The Growing Involvement of Marketing in Distribution

We meet with many sales distribution teams every month and a topic that keeps coming up is how effective a data-driven marketing team with automation tools is compared to the old-fashioned style of marketing teams that just push out flyers.

Successful distribution companies are expanding the role of marketing faster than ever before. Every distributor faces a growing list of challenges every day, such as new competitors, shortages of talented employees, changing buyers, commoditization, online competition and more.

Marketing has become much more than just a communications team.

We’re starting to see distribution companies turn to their marketing teams for more than just generic email blasts and promotions to highly targeted email blasts and promotions based on real data. Here are just a few examples of what smart, data-driven marketing employees are providing to innovative companies.

SMP’s actionable marketing lets you do pinpoint-targeted marketing campaigns right from your BI. Imagine being able to quickly profile a list based on any cross-section of your data and send them the exact message they need to hear. Using SMP, in a couple of clicks you can easily create a data chart showing the most profitable contractors in each branch location, circle those customer with your mouse and then instantly create a new marketing list. With that marketing list, you can send one-to-one emails or create call lists for your sales reps to deliver unique messages.

As more and more purchasing moves online, your marketing team can help you compete in an omni-channel world. Competing against online sources is about personalized targeted marketing. Your marketing team can help clarify that message in a form that online buyers will understand. SMP’s unique advantage is that not only is all the data available to do targeted marketing, but all the contact information with email and communication preferences at the contact level, which leads to personalized pinpoint marketing.

And according to Aberdeen Group, companies with integrated marketing analytics experienced a 5% profit margin improvement per customer vs. 2% average. That’s more than doubling profit margins per customer through better marketing that is powered by actionable analytics. The key is doing what SMP does by integrating your data and analysis capabilities all the way to your sales and marketing lists, activities and execution.