Your affiliates marketing efforts aren’t exactly going as planned…
You give affiliates access to a referral program, but few use it to its potential.
Social posts aren’t converting.
And affiliates spend too much time customizing their print materials and dealing with co-op claims.
To put it simply, the ROI of your local marketing activities could be improved.
What’s your next move?
Before you add more marketing resources to your local marketing program, think about efficiency: Can you do morewith less?
Instead of throwing more marketing against the wall and hoping something sticks, try optimizing what your affiliates are already doing.
In other words, help them spend less time and money on more effective marketing activities to boost efficiency.
What Is Marketing Efficiency?
Before we dive into how you can drive marketing efficiency across your local partners, let’s back up. What does it mean to run an efficient local marketing program?
Efficiency is a measure of impact versus input. It’s how much you put into your marketing vs what you get out (aka results).
Affiliates become more efficient when they achieve their desired outcomes by spending less time, money, and energy. This is how you improve their ROI.
To become more efficient, your affiliates must reduce the number of unnecessary resources they put into their marketing processes to generate leads, increase brand awareness, and drive more revenue.
Efficient partners also put people in the pipeline and increase conversations with less time and money spent.
How Can Your Affiliates Boost Marketing Efficiency?
You can’t make more time in the day (we tried), but everyone can use their time and resources more wisely.
Here are four ways to streamline your local marketing.
1. Automate Routine Tasks
Start with automation. There’s no reason that affiliates should have to spend their time doing repetitive tasks that AI can do for them. Time is money, and automation saves both.
2023 is the year of AI, and local marketers have good reason to celebrate new tech capabilities.
When affiliates let AI-powered solutions check their co-op balances and activate marketing campaigns for them, affiliates can focus on driving leads and making sales. Because AI reduces the need for human involvement, it’s a simple way to start boosting marketing efficiency.
2. Let AI Generate Content
Generative AI technology can write your affiliates’ marketing copy, emails, and eye-catching email subject lines. It can produce images for assets, write social media posts, and flyers. What can’t AI write for you?
Affiliates just need to familiarize themselves with AI technology (like BrandMuscle.ai) and start practicing writing AI prompts. There’s a slight learning curve, but now is the time to get your partners up to speed.
As soon as they start using AI to generate first drafts of marketing content, they’ll free time to market in ways AI can’t — like developing a referral program to get new customers, and hosting local events to drive in-person leads.
Data shows that 82% of marketers already think that AI-generated material is as good, and often better, than what real people produce. The technology is here. Affiliates have faith in it. You just have to empower affiliates to lean in.
3. Consolidate Print Orders
Printing has traditionally been a costly line item, but bulk printing lets you save on spend.
Our Consolidator bulk printing solution is designed specifically to improve ROI by printing long-run collateral more efficiently at a lower cost.
By ordering and shipping in bulk, instead of relying on one-off print projects, you unlock savings that add up significantly over time, reducing your marketing spend and getting brand-compliant marketing materials into market quickly.
When efficiencies save your partners money, you can use those funds to fuel your brand’s growth and fund other initiatives.
4. Single-Source Print Technology
Speaking of print: When affiliates order one-off print items, does someone at your office manually enter the order details into Excel or some kind of spreadsheet?
Then you know: Excel is clunky. It’s also inefficient. Too many busy companies still manage their affiliates’ POS orders inefficiently like this.
Manual data entry is time-consuming. It frequently involves too much back and forth on email and keeps things accurate requires lots of oversight. And still, human errors occur.
Successful brands boost their marketing efficiency by getting a single-source print technology to reduce the time involved, reduce errors, and improve accuracy. You can, too.
Boosting Marketing Efficiency Is an Ongoing Process
These four changes will streamline your business in 2023. After you’ve made these changes, I’d challenge you to go further.
Analyze where else you can optimize. Are the tactics your affiliates use actually driving results? Can you reduce their use of tactics that don’t have much impact and that require more time than they’re worth?
To keep your partners efficient and driving revenue, the most successful brands regularly review their local marketing programs and their internal processes. This routine can highlight where you’re wasting resources and where your spending isn’t driving results.
Driving the same results with fewer resources is efficiency. But driving better results with fewer resources is incredible business strategy. Thankfully, 2023 is a year defined by advanced marketing technology and skilled service providers that can let you do exactly that.
Boost Marketing Efficiency With a Trusted Solutions Provider
Ready to supercharge your brand with some strategic optimizations?
BrandMuscle makes marketing efficiently easy. BrandMuscle.ai will automate tasks and generate content, and Consolidator will save you time and money with bulk printing. See a demo of our solutions today.
