In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, marketing automation has become a critical factor in driving business growth and success. It helps businesses streamline their marketing processes, increase efficiency, and achieve better results. However, for businesses with decentralized marketing operations, scaling marketing automation can be a daunting task. With multiple teams, channels, and strategies, maintaining control and consistency can be a significant challenge. This blog post provides a comprehensive guide on how businesses can scale their decentralized marketing automation efforts while retaining control. It offers practical strategies, and tools businesses can leverage to streamline their marketing efforts, drive better results, and maintain consistency across multiple channels.
Distributed or decentralized marketing, what does it mean?
In larger organizations, there’s often a corporate marketing team and multiple local marketing and sales teams with their own targets and responsibilities for a specific area. We see a lot of similarities when it comes to marketing operations and managing digital experiences in franchising models, large organizations with regional offices, university groups, or governmental organizations with multiple departments.
For clarity, when we talk about central and local marketing, we mean the following:
Local team
This local team is responsible of their own websites, regional sales and marketing initiatives such as local news, press, events, lead generation and nurturing...
In some cases, also the leads that come in via the central website need to be distributed to the right local team for follow up.
The challenges when managing digital experiences in a distributed marketing setting
Organizations constantly change, grow and evolve. Digital transformation doesn't always happen overnight, and different teams may grow at different rates. When there’s chaos due to this growth, governances are often only built to regain the control that has gone lost.
As a result, local teams may start using their own CMS, emailing tools, and CRM solutions. Building small solutions in-house may be a temporary fix, but it's not sustainable. The fragmented data and IT architecture can impact the budget, make central KPI reporting difficult, create hard-to-control data governance, and may cause security risks.
The challenge is to regain control over brand consistency, IT architecture, data governance and security, budget, and change management in the local teams. Sounds familiar? A Multi Mautic setup can help facilitate distributed marketing automation and support organizational growth. While no software can solve everything overnight, a Multi Mautic setup can provide the right solution for organizations looking to regain control and maintain consistent growth.
Marketing automation with Multi Mautic is a powerful approach to managing your marketing campaigns across multiple regions and markets. By giving local teams more control over their marketing efforts while also providing a centralized way to coordinate global campaigns, you can create a more efficient and effective marketing strategy that drives better results while keeping control of your data, budget, and governance.
USECASE 1
Re-use of customer journeys while separating data for university group
Let’s look into the challenge of 13 separate universities in the same group. They all have different branding and are not allowed to access each other's data, but share a similar customer journey that could easily be reused for their audience: to-be students, current students, staff, and various other stakeholders.
Instead of inventing the wheel 13 times, they can tackle their two biggest challenges at the same time with Multi Mautic:
- keep their data separated and secure with a Local Mautic per university
- save time and workload by using the Central Mautic for managing shared templates, assets, content…
USECASE 2
Consistent branding for a large real estate franchise
A large real-estate group with over 100 local franchises has a centrally defined corporate branding and a central website with a global property search, campaigns, and events. The central CRM manages contacts, leads, franchises, and real estate properties. The two challenge is that each franchise has its own website, sometimes emailing system with local mailing lists linked to the CRM one way or another and that the digital maturity and team size between the franchises differs a lot.
Instead of using a scattered hotchpotch of different mailing systems, listed and integrations, a Multi Mautic could begin solving their problems:
- all franchises use the same, easy-to-use marketing automation tooling
- all Local Mautics are linked in the same way, which makes managing them way more efficient
- the corporate branding is consistent over all the different Local Mautics
USECASE 3
Central IT architecture allows business freedom for governmental organization
The different departments of a governmental organization bought or built their own solutions for websites, CRMs, and emailing tools. The challenge lies in bringing it all together in a central IT architecture or governance while still allowing each team to keep the freedom to define and meet their individual digital experience goals.
For this organization, our Open DXP with Multi Mautic was introduced and gradually adopted across all teams. They’re now reaping the benefits. Read all about it here.
A Multi Mautic setup, what does that look like?
When talking about Multi Mautic, we are actually creating multiple, separated instances of Mautic for the local teams, with an extra layer on top for the corporate marketing team. This combines the Central Mautic of the corporate team with the Local Mautics of the local teams. We are still evolving this extra layer to add more features driven by our open DXP vision and values for our existing client base. Restricted versus global data access is obviously a fundamental concept that exists in our core solution.
Building your business case
Before deciding whether to use a Multi Mautic to manage your marketing automation across local teams, it's important to understand the costs and benefits involved. While the solution may offer lots of advantages such as greater control, efficiency, and consistency, it also requires an upfront investment. To help you evaluate the potential return on investment (ROI) of a distributed platform, here are some factors to consider:
- the time it takes to build the templates for each local team vs. one time and distribute them.
- the time it takes to keep control of brand consistency.
- the data privacy concern and security risk using different Saas tools.
- the maintenance cost using a single solution vs. different local solutions.
- the cost of building customizations across a single vs. different local solutions.
- the cost of building integrations with a central CRM and other data sources.
- the overhead in the documentation of all different solutions and onboarding new employees.
The time and money you save by using a single distributed platform can be spent on optimizing your customer journeys to bring more and better leads and increase loyalty and customer lifetime value.