Effective through-channel marketing automation for digital marketing
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by Spencer Smith
Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) arose to solve the problem of sharing messaging and materials at scale for customization by local teams for local marketing. While it has made distribution of materials easier at scale, most solutions lack a digital marketing component, leaving local businesses and teams to tackle digital marketing alone. Into this gap step Collaborative Marketing Platforms (CMPs) that bring the power and promise of Through-Channel Marketing Automation into the digital marketing realm. CMPs make it simple and efficient for corporate teams or technology partners to enable local businesses and teams with easy to execute, highly effective digital marketing programs that drive true demand and ROI.
What is through-channel marketing automation?
Forrester’s Jay McBain has been credited with coining the phrase Through-Channel Marketing Automation, citing it as the third major stage in sales and marketing transformation after the CRM stage in the 1990s, and 2008’s marketing automation stage. TCMA, according to McBain, enables “partners of all types to leverage vendor content, messaging, branding, and demand generation initiatives in their local markets.”
This strategy is “critical to driving a winning customer experience,” according to McBain. “Those brands that can balance their direct and indirect execution while ensuring consistent customer expectations through distributed and localized marketing will have outsized success in the market.”
Why don’t most through-channel marketing automation platforms activate digital advertising programs?
Many of the 13 providers included in the April 2020 Forrester Wave report on TCMA have their roots in traditional marketing channels like print, television, radio and out-of-home versus powerful, modern, digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.
As a result, most TCMA platforms are only able to share best practice documents and checklists rather than offering true digital advertising expertise and counsel. That’s traditionally suited many small, local businesses just fine – A study published by BIA Advisory Services shows that out of the $151.2 billion spent on local marketing in the USA, 64.7% of it is spent on traditional media.
Why is this? The short answer is that executing successful digital marketing is complex. It’s difficult to activate, optimize and maintain sophisticated digital marketing programs at scale, particularly for local businesses. Local businesses lack the time, expertise, data, and technology needed to run the same type of sophisticated, data-driven online marketing programs that larger advertisers are running.
Collaborative Marketing Platforms are TCMA for effective digital marketing
Collaborative Marketing Platforms bring Through-Channel Marketing Automation fully into the realm of digital marketing and unlock the power of digital channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Tiktok. CMP technology enables local, small, and medium businesses to execute effective and impactful digital marketing by collaborating with their national brand or technology partners. Multi-location brands, technology platforms like CRMs, and online marketplaces use CMP technology to enable their locations, agents and users with powerful digital programs that can be customized and launched in a matter of minutes to start driving business results.
Evocalize’s technology drives real business results at scale
Evocalize’s CMP technology enables corporate partners and technology platforms to offer digital marketing programs to hundreds of thousands of their end users, including real estate agents, loan officers and mortgage brokers, wealth managers, and restaurant and hotel chains. Well over 1 million digital marketing programs have been executed with Evocalize’s technology, with over 10 million leads generated for local businesses.
Local businesses can customize and launch digital marketing programs in under 5 minutes to drive demand and generate revenue. The scale of data handled by Evocalize’s CMP enables the technology to optimize marketing programs by as much as 4x once they have been launched, driving better results and making marketing budgets go farther.
The benefits of collaborative marketing using Evocalize
Increased Efficiency: Evocalize’s technology reduces the time to execute a digital marketing program from hours to minutes, or even seconds by automating the process of building and activating programs.
Stronger Performance: Bringing the right data, audiences, messaging, and local customization together through the use of technology creates powerful digital marketing programs built with best practices. This sets programs up to drive real business results from the very beginning.
Increased Accuracy and Quality of Workflows: Evocalize’s technology reduces errors and ensures program consistency by automating and simplifying program creation – removing steps and complexity that cause inconsistencies and opportunities for errors.
Control and Compliance: Ensure compliance rules are followed by using Evocalize’s technology to build marketing programs that always include required information and inputs or that limit the ability of local teams to customize messaging or creative beyond approved criteria.
Customization and Flexibility: Corporate teams or technology partners can create marketing programs that are unique and customized to their data, inputs, and the business needs of their locations, local teams, and users. This improves performance versus solutions that offer one size fits all programs to all partners in a given industry.
Network Performance Effect: By facilitating digital marketing programs for thousands, tens of thousands, or even greater numbers, of end users for any given brand or tech platform, Evocalize’s technology has the scale of data to effectively optimize individual programs as well as identify best practices that can be applied across all programs, once again leading to higher performance. Once launched, programs usually see a 2x-4x increase in performance from optimization.
Conclusion
Through-Channel Marketing Automation solves a real need for multi-location businesses that seek to equip their distributed teams with marketing materials they can easily customize. However, today’s TCMA offerings either lack digital marketing offerings completely or have recently started building them on as secondary functionality. Collaborative Marketing Platforms have come from the opposite direction, first focusing on effective digital marketing.
The best CMPs have built technology that provides robust digital marketing solutions at scale that enable dozens of locations, or thousands of end users to quickly and simply generate demand, using marketing programs built by their corporate team or technology partners using the right inputs and best practices. The results speak for themselves – more leads generated, marketing budgets driving more impact, significant time savings, and effective collaboration between corporate teams and their local partners.
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