How to Choose a TCMA Vendor

March 13, 2020 - This was originally posted on BrandMuscle.com

Choosing a Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) partner can seem like a daunting task. Most marketing teams feel they need multiple TCMA partners to cover all their needs while being able to grow with their channel needs over the years to come. Believe it or not, your TCMA needs should be found within an all-in-one platform that is built to support both sophisticated and unsophisticated channel partners manage, execute, and track channel marketing with unprecedented speed, simplicity, and accuracy.

We believe there are three main pillars that support your through-channel marketing automation needs: Brand Management, Fund Management, and Marketing Services. There are some key features to look for with both the TCMA platform and the partner. We have articulated a few of these below, but have accompanied this with a sample RFP which meticulously explains the items your ideal TCMA partner should offer.

Brand Management

Distributed marketing has evolved quite a bit in the last decade. Marketing teams need more than just a Digital Asset Management (DAM) or an ad builder solution. Through-Channel Marketing Automation platforms need to have the capabilities of these solutions with the key integrations to support channel partners delivering the right media via the right channel to the right audience at the right time.

Simplify and organize

An easy user experience may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many platforms make it difficult for channel partners to even find the right content. Platforms need to enable channel partners to find more than just the usual post card they send each month.

Content should be intuitively organized and easy to navigate, grouped by campaigns and initiatives to help channel partners better target customers at every point during the path to purchase. Whether it be print collateral, variable tchotchkes, emails, social media images, or display banners - all of these should be customized at once. If a logo needs to be updated, for example, it should change throughout the system, saving time on edits and eliminates erroneous versions.

Dealing with regional variability

Gating variable and non-variable assets by user group or region needs to work for you. It’s not just about creating content for Ohio and separate content for Pennsylvania because your images and legal copy are different between states. Your TCMA platform should be able to have one asset that applies the variable gating parameters. within the asset itself. This helps streamline the amount of content you need, drive down costs, and make updates down the road quicker and more strategic.

Allow your channel partners to customize and co-brand

Managing your brand goes beyond the variable assets you allow your channel partners to customize and co-brand. Ensuring they have the proper and best-in-class paths to execute the content is essential. Your TCMA platform should provide native integrations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other email service providers that will scrub against your unsubscribe lists and provide fundamental email reporting back to both the channel partner and your corporate marketing team. These integrations just begin to capture the number of crucial automations needed to allow channel partners to market you brand more effectively.

Fund Management

Organizations manage funds for their channel partners in a plethora of ways. Some provide small budgets to be spent on a corporate approved e-commerce store. Others provide millions of dollars across their channel partners while requiring proof of performance to guarantee the brand is being correctly portrayed across many different marketing tactics. No matter how you structure your fund program, your TCMA partner should be capable of enabling utilization through the platform and offer consultation to assist you with evolving your programs to better meet the challenges you and your channel partners may face.

Through-Channel Marketing Automation platforms that offer Brand Management and Fund Management capabilities give channel partners one less stop along the way to marketing your brand which ultimately leads to higher engagement. Providing the channel partner with an easy-to-use platform to facilitate budgets, pre-approvals (e.g. branding and funding), claims/proof of performance, and funds reimbursement will give you better insight into how your channel is marketing and how much they are investing in your brand at the local level.

Marketing Services 

Consolidation is key to success with marketing execution services. The last thing you want is your channel partner utilizing a handful of different vendors that you don’t have a relationship with to manage your brand at the local level. We believe in segmenting your marketing services needs into three buckets:

Creative Services & Print 

Resources to easily manage custom creative requests within your brand guidelines, say resize requests for a local church bulletin or yearbook ad, and expertise to manage print at a cost that is digestible for smaller partners. Most of your channel doesn’t have the budget or need for 10,000 flyers, so the flexibility prevents waste and saves them money.

Media Placement & Events 

Scalability to assist your channel partners purchase the right media placements at a negotiated rate along and a repository of prequalified local events complemented with access to event materials that support pre- and post- event efforts.

Social & Digital 

Allow channel partners to publish content, monitor their social activity, engage with their social communities, promote key posts, manage online reputations, and optimize online search.

Consolidation and Integration

Choosing a TCMA partner doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Consolidation and integration are key. Seek an all-in-one platform to manage, execute, and track channel marketing activity and make sure it plays nice with your existing technology.

Want to learn more about BrandMuscle’s TCMA solution?

Brand Management to enable local channel partners to personalize and execute brand and legal compliant marketing campaigns.

Fund Management to optimize your marketing strategy with flexible MDF and co-op programs for your partners.

Marketing Execution to help your marketing channel partners implement effective, scalable, and brand compliant marketing campaigns that drive business impact.

Build a Better Co-op Program: Part 1

March 6, 2020 - This was originally posted on BrandMuscle.com

For brands executing local marketing, money talks. Offering marketing funds to your channel partners is a fundamental element to getting the word out about your brand’s products & services. However, building and optimizing a channel marketing program across regions, verticals, and sometimes continents is no easy task. As you reflect on how you can help your channel partners drive awareness and sales, ask yourself these important questions.

1. Do I Have the Time to Manage Co-op Advertising? 

It can be hard to get out of the weeds and focus on the strategy necessary for growth. Be careful not to take on more than you can handle. This can seem obvious, but many channel marketers try to tackle everything at once. Unfortunately, this approach can create confusion and chaos for your partners.

If you’re confident in your current marketing, don’t be afraid to ask for help in the form of marketing dollars or resources in order to execute an effective co-op program. On the other hand, if you’re not so confident, consider scaling back your efforts to focus on specific regions, product lines, or even marketing tactics where you see the most opportunity.

2. Are My Co-op and MDF Guidelines Clearly Defined?

Complicated guidelines will quickly deter your channel partners from portraying your brand correctly, if at all. Your guidelines, at minimum, should include:

• Eligibility of products and/or brands

• Expectations and deadlines for claim (reimbursement request) submissions

• Eligibility of media types and marketing tactics

• Reimbursement percentages and timelines, including earned dollars and insufficient funds

• Pre-approval and compliance recommendations

• Proof-of-performance documentation and advertising requirements

• Approved vendors for marketing execution (e.g. print vendors, digital agencies, etc.)

• How to request additional funds

• Support contact information

3. Is My Channel Marketing Program Easy to Use?

This question isn’t whether or not you find the program easy to use but if your channel partners find it easy. Think about the following from their perspective:

Are you offering a unified co-op platform? Eliminate confusion by keeping the technology simple. Don’t send your partners to multiple sites and vendors in order to produce one marketing tactic or campaign. By offering a one-stop-shop, you’re empowering your partners with the ease to manage co-op funds independently and within your guidelines. (As reference, check out how BrandMuscle streamlines the process by offering an Integrated Local Marketing Platform)

Do you have co-op marketing guidelines that are easy to find? Not having program guidelines is like assembling a piece of IKEA furniture without instructions. Channel partners need (and want!) guidance and instructions in order to conduct marketing on your behalf. Having your guidelines in an easy to find location, typically alongside marketing collateral, will increase engagement and minimize denials.

Are you providing excellent customer service? This service should act as an extension of your marketing team. Your channel partners should know where to go to receive strategic direction, ongoing training, and professional guidance. By providing value through great customer service, you’re ensuring your channel partners are generating the greatest return on your co-op investment because they will be satisfied and actively engaged in marketing your brand.

Are you reimbursing your partners quickly? There’s nothing worse than submitting an expense report for flights and hotels and your boss taking forever to approve it. Your channel partners feel the same way when they have spent money out of their pocket to advertise your brand, but you aren’t reimbursing them in a timely fashion. The faster you reimburse them, the faster they market your brand more.

4. Am I Selling My Channel Marketing? 

If you want co-op and MDF funds to be spent on local marketing, the process needs to be easier and more beneficial to local, channel partners – a process that usually starts by opening the lines of communication.

Partners need to be informed of your co-op program. How are you getting their attention? Your co-op participants are often busy managing their entire business and depend on you for reminders and support. This communication needs to be ingrained in your email newsletters, conversations with your marketing team and channel partners, and alerts through your Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) platform. Continuously offer training to educate your partners, and don’t forget to make it exciting by including incentives to invest in the tactics you know drive the highest ROI.

Team, Templates & Timelines: Your Guide to a Successful TCMA Implementation

October 11, 2019 - This was originally posted on BrandMuscle.com

Your boss has just asked you to manage this huge project on top of your existing laundry list of responsibilities. You’re told to move quickly, and that means you need your partner ready to rapidly coordinate.

At BrandMuscle, we believe in a structured approach to success with our implementation process. The project plan is the first and most obvious need for any new platform project. For our Implementation Project Manager, it is the most important tool in their arsenal for managing what can be a very complex project. The Implementation Project Manager will be your right-hand resource when it comes to getting your new platform off the ground.

Identify & Plan

First, we need to understand the full requirements such as user groups, look and feel, and vendor integrations. Our Implementation Team brings a consultative approach to the process to give you best practices and recommendations based on what we have seen within your specific industry and other like-minded clients. We also recognize that planning is an iterative process, and often execution is too. You may need to roll out a new Brand Management application as well as a Channel Funds Management application; however, doing both may be overwhelming due to scope, internal resource availability, and budgets. Our team is well-versed in phased approaches for rollout without creating excessive timelines.

We establish an expectation from the beginning on the level of detail you expect a schedule to go to, and the reporting frequency you desire. We believe the more communication, the better. The project plan and schedule will always be up-to-date with the information you need to communicate back to your project sponsors on the progress and goals.

Build the Templates

Once requirements are approved by your team, we hit the ground running on development and configurations. Our Implementation Team takes on the heavy lifting during this stage. We recognize your designers have enough big picture tasks to handle, so our team builds the templates for you. Our proprietary, sophisticated, and database-driven rules ensure every template has brand, legal, and pricing standards maintained while giving your local users the flexibility they need to customize materials to ensure the right product, offer, and visuals are delivered via the right media channel. Our goal is to make creating marketing materials easy for the end users while ensuring ongoing template updates are quick and easy.

Validate for Quality & User Experience

All the templates are built, users are created, integrations are running, the BrandMuscle Quality Assurance team has tested all requirements, the platform is finished. Now it is time to test with you. We walk through the user experience, template customizations, and all workflows alongside you. We then hand over the platform to your team to exhaustively test so you feel comfortable with every nook and cranny before launching to your end users.

Develop Training Materials

Once everything is approved, we finalize all of the training materials needed to make you and your end users feel at home. We cover it all including training guides, chapter-based videos, FAQs, webinars, onsite sessions, you name it, all customized for your brand and platform. We also know training is only half the battle. We work closely with you to develop direct mail and email campaigns, launch kits, and sizzle-reels to market the platform for a successful launch that leads to high adoption.

Enhance & Optimize

Now that everything is launched, we are done right? Absolutely not. The BrandMuscle team doesn’t disappear into shadows for you to manage the platform on your own. We continue to be right beside you offering best practices and recommendations on how to improve engagement. Our UI/UX team is reviewing user data to understand how we can enhance the user’s experience to guide them through the process even faster. Our Product team is listening to your feedback and that of end user’s to add and improve functionality that allows them to better manage local marketing. We continue to be your partner every step of the way.

BrandMuscle’s user support center is available 24/7 and expertly fields marketing-related questions from local businesses and channel partners. The support team members work in tandem with the client service team and are well-versed on each clients’ individual marketing programs and solutions, meaning help is just one phone call away.

BrandMuscle’s DAM Difference

November 20, 2018 - This was originally posted on BrandMuscle.com

Differentiating between marketing technologies has become increasingly difficult. The proliferation of tools, platforms, portals and software can be overwhelming for both corporate marketers and local business partners.

It’s a DAM problem, if you ask us.

BrandMuscle’s role on the front lines of marketing has shown us that further education is still needed to define the difference between systems that act as virtual libraries and dynamic systems that allow asset customization as a working solution.

Solutions like Adobe Experience Manager, a DAM giant and industry breadwinner, can be either too much for brands or (surprisingly) not enough. To get the best of both worlds, brands need a central location where they can house their hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of assets and a platform where their extensive network of local business partners can create and customize local marketing materials. The BrandMuscle platform allows a range of capabilities outside of asset management, including campaign planning, fund management, licensing, measurement and integration with third-party fulfillment centers like printers, media buyers, social networks, and more.

We typically see two recurring problems that global and national brands face when looking for a DAM platform: the need for consolidation and the desire for end-user adoption.

Two DAM Problems

DAM Overload

Compared to twenty years ago when digital marketing assets resided on a loose collection of hard drives and digital storage devices, cloud-based storage systems provide a distinct advantage, especially for national and global marketing teams who aren’t always operating out of the same office. Two decades later, though, there are vast improvements to digital catalogs of your marketing assets. However, solutions like Google Drive and Drop Box, though a quick fix, are messy and overwhelming, and can end up being a black hole of outdated and inconsistent assets.

One of the best ways to keep local business partners focused is to provide assets that meet their specific needs – whether that means marketing for a specific product, to a specific vertical, or in a specific geographic area. Creating and cataloging static assets for an entire product line sold across a wide geographic area quickly becomes cumbersome, and updating those assets over time can be virtually impossible. Offering customizable assets allows national marketers to maintain brand consistency while relating directly to local audiences.

The BrandMuscle Difference:

Our platform is built on a Digital Asset Management system designed specifically for distributed marketing. BrandMuscle’s DAM enables corporate teams to work more efficiently and simplifies distribution of marketing content from corporate to local. It provides easy access to digital assets that can be downloaded or utilized in customizable templates at a fraction of the cost and time to create new materials. Whether images, logos, illustrations, documents, graphic design files, copy, planning files, or other marketing resources, our DAM lets you put your marketing assets to work.

Already have a DAM? No need to recreate the wheel, BrandMuscle can work with your existing partner to push assets to our platform for easy access along with customizable marketing materials.

DAM Adoption

Like any new platform or solution, low usage and adoption rates can not only feel like a massive waste of money, but a failed attempt to consolidate and fix the problem at hand. Because the quality of the library depends on active users, adoption problems have a snowball effect and can render significant DAM investments virtually useless. The essence of providing local business partners a useful system is to deliver an easy-to-use system that includes assets essential to their business.

BrandMuscle Simplifies DAM:

Our platform is unique in that we marry two separate platforms (digital asset management and marketing asset management) to create a powerful central location for brands’ local business partners to access all marketing materials.

Adoption rate will increase since a consolidated platform makes it easy for local business partners to execute their marketing in a one-stop shop location. Combined, these two solutions create a single source of truth for all corporately branded materials. This means updating your assets from a single location can propagate across the entire corporation and all campaigns.

Ditching the Spreadsheets: Why it’s Time to Rethink the Way Your Co-op is Managed

August 1, 2017 - This was originally posted on BrandMuscle.com

Nearly nine out of 10 spreadsheets contain errors, yet sifting through for the bad data is like trying to find that burned out bulb in your holiday display. It’s frustrating, tedious, and you pretty much feel it would be easier to chuck all your work in the trash and start over.

When it comes to managing co-op dollars for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of program participants, there’s no room for mistakes. Every dollar counts, as 48% of local business partners reported having less than $500 per month to spend on marketing (2018 State of Local Marketing Report). Your local business partners need the financial support, with 86% of local businesses reporting that co-op/MDF is critical to their ability to execute local marketing.

Yet, keeping track of the varying co-op rules for the different tactics, participants or regions can be daunting. One of the challenges with managing co-op programs is the uneven distribution of funds to every local participant. There are typically different tiers of local business partners where the higher tiers earn more funds than the lower tiers. Tactics are also reimbursed differently. For example, direct mailers often have a higher eligibility than community sponsorships. In today’s world of integrated marketing, running a campaign with multiple tactics of different eligibility mixed together is a recipe for endless hours of management frosted in layers of potential for human error.

That’s why at BrandMuscle, we say it’s time to ditch the spreadsheet. You don’t have time for the complicated processes, and possibility of major errors. You need a platform that automates multiple co-op/MDF programs to apply the current rules based on the partner, their region, the tactics being executed, the products sold, etc. to ensure the correct marketing is executed with the appropriate funding from corporate. Reporting needs to clearly state which tactics are being executed and which funds are being applied to ultimately define what success is at the local level.

Having a platform that carefully keeps track of the complex nature of co-op funds will free up your time, allow your partners to get reimbursed quicker, and create opportunities to more strategically use funds to precisely execute the right tactics to the right audience at the right time.