One of the questions that we get asked the most at Balihoo is, “how can I make marketing easy for my channel partner?”  The simple answer is that you can’t.  You can make it EASIER than it already is, but you can’t make it easy.  The reason is that marketing at a local level is very difficult and getting more difficult every day.   Local marketing includes advertising, PR, customer service, sales materials, in store materials, and much more.  Local marketing is a mindset, a commitment, an approach to business, not a tactic to be flipped on or off.

In response to the difficult nature of local marketing we are seeing a big increase in national brands wanting to provide marketing packages to their affiliates (distributors, dealer, resellers, franchisees) so that all the affiliate is required to do is select a package and sit back and watch the leads roll in.  While I commend the brands on attempting to make life easier for their affiliates, I have a great deal of concern over this approach to local marketing.  The main reason is, by creating these packages brands are often selling an easy marketing approach which results in a false sense of security for the local affiliate.  Don’t get me wrong, a marketing package could be beneficial for an affiliate so long as it is taken in context of the overall effort that is required to be successful in their marketing efforts, but as a silver bullet, the marketing package approach is a dud. 

While no silver bullet exists for local marketing, there are several fundamental practices that brands can employ to make their affiliates more successful and make their marketing lives easier.  In order to assist brands in implementing these building blocks I will be writing a series of posts on Mondays that will detail the specific steps to building a better local marketing program.  These posts will cover:

• Providing marketing education/training
• Providing great creative
• Providing guidance
• Providing  tools
• Providing services
• Reducing overhead in co-op programs
• Leveraging economies of scale

There will certainly be some additional topics that come to mind over the coming weeks, but these should keep us busy for a while.