Distributed Marketing, Co-Op Marketing, Marketing Resource Management

Real Estate Industry - Increase company listings and sales

Real Estate Industry http://bit.ly/sJHuTg - Increase company listings and sales by providing superior local marketing support.

Give your local offices and agents a simple yet powerful way to secure listings and showcase properties to the right target markets. SproutLoud, formerly known as RealMailers, gives real estate companies an easy to use web-based marketing toolkit to support the promotional activities in local markets where sales occur. Agents can select from pre-approved marketing programs you control and customize them for their properties or local offices. SproutLoud helps you manage programs over multiple marketing media - direct mail, e-mail, social and more. We can design programs and materials just for you. Our user friendly marketing toolkit maximizes agents’ efforts and resource, generating better field adoption. http://bit.ly/sJHuTg

Archives Distributed Marketing Blog

Archives Distributed Marketing Blog http://bit.ly/rGlt5x - Marketing Resource Management, Decentralized Marketing Organizations, Co-Op, Brand Management System, Ad Builder - SproutLoud

SproutLoud Co-Op Marketing Blog

Make the Most of Your Marketing Meetings

What’s worse than sitting through a long meeting? A long meeting that doesn’t get anything accomplished.

Here at SproutLoud, we recently had a meeting about meetings. Although that may sound a bit redundant, it was incredibly productive – we put in place a few structural rules so our meetings could be more efficient and produce results.

Whenever someone needs to organize a meeting, they must establish three key details of that meeting up-front in the meeting invite.

(1) What type of meeting is it? An info-sharing meeting, a brainstorming meeting, or a decision making meeting. This establishes the purpose of the meeting and manages expectations from meeting participants on meeting take-aways.

(2) List an agenda. If a meeting organizer doesn’t list an agenda so its participants can prepare or determine if its a meeting they should be at, then the organizer isn’t respecting the meeting participants’ time. An agenda also allows the content of the meeting to be structured in an efficient way to make the best use of everyone’s time. i.e. You may only need your IT team at the start of a meeting…

(3) List a goal. What is the meeting supposed to accomplish?

Here are some more rules we put in place, in no particular order:

1.) Our meetings can never last longer than one hour. Unless we need a longer strategy session, we want people working on producing results rather than talking about them. If you think you need an hour, try the exercise of intentionally scheduling a meeting to run shorter.

2.) Be on time. Nothing is worse than someone showing up 5 minutes late and missing critical content – or worse, a room full of people waiting ten minutes for a few key people to join (potentially the organizer). Demand punctuality from your team.

3.) To accomplish #2, never end a meeting at the 30 or 60 minute mark – always end it five minutes early. Our schedules get stacked over the course of the day. If I have a meeting that runs from 3-4, and another one that starts at 4, right off the bat I am doomed to fail at #2 on this list. Now, my hour meetings end on the 55 minute mark. i.e. 3:55.

4.) Appoint a timekeeper. A timekeeper is responsible for keeping the meeting on track and reminding everyone that there is a hard cut-off to the end of the meeting.

5.) Determine what the action items are coming out of the meeting. Otherwise, you’ve just wasted all your time with no follow-up.

http://bit.ly/rMOpLF - SproutLoud - Distributed Marketing

The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Distributed Marketing Network

Marketing Campaign Management System, Distributed Marketing, Local Marketing Automation

The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Distributed Marketing Network

Creating a network of responsive distributed marketers that are actively engaged in promoting your brand doesn’t happen overnight, it takes nurturing. Here’s what you need to know to become a ‘master gardener’ to a healthy and thriving local marketing network.

Why You Need to Feed Your Network

Your distributed marketers may be exceptional at running their business, whether it’s an independent insurance agency, a franchise, travel and leisure sales, whatever type of company represents your brand, but that doesn’t make them professional marketers, or even technology literate. Deploying a system that provides direction and support for your distributed marketers is critical to gaining their compliance; ensuring your system is easy for them to use is equally important to help them complete these tasks.

What to Feed Your Network

To start with what seems obvious but is often overlooked, it is absolutely essential to provide some basic training to your distributed marketers on how to use your system. Whether you purchase software, use a web-based platform, or even do things the old-fashioned manual way, when you guide first time users, they have a much better chance at doing what you would like them to.

Depending on the range of marketing literacy in your network, you may also need to explain the expected program benefits or value to them. Remember to look at the positioning from their perspective when crafting the message to increase its persuasive impact.

Finally, make it clear what actions you want them to take. For example, here are three totally different marketing behaviors your network can perform:

Assemble a holiday e-mail campaign
Use your brand’s feeds in their social media
Order letterhead and business cards with a new logo

To feed your distributed network the right marketing, make sure your system broadcasts and visually highlights whatever activities are most important to you at any given time.

How to Maintain a Healthy Network

Consistency is the key to keeping your distributed marketers engaged and active in your marketing.

First, keep the lines of communication open. Whether you use a platform with integrated communications or you keep in touch through basic e-mail, providing a constant supply of marketing support helps remind your network what activities you want them to participate in.

Next, use a similar method of how you present your marketing activities to your network. Once your local marketers get used to where to look for marketing support and material updates, they will recognize the cues and know what to do next.

However, that doesn’t mean your marketing priorities shouldn’t change. It’s important to keep your marketing activities current in your system so make sure you can easily change focus to the latest product launch, co-op program, or whatever marketing activities you have planned.

There is no short term solution to growing a strong distributed marketing network to push your corporate marketing objectives onto local markets, but with the right system, you can certainly develop one.

http://bit.ly/tlt2IC - SproutLoud