Improve the Awareness and Use of Your Sales and Marketing Content
Welcome back to SproutLoud’s Distributed Marketing Jobs to Be Done newsletter, where we explore how you can use SproutLoud software to accomplish the jobs that need to be done to deliver exceptional local marketing results.
We’ve done hundreds of Jobs to Be Done interviews with customers to get to the root cause of their challenges and to build effective solutions. This newsletter is intended to help you understand some of these challenges and solutions while learning more about SproutLoud technology.
Local partners or employee end users are the front-line decision makers on how to engage with prospects and customers, but to be successful in these engagements they need impactful assets and content. It’s the role of the national brand team to ensure that these local users are aware of and can easily access impactful and appropriate content when engaging.
In this issue of our newsletter, we explore four common obstacles to successfully equipping local users with the assets and content they need to effectively engage:
- Lack of awareness that content exist
- Hard to find content
- Unavailability of the right kind of content
- Regulatory / compliance friction
Obstacle 1: Lack of awareness that content exists
Why are channel partners or local employees frequently unaware of available marketing assets?
A: Your local users have many different jobs….. time, knowledge, and resources are limited. As a result, even your best assets and content may get lost in a partner’s busy day.
So how do you overcome those challenges? SproutLoud provides several capabilities that will help to ensure that your assets are noticed by even your busiest local users:
- Custom Home Pages (In-app Landing Pages): in-app landing pages allow Brands to guide their local users’ marketing efforts. Through in-app landing pages, Brands can provide asset and campaign recommendations, thus alleviating the challenges of sorting through multiple pieces of content, tactics, and promotions.
- Tags: tags allow local users to refine their marketing asset and content search. Brands can provide tag guidance based on objectives like lead acquisition or retention, campaign, promotion, collateral type, language, etc.
- Share links: share links allow brands to promote specific assets via email and brand-controlled systems. Through shared links and Single Sign On, brands can provide direct access to partners to start marketing campaigns directly in SproutLoud.
Obstacle 2: Hard to find content
Why are my local users complaining about difficulty finding assets and content I make available
A: The more of a burden you place on your local users to find the content they need, the more unaware that audience will be that the content even exists. We see this in many legacy platforms that have never been updated:
- Digital Asset Management systems that weren’t designed for comprehensive content management
- Front-end applications tied to a print or inventory management system
- Separate social media content application to pull and push organic and paid content to digital platforms
These “point” solutions typically host content to serve the tactic or medium the point solution was designed around. However, local users’ primary role is not to keep track of where you choose to locate your content.
Your branded content must have centralized tooling – content shouldn’t be scattered in multiple places and multiple tools — go here for social content, go here for direct mail, go here for sales sheets, etc. — it makes it too confusing. Imagine if Amazon had an intermediary portal and re-directed you to a different site depending on what you wanted to buy. It wouldn’t nearly be the same experience.
For example, one insurance client managed all their printed collateral from their warehouse on campus. They had two printers supporting their print-on-demand and premium assets. They used an email tool for email marketing. And, they had a social media platform for content. With so many point solutions, adoption of this content suffered. In contrast – as a singular, easily accessible, easy to use solution for local users – SproutLoud regularly drives program adoption of well over 80%.
This level of adoption is possible with a platform like SproutLoud because brands can bring every type of content together under one platform and make it available using one global search engine, one tagging system — so that no matter where these resources are created, or what communication channels the content is disseminated through, they are stored centrally and accessed from one place.
Obstacle 3: Unavailability of the right type of content
Why do my local users feel that they don’t have the content they need to make an impact?
A: A common problem for adoption is local users not believing that they receive the content they need from their brand counterparts to have an impact. How do you understand what content is used so that you can build more of it?
With SproutLoud’s reporting tags, you can tag content, and customization options like text and images, to get a better understanding of the types of content being utilized on the platform, inclusive of which content drives response. This information, combined with performance metrics like calls and leads, helps brands understand the effectiveness of the content
SproutLoud can also provide reporting on end-user search terms so you can see what local users are searching on the platform that don’t yield search results.
For local users that have specific creative needs, not satisfied by an existing template or content piece, local users can request creative services directly from the Brand all through SproutLoud’s streamlined ordering workflow. If local creative requests are approved, SproutLoud’s Custom Design module allows Creative Admins to upload local user accounts and tag these designs to ensure proper reporting and attribution.
Don’t leave feedback loops off the table. Listening to user feedback fuels strong engagement. Make sure you have a system to collect feedback on your content, as well as a process to evaluate and provide new content based on local user requests.
Obstacle 4: Brand and Regulatory compliance friction
My business has a lot of brand approval guidelines or regulatory requirements that slow down my ability to get my local users the content they need and will use. How can I streamline this?
A: Brand approvals and required changes slow or create large amounts of friction, thereby slowing speed of that content into local markets.
Systems like SproutLoud move the Creative and Brand Approval process into the content libraries themselves. If content needs to be modified or customized by local users, they are configured via an Ad Builder in a way that is already approved by your Creative Team. Using a pre-approved template structure, local users can never go rogue, but they still get afforded the flexibility they need to customize the content in the manner they need it.
SproutLoud also contains features that allow evergreen content to be posted to limit creative and content re-work while sections of that content can change seasonally for regulatory or compliance updates – such as with new campaign or promotion disclaimers.
SproutLoud’s Global Text Libraries make it faster and easier than ever for brands to update, replicate, and distribute brand-compliant text copy instantly and simultaneously across entire networks of resellers — all with a few clicks. By using Global Text Libraries, brands can increase speed-to-market and reduce costs of template maintenance. The brand user can make copy updates in one place and apply it everywhere that text is used in their customizable online templates by their local dealers, agents, brokers, underwriters, distributors, franchisees, corporate locations, independent retailers, and multi-location resellers. This gives brands greater control and consistency in updating legal disclaimers, product descriptions, promotions, headlines, body copy and ad messaging, ensuring content is continually brand and regulatory compliant.
[Learn More About Global Text Libraries]
Ready to see what SproutLoud can do for you?
