Learn the concepts that have made efficient brand-to-local marketing a must-have discipline for multi-location brands.
For the past two decades, brand-to-local marketing has been gathering momentum as more and more marketing and branding teams realize how critical it is to be able to keep pace with the dizzying rate of change in marketing and advertising media and technologies.
- Does your brand find it challenging to maintain a consistent look and feel in marketing vehicles that are produced at the local level?
- Do your local marketers (franchisees, dealers, resellers, agents, etc) need a high level of marketing agility in order to respond to opportunities and competitive threats in their markets?
- Does your in-house agency or marketing team feel inundated with one-off design and mechanical requests that distract from higher-level and more strategic creative assignments?
- Do you find that proliferating media channels (social, web, email, collateral, etc) open the door to non-compliant creative executions?
- Are you looking for ways to reduce creative-production costs and elevate the re-use of your brand assets?
If the answer to one or more of these questions is a resounding "yes", then a brand-to-local marketing platform is probably a good choice for you.
Components of The CampaignDrive Brand-to-Local Marketing Platform
The CampaignDrive system provides local marketers with a "one-stop-shop" environment for their marketing needs. From a user-experience perspective, this helps to simplify the marketing challenge for users, and it also helps to make the platform a regular part of their working routine. By coming to CampaignDrive, the local marketer should find easy access to:
- Commonly used “static” brand assets -- such as logos, documents, images, and other artwork. These are often delivered by local marketers to external partners, such as media companies, websites, and creative agencies. Your brand-to-local system needs to make these commonly needed resources easy to find and easy to convert into the file format that local affiliates need at the moment. You may also need to track the ownership and license rights assigned to your brand assets, to ensure that your efforts to activate the brand don't lead you to take inadvertent (and unnecessary) legal risks. That means your asset management system should be set up "out of the box" to track expiration dates and rights documentation at the individual asset level.
- Editable brand templates, which can be quickly and easily customized by business users within parameters and boundaries defined by marketing professionals responsible for the stewardship of the brand. Examples of templates include:
- Print collateral, such as flyers, brochures, sell sheets, posters, window clings, table tents and other "on-premise" materials
- Digital documents, such as online ads (static and animated), landing pages, and emails.
- More and more these days, brands want their templates to be able to resize based on the dimensions that the local marketer requires. The dynamic sizing capabilities in CampaignDrive for both print and digital templates answers this need.
- Branded Merchandise or Apparel. Often, brands will provide local marketers with access to “swag” and other branded items via their brand-to-local portal. These items can then be ordered, either from the brand or from fulfillment partners integrated with the system.
- Integrated Approval Processes: The number one complaint from most local marketing communities is that the brand isn't ”in synch” with the pace at which local marketing needs to take place. When approvals take days or weeks, or when reimbursements sit waiting for weeks or months, dissatisfaction among local marketers grows, and with it, the desire (and justification) for “going rogue” and executing local marketing tactics independently.
Over time, many franchisees, dealers, etc., come to realize that it's faster and easier to ask for forgiveness for off-brand executions than it is to seek permission beforehand. Once that culture has been created, it can be hard to dislodge—unless your brand-to-local system makes creating and getting approval for local marketing tactics so fast and easy that the system becomes the “path of least resistance.”
The CampaignDrive Approval Process allows you to achieve this balance, while still maintaining just the right amount of oversight and control over local marketing executions.
The Brand-to-Local User Experience.
It just can't be said often enough: local marketers today wear a lot more hats than marketing alone. This means that the simplicity and friendliness of your brand-to-local portal will be critical to broad user adoption and success.
- If a local marketer needs a template, she should be able to find it within a few seconds, customize it within a few minutes, and then be able to get on with the rest of her day—secure in that knowledge that she did her marketing job well.
- If a new brand campaign combines dynamic templates with static assets, those campaign items should be grouped in a way that allows the local marketer to find everything he needs, at a glance.
- When customizing the content of a brand template, local marketers should be able to create a polished and professional result, without needing to know much—if anything—about the finer points of graphic design, or web design, or professional printing. The system should insulate them from these complexities, so they can get the job done, and get on with their day.
- When the local marketer sends a new marketing tactic into her local market, she should be confident that the materials are on-brand, on-message, and optimized to show her local operation in the best possible brand light.
- And finally, when the brand management team reviews the impact of the brand-to-local system, the reporting dashboard should show them, quickly and easily, which local markets are embracing the brand, and which are not quite catching on; which templates and assets are popular with the field, and which are escaping notice, and which local affiliates are developing their marketing skills, and which might be due from some additional coaching.