Distributed marketing expands the availability of a business-to-business (B2B) brand’s services to more people by reducing costs and increasing audience reach. In most cases, this sort of move gives a brand more market share while simultaneously giving it the ability to provide a personalized experience and unique brand recognition at a local level.

Here’s an example: If a company grows to a large size, it’ll have numerous partners and sales agents to manage. This type of scaling can strain the company’s resources, especially if they want to achieve consistency regarding the brand image and message across all channels.

However, a distributed marketing approach can help in many ways, predominantly due to a centralized approach to creative assets. Partners, sales agents, and the brand itself can access the centralized asset hub and use any of them easily whenever needed.

So, whether the assets are needed for the partner websites or within emails, they are readily available to everyone who needs them. This type of accessibility is very beneficial and can occur when using distributed marketing.

Distributed Marketing Explained

Distribution channels are at the core of every B2B marketing campaign, with partners having influence over specific channels. Organizations can then utilize the relevant content and assets to create a network of educated consumers. This allows organizations to sell more products by scaling down to local channels.

In the simplest terms, distributed marketing management is the collaboration between the brand and its partners to distribute and market goods across a wide range of channels. Both corporate (centralized) and distributed (localized) channels are helpful because they provide flexibility when coordinating campaigns and operations.

How Does Distributed Marketing Work in Real Life?

Here are some real-life examples of distributed marketing and what it brings to brands by streamlining brand consistency across all channels and enhancing sales enablement.

Seamless Brand Consistency Across All Channels

Large-scale organizations utilize effective B2B marketing strategies to streamline the overall brand consistency with the help of partners. Such an approach provides consistent access to channels through the distributed marketing network while maintaining the same consistency in all brand messages or offers. In essence, distributed marketing lets enterprises connect with a larger audience without compromising their brand message.

Enhanced Sales Enablement

Your company should always have a specific organizational objective that it needs to reach. Finding an objective usually isn’t a problem since you’ll have a hands-on approach to most of what needs to be done. But what happens if your enterprise is spread out across many different locations?

You will use distributed marketing to improve sales enablement by giving teams and partners the resources they need to reach those organizational objectives.

Improved sales enablement means higher flexibility and more growth opportunities, especially regarding partnerships and revenue. If you devote your time to helping sales teams create content, train new talent, and implement guidelines, you’ll understand the enormous benefit distributed marketing brings.

Quicker Turn-Arounds

Achieving long-term success with an organization that uses a distributed marketing model is achieved by finding and analyzing certain obstacles, defining solutions for problems, and improving the overall campaign.

Distributed marketing management is helpful in this regard because it makes the entire process more manageable due to having automated processes that allow the fine-tuning of messages across all channels.

Targeted Channels for Distribution Purposes

Marketing teams (usually internal) use distributed marketing models to collaborate with outside agencies and partners through targeted channels. These channels allow for better flexibility when collaborating with third-party entities to deliver services or products to a company’s clients.

Performance Metrics in Real-Time

Finally, arguably one of the most important real-life uses of distributed marketing is the ability to track performance metrics in real-time. This enables organizations to integrate various programs with their existing workflows with ease.

Cloud analytics tools and file-sharing platforms give distributed organizations an advantage in marketing their products. There are already numerous platforms that organizations can use to achieve this, a much simpler choice than investing in creating new technology that may become outdated within a couple of years.

How Do I Implement Successful Distributed Marketing Management?

There are four primary methods of implementing distributed marketing successfully. Although not all are necessary, you should consider utilizing them to prevent issues down the road.

Marketing Asset Management is Important

In the modern world, flexibility and scalability are key – together. Your target audience may change their ideas and needs quickly, or something else might happen that’ll derail your campaign unless you adapt.

Because of this, the need for marketing asset management has never been higher. Organizations that invest in marketing asset management are more capable of collaborating across different workflows, ultimately making more financial resources available to the company for successful distributed marketing implementation.

Always Keep Communication Channels Open

The only way to make sure your distributed marketing campaign is successful is by communicating with your partners and sales teams – all the time. See, sometimes they’ll need your help at a moment’s notice, and although that might not be ideal, you should still attempt to help them out as fast as possible.

The truth is the entire distributed marketing management process can only be as streamlined as its communication channels. There needs to be a high level of external and internal communication to enable organizations to connect with their target audience properly.

Distributed marketing allows organizations an unprecedented level of collaboration which, in turn, enables them to create effective and modern marketing strategies that the potential customer base ‘has’ to react to.

Commit to Your Channel Partners

Channel partners are integral to a distributed marketing campaign, but they need to be tended to the same way you’d tend to your customers. Remember that partners are motivated by engagement and opportunity; you need to give them this if you expect them to help you.

Essentially, you’ll need to commit to your partners across all channels if you are interested in applying distributed marketing to your marketing efforts. You assist them with reaching their goals, and they’ll do the same for you.

Learn From Your Mistakes and Improve Upon Them

Lastly, let’s talk a bit about mistakes. Mistakes are commonplace in any business; you’ll make at least a couple before you streamline your process. However, what’s important is learning from your mistakes and making certain adjustments that’ll prevent those mistakes from happening again.

Efficient distributed marketing management helps teams find where their efforts are weak and where they can improve. This can range from improving service delivery, adding more value for the end-user, or expanding communication with the customer base. Either way, know that you can only succeed by upgrading your distributed marketing strategy whenever there’s an issue.

Ready to get more from your channel partners? Extu’s through-channel marketing programs achieve 80% monthly participation from partners and 22:1 attributable sales ROI. Contact us to learn more!