to know in order to achieve distributed marketing automation success.
1. Maintain Expert Organization
Within the distributed network, there's a strong likelihood that your brand management teams and local partners are using some very different terms to describe the same marketing assets. The most effective multi-located business maintain a strict adherence to brand-level asset organization through metadata, taxonomies, file naming conventions, and more.
An important first step towards increased distributed marketing automation effectiveness is to develop a common vocabulary. Building and maintaining expert asset organization is about having a common set of vocabulary and expectations when dealing with creative executions. This kind of file organization helps users to source assets quickly and efficiently.
CampaignDrive is designed for the customer and by the customer. We don't force users to do it "our way." Instead, we set the system up in a way that complements the unique processes of our clients.
2. Reuse Templates
Secondly, at the brand level, look for opportunities to reuse creative templates. Instead of creating parent files over and over again, the most effective multi-location brands reuse creative from previous campaigns. Additionally, through dynamic customization, many leading distributed marketing automation tools make it easy for brands to easily update templates based on location, season, campaign, and more.
This is an effective way to increase speed to market. Additionally, template reuse helps system administrators to maintain increased file organization.
3. Make it Easy to Add Local Elements
Next, help end users add localized elements to creative templates. CampaignDrive offers convenient control/lock features at the brand level. In short, this prevents access to certain design elements within the creative. With control/lock mechanisms in place, end users know exactly what they can and cannot manipulate.
Additionally, dynamic customization gives local affiliates the ability to automatically infuse localization into the brand's creative.
4. Commit to Ongoing Training
To maximize system value, many of the world's most successful brands commit to ongoing training. A local marketing team can have access to all of the brand's creative assets, but without system know-how, it can be difficult to execute local campaigns that deliver brand value. If local users don't know how to use the system properly, instead of working with the system, most will try to work around the system.
In most cases, marketing partners and software vendors offer an extensive library of training materials. Instead of spending an endless amount of time developing in-house training programs, leverage your relationship with those distributed marketing partners.
CampaignDrive by Pica9 helps brands maximize system adoption and effectiveness through ongoing training and support. From system implementation to management, we'll help key stakeholders discover everything they need to know about the software. Additional training can be requested at any point. Finally, our support and troubleshooting teams are always available to answer your questions or concerns. Simply call or email to speak with a customer support representative.
Achieve Distributed Marketing Automation Mastery
Does your multi-located brand have what it takes to achieve distributed marketing automation mastery? Following these expert tips will position your distributed brand for sustained software success.
With 30 brands and 7,000 properties, Marriott International needed to manage their messaging from the enterprise level. Using CampaignDrive, Marriott International was able to create an enterprise-level brand management system that ensures consistency and marketing flexibility for its entire global marketing network.
See how your brand can achieve consistency and better local execution with our ultimate guide: The Local Marketing Playbook. In this guide, learn how to align local marketing teams to ensure brand consistency, execute effective local marketing strategies, and improve your bottom line. 
