Kyle Milko
Many technology organizations are challenged with effectively supporting the complexities of their marketing functions. Tech marketers struggle to support:
- Control of their marketing programs and/or their brand consistency when there is a constant pull to decentralize the marketing function to support resellers and VARS.
- Sales in the field, at the branch, or at the retail level have little or no access to marketing programs and little expertise in marketing implementation or database management even if they have better access.
- Local marketing efforts are complicated and expensive – with dozens of ad hoc programs to support individual VARS/resellers, it’s impossible to get any economies of scale.
- Effective campaign management – with too many ad hoc or one-off campaigns.
- Speed-to-market – too many small campaigns means each one takes longer to get off the ground.
- Return on Marketing Investment – impossible to track with little visibility to the final sale.
Distributed Marketing is a concept for delivering automated marketing services to small- and mid-sized businesses, resellers or other sales/service channels through a larger marketer who would act as a centralized enabler of data, analytics and technology.
- Distributed Marketing can bring a measure of control back to the brand – by retaining corporate control of data, content and technology, while still making smarter marketers of local, channel or partner marketing – often through SaaS-delivered marketing tools.
- Delivery methods include a self-serve web portal where the small- or mid-sized business could upload data, access leads, view reports, and create messaging via email, SMS, or Print-on-Demand using a content database of material created for delivering personalized content.
- Decentralized marketing partners can get access to data, leads, creative – even insights, through a web services platform that makes them feel like they have some control over their own marketing – and lets the Corporate Marketing Department feel control as well.
Distributed Marketing provides today’s technology marketers with the opportunity to leverage advances in data, analytics and cloud technology to increase results and profitability for themselves and their channel partners.
About the Author:
Kyle Milko serves as Business Practice Leader for technology markets at SIGMA Marketing Group. Connect with Kyle on , or follow him on .
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