The marketing process: Supporting the marketing team in local marketing

Marketing not only includes generating content and choosing the right platforms, but also planning, evaluating and working with the individual participants. Especially decentralized companies, companies with partner networks or business models with different locations face special challenges here. The marketing activities should run as uniformly as possible, strengthen the brand image and serve the company's success, but still give those responsible the necessary freedom and address them to the local audience? Getting everyone and everything under one roof is often difficult here. With this article we would like to show you how you can implement your local marketing and design it effectively using the individual phases in the marketing process.

1. Planning

The cornerstone of successful marketing is planning. The point here is not only to determine which promotions and discounts there should be, but also to define guidelines and goals in principle. Above all, the corporate design and corporate identity play a major role in strengthening the corporate and brand image uniformly and jointly. In addition, the marketing objectives and possible campaigns and time periods are defined in the planning phase. In order to work together with your local marketing managers in the best possible way, it helps to involve them in the planning and to know the needs and challenges at the local level. In addition, the corporate design in particular should provide a fixed guideline to enable a uniform brand image.

2. Creation

These guidelines and the planning are put into practice in the next step, the creation. For example, the posters for an action are designed, the new image video is shot or a contribution is written for social media. Basically, this is the creative phase of marketing, in which the design and campaign specifications have to be observed, but mostly individual solutions and ways can also be found. Support your partners* in this by clearly communicating the requirements and making them easy to implement. Provide possible templates for different marketing materials and encourage those involved to break new ground. Especially in the current time, cross-media marketing on a wide variety of channels is suitable in order to address the broadest possible audience.

3. Approval

In most decentralized companies and companies with partner networks, the marketing materials and content created must be approved and approved by the headquarters before publication. This consultation and consent are especially important for the consistency of the content and design. In this way, the head office can ensure that a uniform brand image is conveyed to the outside world despite the various responsible parties.

4. Production and publication

Ultimately, the finished materials are put into production or published for the target group. Especially in production, it is important to give local partners* a helping hand and provide uniform service providers such as printing companies or production forms. Through company-wide cooperation with service providers, not only can quality standards be guaranteed, but cost advantages can also be achieved. In addition to the production, you can also support your partners* in the publication and publication, for example of articles and advertisements on social media. With software support or standardized accounts, these requirements can be simplified and standardized and motivated more partners* to perhaps go new marketing channels.

Basically, it is important to work in partnership with your local marketing teams and to manage marketing together; this is the only way to achieve long-term brand success.