By Clive Roberts, Head of APAC Sales
One of the key challenges facing all marketers is how to ensure consistent and relevant messaging and communications are delivered through the sales channel, particularly when that sales channel is provided by a third party like an adviser, broker, reseller, franchise operator - or even one of your own retail outlets.
While it is essential that these sales “footsoldiers” are able to customise and personalise infield offers, local promotions and co-branded campaigns, the very thought of allowing them to tamper with your cherished brand guidelines and expensively researched value propositions is enough to give most senior marketing executives heart palpitations.
As a result, marketers seek to limit the risk of brand tampering by arranging huge centralised print runs of posters and collateral, each featuring blocks of blank space in which the channel can print, or just write, the requisite local content. As a control mechanism this approach can be reasonably effective – but it is fundamentally lacking in efficiency and practicality. A visit to the storeroom of your average third party sales channel will very quickly give you an indication of the huge implications of the cost and logistics waste created by this practice.
What is really needed is for your sales channels to be able to print localised collateral on-demand at the point of use – without having to rely on your agency or in-house team to customize every piece they need. A number of software solutions have offered limited versions of this capability for a few years now, but these have generally lacked scale and been unable to service a large or global channel footprint. They were typically offered by printing companies which sought to lock the user in to using a particular print provider, and were quite rudimentary in terms of their design capabilities. As you can imagine, this limited design functionality was very frustrating to the creative department, who had to adjust from working in a professional creative suite like Adobe, to trying to maintain their high quality work in a system with inadequate tools.
Orbis solves this marketing dilemma with our ArtBuild solution – a robust and scalable solution combining the OrbisMarketing platform with the world’s best graphics-industry technology from Adobe. Artbuild gives your team the best of both worlds. The studio (whether in-house or agency) can develop sophisticated creative pieces using their standard toolset, and then deploy them as templates for localisation by the field. Your marketers post the templates to your Orbis Marketing Knowledge Centre (a library of all your digital assets) alongside a corresponding range of approved personalisation imagery, copy, and content which the field marketer or channel can use to customise the template. You can even give them the option to develop their own copy and content for certain limited fields. Such a system ensures that brand guidelines are easily maintained throughout the life of each piece, and when pieces expire or a relevant campaign ends they are immediately taken out of market.
The benefits:
§ Marketing gets greater brand control
§ The field gets personalized content when they need it
§ Massive design and production cost savings
If you are one of the many marketing executives out there who are grappling with how you can better support your salesforce and develop your relationship with senior sales executives, give Orbis a call, and we can help you discover how other leading marketing organizations have overcome these, and other issues.
