Taking Your Online Marketing Campaign to the Next Level

In an economy increasingly influenced by the Internet, marketing your brand online is more important than ever. While other forms of media still play an important role in building the brand of many companies, it’s online marketing that has seen the greatest increases in reach and effectiveness over the last several years. A great website is the starting point for any successful online marketing campaign and thankfully, building one is less difficult than it’s ever been.

In the past, website building and maintenance was very fragmented and proprietary. Early in the Internet boom, it was common for websites to be built completely in HTML from the ground up. Creating a high-quality website worthy of a national brand was extremely expensive and required an army of web-design professionals not only to build it, but to maintain it as well. Over the last few years, though, content management systems (or CMS) have taken over most of the heavy lifting in terms of design and maintenance. There are many of these systems in wide use today, some of the most popular being WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. What makes these so appealing to companies of every size is that they’re initially simple to design, often being based on templates. However, they’re also highly customizable, making it possible for any company to create a site that is distinctive as well as functional. This aspect of CMS is very important to your online marketing campaign, since you want to stand out in your field. Ways to achieve this individuality range from hiring a web designer to create a custom layout to buying exclusive rights to a template that’s already been created. From there, it’s possible to customize it specifically to your needs. The beauty of CMS is that once this initial setup is complete, updating and maintaining your site is as easy as inputting new content into this pre-existing structure without ever having to touch a piece of code. Virtually every major brand now uses this system. WordPress, for instance, boasts users as notable as CNN, GM, Volkswagen and Sony.

Once you’ve built a world-class website, it’s time to focus on taking your online marketing campaign to the next level. This is especially important for brands with a network of independent dealers. For companies that sell products through local dealers face the problem of maintaining their image and product catalog through these individual dealers’ websites. While your national site may be excellent, your dealers may be too busy with other aspects of their businesses to keep current in updating your product catalog and representing your brand properly on their own websites. Some of your dealers may not even have websites at all. This is a problem for national companies, as potential customers in their markets may not be able to find your dealers. Even worse, poor representation of your brand may diminish their view of your products through no fault of your own.

The best solution to these problems is by implementing a marketing management system, or dealer management software. What this does is allow you to create a miniature version of your own website that contains product catalogs and promotions that will appear on all of your dealers’ individual websites. It’s centrally controlled by the brand, and therefore will be updated across your network in real-time, while continuing to present your brand in the best way possible. This sort of cohesion is important to a successful marketing campaign, and will present potential customers with a powerful and unified presence in every market.

Not only do your customers want to see a unified image, they want the most accurate information about your products and promotions. Keeping customers up-to-date is another important aspect of any marketing campaign. This is another area where dealer management software shines. Whenever you make a change centrally, it automatically changes on every dealer website you’re hosted on, without the need to contact any dealers directly. Not only is this great for your brand, dealers love it because your product line is always up to date without any additional attention on their end. For new products, product changes or even national promotions, you can control your brand’s local engagement easily in this way, making a marketing management system a great choice for any national brand.

By creating an excellent website and then managing your brand across your dealer network, you can make the most of your online marketing campaign. Your customers will feel supported and engaged by your marketing, and confident in your ability to deliver a great product through their local dealer.