Category: Digital

Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) has rapidly become the preferred technology platform for brands looking to build more profitable brand marketing relationships with their local partners. It gives brands (manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and marketing services) a greater ability to monitor and ensure that brand compliant marketing content and practices are uniformly applied across a partner network of any size. According to a CMO Council report, 95% of respondents noted that increasing revenue through their local channels is of strategic importance in the next year, with 54% deeming this very important, if not critical. An effective TCMA strategy can help you do that.

Partners (dealers, agents, franchisees, white label commerce, sales reps, and retailers) benefit because less of their time is spent worrying over marketing strategies. They know the brand and TCMA are helping them run more successful, data-driven campaigns than they could ever manage on their own. Because marketing capabilities and experience can vary from partner to partner, these platforms must be easy to use, flexible enough to be adapted to cater to local markets, and able to manage and measure a wide array of print, digital, and social media campaigns.

TCMA provides brands and their partner with solutions that deliver consistent messaging and get maximum impact and return on investment with every channel marketing dollar spent. Here are five ways TCMA is making a difference.

1. Partner Brand Compliance at Subsidized Cost

As a result of the ability for brands to manage market development funds (MDFs) through TCMA, both parties can optimize the cost benefits of joint marketing. Local partners get the creative assets they need to execute professional, personalized marketing campaigns. Brands maintain control and compliance with channel marketing automation that also provides strategic market development fund management to help partners control costs.

Co-investing on marketing through MDFs sends resources and support throughout networks of partners and helps them deliver consistent messaging into new or productive markets. MDFs can also reduce costs for print, digital, and in-person marketing collateral and support direct mail and email campaigns, conferences and trade shows and local advertising. For best results, brands should also provide TCMA training on marketing practices and tactics for partners. The 2022 Channel/Partner Marketing Benchmark Survey conducted by Channel Marketer Report and Demand Gen Report found that nearly 70% of brands will be allocating funds to upgrade a variety of support services and activities such as partner training, channel incentives and partner relationship management.

2. Let Partners Focus on Getting More Sales

Brands do best when local partners do what they do best – increasing customer engagement and revenue in local markets. According to the CMO report, brands realize 50% – 80% of their company revenue from their indirect or partner channels.

Through-channel marketing automation frees local partners from many of the chores of marketing so they can focus on their daily priorities for growing their business. Brands can give them everything they need to increase customer engagement in local marketing more effectively with automated channel marketing. Strategic support gives partners the ability to craft personalized messaging that reaches and resonates with their customers while capitalizing on the brand’s reputation and experience.

3. Flexibility to Support a Network of Partners

The best marketing channel automation gives partners easy access to customizable templates, promotional items, and digital content to optimize customer data and craft personalized messaging. They can provide flexible graphic, written, and video content options to empower the partner to differentiate messaging to rural, urban, and geographically diverse customers.

Partners can build off already established and proven marketing tactics while adding brand-compliant local touches that are ideally suited to their customer base. They can create relevant and engaging email, direct mail, print, and digital campaigns with the right blend of local customization to create more engaging and effective messaging.

4. Empowerment Through Efficiency

Through-channel marketing automation is only as good as it is easy to use. Brands and partners benefit when channel marketing automation platforms provide effective solutions that minimize frustrations and maximize impact through streamlined workflows and policies. The top two reasons businesses cite for using marketing automation are efficient marketing efforts (35%) and improved customer engagement (34%).

Innovative technology and intuitive business portals can make it simple for organizations at all levels of marketing expertise or experience to manage or use marketing automation platforms. In addition to smooth access to content, an effective marketing automation platform can also eliminate the complexity of monitoring campaigns and gaining insights into what is and what isn’t working.

5. Sound Decisions Based on Robust Analytics

Many local partners are small-business owners lacking the tools to understand customer data that can be used to optimize marketing campaigns. Sharing their data with brands is often difficult, resulting in an impaired ability to make informed marketing decisions.

Channel marketing automation platforms can manage that data and give brands important analytics information quickly and, in real time, to help them effectively manage a network of partners. When partners can see measurable results, their enthusiasm increases. An engaged partnership can lead to greater success and co-investment.

Conclusion

As more brands realize the revenue potential of channel partnerships and compete for the attention and cooperation of local partners, having innovative and effective channel marketing automation is a terrific way to attract dedicated and enthusiastic partners.

Trust Marketing.com’s marketing automation hub, Dot™, for creative solutions to easily manage your tactics through one easy to use portal. Dot™ gives you the tools to oversee brand compliance, to support and scale your marketing through a diversified network of partners, and build partner involvement and loyalty. You’ll be able to precisely measure results and adapt quickly to maximize ROI. Centered around technology; powered by people, never has connecting the dots of your channel partner marketing campaigns been this easy.

The world is more connected now than it has ever been.  With the internet and mobile technology becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives, there have never been more channels through which to reach consumers.  But with so many channels, it has also never been more of a balancing act.  It can seem like a real challenge to home in on which channels are best and how much to allocate to them, but a holistic understanding of your marketing strategy can yield enormous results.  The right combination of channels, as well as cooperation between those channels, is the key to your success.

Cross-channel marketing is the strategic integration of your various channels into a seamless experience that increases customer exposure to your brand and guides them towards purchases.  Which channels you choose to emphasize in your strategy will require a lot of important data, but it will yield more data in return.  Consider the demographics of your target audience: age, gender, devices, income, occupation, and interests are all going to play a factor in which channels to target more aggressively.  For example, since Edison reports that 95% of Baby Boomers say they use email to communicate in their personal lives, you may engage this demographic through email from a home computer. On the other hand, it might be wiser to target Millennials through their mobile devices. This group may be more enticed by social media engagement and app-based experiences.  To cater through the improper platform would be to bark up the wrong tree.

Through studying reported data to measure important KPIs, you should gain a more comprehensive understanding of your customers’ journey through your various platforms and portals.  Pay mind to how and why a customer may have reached any given stage of their purchase.  Were they brought here by an email promotion?  Search engine results?  Social media link? Are they a returning customer?  A registered member of your platform?  Did they abandon a full cart at any moment in the sales funnel, and could they be remarketed to?  The answers to these questions are powerful tools that will help you optimize your next moves.  By consolidating these data into customer relationship management tools, marketing calendars, and buyer personas, you can study changes and trends in the engagement patterns of your customers.

As you attune your strategy to the data you have acquired, the advantages of cross-channel marketing should become clearer.  You now have the means to more sharply focus your approach through personalized marketing methods while increasing brand exposure through seamless cross-platform customer experiences. This mean optimizing SEO, increasing social engagement, adding display advertising, developing print and mailing campaigns and using promotions to increase brand awareness.  Targeted advertisements, email listings, paid placements on search engines, and social media posts should all lead a customer towards a purchase, but these all work more effectively when they are operating in a coordinated, interlinked system.  For example, you can follow up an online transaction with a thank you email and an invitation to a newsletter, or target deals to previous customers based on their past buying history and engagements across your platforms.  These linked channels not only create greater exposure, but also  form a concise pathway to a purchase.  Greater visibility creates more opportunities for a customer to engage with a brand, gradually funneling them towards a point of sale.   These separate points all work in harmony making the process more effective at converting audiences, streamlining transactions, increasing sales, and improving customer satisfaction.

The benefits of diversifying and refining your marketing strategy should be an enticing enough proposition on its own tactical merit, but recent data gives concrete proof that more connected engagement pays dividends.  The average consumer today experiences triple the marketing touchpoints before purchasing than it did 20 years ago.  Brands using more channels have higher purchase rates.  Strong cross-channel engagement is creating more returning customers. The tools of marketing are rapidly evolving, and companies that apply those tools well are proving their explosive potential.  To ignore the data is to leave money on the table.  Applying strategic SEO that improves results rankings on search engines makes it easier for your company be found by someone conducting an organic search. By adding a social media presence, blog, or email campaign, you could be substantially widening the scope of your influence and converting more visitors into purchasers.  Experiment, see what works, and adjust accordingly.  It may take time to see results from your efforts in one channel, but expanding your outreach can still yield valuable insights in the short term while the rest of your plan plays out.

Marketing and promotion are always changing. It’s inherent to the process. In our ever-evolving business landscape, marketing strategies must keep up with the fluid and dynamic needs of rapidly changing consumer preferences. Augmented reality (AR) is being used in new ways to take traditional print marketing methods and turn them into interactive, immersive, and unforgettable experiences that keep users engaged. Printed direct mail campaigns that incorporate AR have seen response rates jumping from 2-3% to 35%. Today, most consumers are not intrigued by an ordinary postcard that feels impersonal and generic but when AR is tied to the printed media, interest soars.

According to TechTarget, “Augmented Reality (AR) is the integration of digital information with the user’s environment in real-time …AR users experience a real-world environment with generated perceptual information overlaid on top of it.” With AR, we can explore new ways to spread brand awareness and engage customers in ways heretofore unimagined.  AR allows users to overlay virtual interfaces and experiences onto the world we live in, merging the real world with accessible technology that many of us already own and use frequently. “AR delivers visual elements, sound and other sensory information to the user through a device like a smartphone or glasses,” elaborated TechTarget.

A large part of what makes AR such a valuable marketing tool is its accessibility. The vast majority of us own and rely on a smartphone for much of our daily activity, and the rapid evolution of mobile technology has given us access to increasingly more sophisticated portable computing, camera features, and Internet connectivity. Considering that 83.37% of the world’s population owns a smartphone, opportunities abound for businesses to bring AR into their marketing strategies and take what would have otherwise been a low-performing print campaign to the next level with AR.

In its early stages, AR saw implementations through the likes of filters and lenses on Snapchat, simple graphical overlays used to enhance user-generated images. Further developments in the field led to experiences such as Pokémon GO, encouraging an explosive burst of users to explore their neighborhoods on foot in pursuit of fantastical creatures in familiar environments. From these two examples alone, we can see how AR has gone from surface-level curiosities to immersive, interactive experiences for users, bridging the gap between realms by transforming how we interact with brands and their content. It’s exciting to note that even the United States Postal Service will be offering special discounts through an AR campaign that will have customers scanning QR codes on its signature blue mailboxes around the country leading into the holiday season.

AR’s Impact on Consumer Purchases

AR is already having a dramatic impact on how we shop and make decisions. Everyone has had the experience of purchasing something through an online vendor, only for it to show up and be not quite right – a garment may not look or fit as advertised, or a piece of furniture or décor may not suit a space as originally anticipated. AR tools dramatically increase customer satisfaction by increasing the perceived tangibility of products before they have even been added to the cart. Manipulable 3D models transcend the limitations of static images by allowing customers to preview and place their purchases in real space, making them more informed on how they spend their money. In this way, AR is already proving itself as a tool that makes for clearer brand communication and customer satisfaction, so it’s a win-win situation for all parties.

AR Takes Us Into a New Frontier for Immersive Experiences

AR is even impacting long-running institutions that we may otherwise consider resistant to change. The United States Postal Service is incorporating AR elements into new types of postage and incentivizing its usage through discounts, further ushering in the technology while passing savings on to customers. This further serves to demonstrate that new technological developments, instead of pushing established media into obsolescence, can bring our existing services into the modern age while helping to prop up and reinforce the analog communications we still rely on to this day. A lot can be accomplished with a QR code or other scannable iconography, showing that this technology has its place in our world as a replacement for older methods, or working alongside them to create something more effective.

All these developments sound thrilling, but how effective it can be is a moot point without the ability to feel its tangible effects. Like with most technological offerings, though, there are concrete figures to be tracked that point directly to the impact of AR’s marketing potential. As is the case with various social media platforms, impressions can be logged.  Interactions, opens/scans, captures, shares, unique users, dwell time, and conversions into actual purchases are all readily available and will tell you exactly what sort of impact your AR implementation is having on your business. Restaurants, car companies, and even large media corporations are actively implementing AR experiences into their marketing and figuring the above metrics into their future strategies.  And the data is promising: MG Motor has recorded 4,600 engaged hours in reaction to their 3D displays, ViacomCBS saw a 29% sales lift from a recent AR campaign, and scannable menus are already a staple of our current landscape. And as we know, knowledge is power. These tools are already changing how we do business and providing numbers for further improvements.

AR is the way things look to be going, and it’s not going away any time soon. In our increasingly digital landscape, we must arm ourselves with all the tools and metrics available to us. AR affords businesses the unique opportunity to add tangibility to the physical while expanding upon the physical with digital experiences. It’s an ever-growing marketing opportunity and a genuinely exciting resource that businesses across all industries should be taking advantage of. Especially when considering the pace at which technology evolves and is implemented, one would be at great risk of being left behind by not immediately considering ways in which AR can extend its reach.

Marketing.com is your go-to omnichannel partner for engaging your audience and building your brand with the incorporation of AR – contact us today!