3 Reasons Traditional Vendor Management is Obsolete
The number of marketing vendors is growing exponentially each year.
A recent tally from chiefmartech.com revealed that about 7,000+ marketing technology vendors offer services in 49 distinct categories. Not only is the marketing technology landscape growing, but brands and their local resellers are respectively working with more vendors than ever to create and execute local marketing. While the day-to-day vendor management is decidedly more complex, all that work still yields lackluster results. If vendor management doesn’t meet the essential needs of brands and channel partners, why bother — especially when Through Channel Marketing Automation offers more innovative options? Arguably, the traditional method of vendor management is obsolete, and here are three reasons why:
1. It takes too much time.
Vendor management, when it’s done well, is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. Whether you’re managing vendors for a small business or a large brand, the concerns are constant: Are you sure you’re working with the best? Is there another vendor that’s better, faster, cheaper? Acquiring a degree of confidence in the vendors you entrust to execute marketing requires heavy-lifting on the backend:
- Vetting: How innovative are your vendors’ capabilities? What is their track record for success?
- Monitoring: How do your vendors perform? And what sort of fluctuation in performance can you expect from your vendors on a monthly or quarterly basis?
- Evaluating: How do your current vendors compare to new vendors entering the market? What criteria are you using for the comparison: pricing, turnaround, quality, results?
The Through Channel Marketing Automation Solution:
Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) is designed to do the heavy-lifting for you, with a network of Marketing Service Integrations. SproutLoud, a leader in TCMA, offers a robust selection of 100+ best-in-class marketing vendors through its SaaS marketing platform, which handles the ongoing vetting, monitoring and evaluation of vendors to deliver flawless execution for brands and their partners.
2. Results aren’t guaranteed.
Flawless, brand-compliant results. It’s what brands and their local resellers are looking for in local marketing automation. It’s not necessarily what they get. This is the reason brands develop extensive, detailed guidelines for brand compliance. But when those guidelines are passed along from the brand to channel partners to agencies and vendors, mixed results reveal the varying degrees of interpretation, implementation and attention to detail throughout the process. And when errors occur, they slow down the entire process and can cause delays in getting ads to market. When traffic, leads and sales hinge on getting the right message to the right customer at the right time, delays can have a significant impact.
The Through Channel Marketing Automation Solution:
SproutLoud’s marketing automation platform incorporates Digital Asset Management tools and dynamic templates with pre-set customization options that are approved by the brand. Its TCMA platform gives brands the control they need to upload assets, set customization parameters, choose which marketing tactics are available to which partners and even attach Co-Op Advertising and MDF fund percentages as a way to influence partner participation in the most effective tactics. SproutLoud’s distributed marketing automation platform also gives partners the flexibility they need for local customization and high-quality automated campaign execution.
3. A successful strategy isn’t built on guesswork.
Comprehensive marketing analytics help brands and their channel partners determine what’s working and what’s not. Drilling down in local marketing performance metrics could reveal that a marketing tactic just didn’t work for a specific market or for a particular campaign. If you’re able to access that information in real time, you may be able to adjust your strategy for better results before the campaign ends.
As digital marketing tactics get more and more complex, channel partners rely more on marketing agencies and specialized vendors to build, execute and launch local marketing campaigns on their behalf. However, when each local reseller relies on multiple agencies and vendors, there is no systematic, timely or meaningful way for resellers or their brand to access and compare and make decisions based on marketing peformance data. Imagine if a brand had to retrieve marketing performance data from every agency and vendor used by every reseller across their entire partner network. It’s highly improbable that anyone would bother going to such lengths for data that would be incompatible, incomplete and utterly useless.
But without data, what’s the basis of your local marketing strategy? How do you know what works and what doesn’t? How do you know where to invest and when your funds would better be spent elsewhere? Successful local marketing strategies aren’t built on guesswork.
The Through Channel Marketing Automation Solution:
With timely access to meaningful marketing performance metrics, brands and their resellers can make data-driven decisions. SproutLoud’s comprehensive Through Channel Marketing Automation Platform allows for robust performance tracking, by moving the entire distributed marketing process into a controlled, measurable environment. This means everything your channel partners do, from campaign planning to last-mile execution, lives in the same virtual space. That gives brands immediate access to a wealth of data to determine return on investment for every marketing tactic, every local marketing campaign and every local reseller — every time.