One-size-fits-all marketing is no longer enough in our highly competitive and fast-paced world.
Personalization is now the name of the game. According to studies, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, while 75% are willing to switch products if they don’t like the experience they received.
But how can you deliver personalized marketing that caters to a customer’s local tastes, preferences, cultural traditions, and regional trends while remaining scalable and flexible for global or nationwide marketing?
The answer is distributed marketing. But what exactly is distributed marketing, and how can it help provide personalized solutions, especially for businesses with multiple locations?
This article will cover everything you need to know about distributed marketing—its definition, benefits, and best practices for implementing it.
Let’s dive in.
What is Distributed Marketing?
Distributed marketing is a strategy in which businesses develop a marketing message at a corporate level and then distribute it to their local branches, franchisees, resellers, or dealers for them to adapt and execute.
These local partners will then tailor the marketing message to fit their audience’s preferences and needs while also considering their local market’s conditions and trends.
An example is Nike. Their marketing message revolves around perseverance and passion for sports. While their campaigns reinforce this message, their local branches adapt it for their local market. For instance, their US campaigns focus on basketball and football, while their India campaigns focus on cricket, the popular sports in their regions.
Another example is Marriott Hotels. Their core marketing message is about providing a complete travel experience wherever you are. However, their local branches focus on different promotions. For instance, their campaigns for their Miami branch showcase beach destinations while their New York branches cater to city events.
Distributed marketing bridges the gap between corporate level and local level marketing–allowing a business to cater to different local markets while remaining consistent with their marketing message and staying true to their brand identity.
Who Uses Distributed Marketing?
Distributed marketing is typically used by businesses that have multiple locations and would benefit from adapting their messaging for local markets.
Some examples are:
- Multi-location businesses (hotels, retail chains)
- Global brands with regional teams (Nike, Coca-Cola, H&M)
- Real estate agencies
- Automotive industry
- Telecom and tech providers
- Insurance & financial service companies
- Healthcare networks
- Franchises (McDonalds, Taco Bell, Starbucks)
What Are the Benefits of Distributed Marketing?
Some benefits of distributed marketing can be:
More personalized content
Customers respond better to marketing tailored to their needs, interests, location, and culture. In fact, according to a study by McKinsey, consumers expect brands to know them on a personal level.
Distributed marketing makes it easier for businesses to provide this type of personalized content while still adhering to their set brand identity. For example, McDonald’s franchises worldwide have a global menu while also offering region-specific items that cater to local tastes. That’s why they have items like Masala Burger in India, Sakura McFloat in Japan, or Century Egg Porridge in China.
This approach allows your marketing efforts to feel more relatable, authentic, and personal, increasing customer engagement and connection to your business.
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Better brand consistency
Maintaining a uniform look and messaging for a business can be challenging, especially if you have multiple locations.
A local branch can use the wrong logo color, write a social media caption that is not aligned with your brand voice, or release a Facebook ad that is not 100% relevant to the location. While these may seem like small or inconsequential incidents, they can weaken your marketing message, which in turn leads to a weaker brand identity.
With distributed marketing, the corporate team provides brand guidelines, brand assets, and design templates for each location to follow and use. This allows all branches and partners to stay consistent with the logos, colors, tone, and messaging. This ensures that your business remains on-brand all the time and that all your marketing efforts look professional and credible.
Increased brand awareness
You may have devised a strong marketing message or have a corporate team filled with highly efficient team members, but these can only do so much. To increase your reach and visibility, you’ll need your local branches, resellers, dealers, and partners to actively participate in your marketing.
This is where the distributed marketing approach shines. Creating localized content, sponsoring regional events, or running geo-targeted ads all help promote your business. This increases your brand awareness since you are visible in multiple markets. You can also enjoy 84% revenue growth and 6x more engagement with localized content.
This also helps form better connections with your local communities, which tends to increase word-of-mouth and recommendation-type marketing.
Reduced costs and increased efficiency
A flexible approach like distributed marketing helps reduce costs while improving efficiency.
Instead of each location creating a marketing strategy and brand assets from scratch, their corporate team develops everything they’ll need, which each location can then customize.
You won’t need to hire separate design teams or waste time coming up with new ideas each time. This also ensures that each campaign will maintain the same level of quality no matter which location it comes from.
Additionally, your business can create more targeted and personalized campaigns rather than producing generic ads. Personalized campaigns tend to get better conversion and higher ROI, thus getting more significant results even with just one marketing material.
Provide marketing templates
Additionally, providing ready-made templates and designs can help ensure that your distributed marketing efforts will be aligned with your brand identity. Your local teams can use these templates and customize them if needed instead of creating one from scratch. Your design team can create these templates or you can use ready-made ones from Canva, Adobe, or Envato.
Some templates you may need are:
- Social media posts
- Email campaigns
- Print materials
- Digital ads
- Packaging
- Business cards
- Email signatures
- And so on!
Provide training and support
Aside from your brand bible and onboarding sessions, having training modules, FAQs, or a dedicated branding team or support team can help ensure that your distributed marketing will run smoothly.
Also, your work won’t end after you onboarded your team with your guidelines. Your distributed marketing efforts will only succeed if you have ongoing communication with your corporate and local teams.
Regular training sessions, check-ins, or reviews can ensure that everyone understands your branding guidelines and goals. They can also help them know if they are on the right track or if they need to revise anything. You can also use this time to exchange ideas with your local teams to see how you can improve your campaigns based on their observations and experiences.
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Track and analyze your performance
As with any marketing strategy, analyzing your performance is key to improving. An seasoned content manager tracks important metrics like engagement, conversion, retention, and ROI for your corporate and local levels.
You can use the analytics of each platform you use (e.g., Facebook Ad Manager for your Facebook ads or Google Analytics for your website) or invest in a centralized analytics dashboard to measure your success and identify areas for improvement.
Always test out different approaches and campaigns to further refine your distributed marketing strategy and ensure that it remains relevant and engaging for your customers.
Final Thoughts on Distributed Marketing
As you can see, distributed marketing is probably the best approach for any business that wants to scale its marketing nationwide (or even globally!) without sacrificing quality or maintaining brand consistency.
By establishing a clear brand guideline, leveraging marketing tools, and following the best practices outlined above, your business can develop a distributed marketing strategy that drives engagement and boosts revenue.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning digital marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners unlock the power of distributed marketing, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
