According to Gleanster’s research, “Top performing organizations that used local marketing automation reported 300% or more increases in revenue within the first 12 months of investing in the technology.” That’s impressive! Combine that with the marketing automation boom that is sweeping the software world, and it seems that everyone should know a little bit more about the mystical and exciting beast known as localized marketing automation (LMA).
What is Localized Marketing Automation?
Though it has the word marketing in its title, it’s not a tool that is built exclusively for traditional marketing departments. Corporate marketers already have tools to send emails, run marketing campaigns and learn more about consumers’ needs (aka lead nurturing). Localized marketing automation is used later in the sales cycle by the marketing and sales pros who are interacting with consumers more directly.
Who Uses the Software?
Most other marketing automation software out there (i.e. campaign management, CRM, email marketing, etc) is made solely for corporate or central marketing departments. It’s designed to be used by a handful of people at headquarters, whereas localized marketing automation is designed to support the tens, hundreds or thousands of reps that are selling to a specific region or target audience. Localized marketing automation aims to build on the awareness and interest that corporate marketing has already generated by equipping local reps to quickly and easily communicate with prospects and close deals.
Since the software allows marketing and sales people to connect with consumers in their region it can work for any company; however, the heaviest users of LMA are companies who utilize field sales reps, local marketing offices, regional branches, value added resellers (VARS), franchisees, etc. to sell their products and services. Unsurprisingly, LMA is already gaining popularity with industries such as finance, insurance, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, franchise, telecommunications and retail.
Why Localized Marketing Automation is Awesome
When companies can utilize a solution like this it changes their mindset. Instead of restricting reps, they empower them to connect with the consumers on their own. This creates an ideal situation for everyone. Consumers get the personalization they crave, the reps close more deals and marketing saves a ton of time and resources.
Organize (Marketing Asset Management): In the past, local sales reps wasted ~30 hours a month searching for and creating digital content to send to prospects (American Marketing Association). Today, marketing asset management (MAM) reclaims that wasted time. It acts as a digital library where corporate marketers store all their content in a single place within the cloud. Marketing asset management allows corporate marketers to organize the digital content they create so it can be found and used later by the local marketers in pre-designed templates. This gives sales reps the power to run localized marketing campaigns on their own.
Access (User Based Permissions): Each piece of content in a MAM system is assigned rules which dictate who can see the content and how they can use it. Take a sporting goods manufacturer for example, they sell various products in stores around the country and those stores need a way to promote those products. Imagine they have a retail store in Miami Florida. When someone from the Miami store logs into the software, they won’t see snowboards and snowshoes among the beachwear, they only see products for sports that are relevant to their region. To go further, the content they see is specific to Miami, the promotions they run at their store, and all the content abides by any marketing laws that Miami or Florida may have.
Customize (Brand Consistency & Channel Management): For ages, local reps have tried to customize their sales and marketing materials and it has caused major tension with the brand management folks. According to a recent LMA survey done by Gleanster, 68% of brand marketers indicated that maintaining brand consistency in a locally executed marketing campaign is one of their top 3 challenges.
The templates within LMA ensure that every communication created and sent by the distributed network is on brand and complies with the law. Moreover, those communications can now be customized for local prospects—it’s a win-win. Even the photos and the words they use in the marketing templates can be customized to individuals and groups so that the message truly resonates with the person that receives it.
Distribute (Multi-Channel Marketing): Consumers can be very picky when it comes to communication preferences. Some people love email, others prefer text messages, a few people even mildly enjoy direct mail still. Local marketing and sales reps strive to connect with their audience in their favorite way which is why LMA allows them to send emails, text messages (SMS), printed or digital PDFs, social media posts, or direct mail.
Measure (What’s Working?): When companies use large distributed networks it can be very difficult to see if the marketing campaigns are working. In today’s business world everyone is held accountable for the money they spend and the best way to prove effectiveness is through data. LMA simplifies this because all the marketing materials are in a single library, so one can pull reports from that data to see how effective a specific subject line is or to see how much marketing activity is happening in a particular region. Being able to look at the data from all the sales and marketing activity leads to better, more informed business decisions company-wide.
Well there you go, that covers the basics of localized marketing automation. If you’re yearning for more, maybe showing would be better than telling. If you want to see some LMA software in action let us know, we’re always happy to show people how our software works.