Evolution of Marketing Within Growing Distributors

The goal of marketing is to help your company grow. For many distributors marketing has been a promotion, event and sometimes communications department. For many, the staff are expected to be “doers”, not “thinkers”.  Historically business strategy has been the role of ownership and sales management. But growth-oriented distributors have now realized that marketing can be a business driver.

This report, The Evolution of Marketing Within Growing Distributors, shares thoughts for distributors on the potential role of marketing within their company.  It outlines four phases of marketing and suggests a Marketing Audit approach to evaluate the marketing department, its deliverables and staff in relationship to where marketing can further help the company achieve its objectives.

For leading, growth-oriented, share-taking distributors, marketing is becoming more integral to the success of the business. Marketing is now becoming involved in strategy to support development of sales initiatives in the areas of strategy, market research, analysis and idea generation and through a broader array of deliverables ranging from the traditional (promotions, events, premiums) to revenue generation (monetization of house accounts, customer service, eCommerce, new product sales) and differentiation (content marketing, account prospect development, etc).

The question becomes “What is Marketing To You?”

This presentation will hopefully help you through the process.  It shares

• a number of questions for senior management to consider in evaluating its marketing department and marketing needs
• the difference between a fulfillment-oriented marketing department (essentially an in-house marcom agency) vs a strategic resource
• how to conduct a marketing audit
• a 4 phase process to support the evolution of your marketing department.

Leading companies are recognizing that marketing needs to be an integrative component of their sales effort.  Marketing can be a “force multiplier” that enables companies to reach a broader segment of their customer base being restricted to their direct sales organization calling on selected customers who represent ever decreasing gross margin.

Marketing requires investments, however, the ROI can be significant as it can drive sales, it supports sales and acts as a business differentiator to further build distributors’ value proposition … and it doesn’t all have to be funded by suppliers!