If your company sells products and services to consumers through an external sales channel, your marketing team may be working twice as hard as it needs to. And doing so inefficiently.
Here’s where a two-portal solution can help your bottom line while streamlining the marketing and fulfillment functions.
Think about it. Your marketing team has to support your sales team, providing them with digital and physical assets to promote your products to their customers. It’s both a B2B marketing challenge and a B2C marketing challenge. The bad news is that it’s a gargantuan marketing effort. The good news? Dual web portals can assume the lion’s share of the work, while freeing up your marketing staff to do non-administrative tasks.
As an example, we have a client who manufactures medical devices for consumers, who purchase the devices from physicians. Our client markets the devices to physicians worldwide. And physicians market the devices to consumers. It’s a sizeable B2B2C challenge. But it’s not insurmountable.
The solution is having two separate marketing and fulfillment portals: one for your internal marketing team to promote your products to the sales force (physicians). And the second portal is strictly for physicians to market the products to consumers.
Before we built dual portals for this medical device company years ago, they were using multiple web sites and multiple vendors to get physical and digital marketing materials to their sales reps and to their customers. People were forever requesting items like logos and brochures and banners to use in doctors’ offices. It was done manually.
Everyone was doing something different. And it was chaotic.
The client came to us to solve this problem. They wanted to get control of their brand, their marketing materials, and the dollars spent on these assets. They turned to us to build an online one-stop shop for doctors, whereby the doctors could sell this device and related services to their customers.
Our client initially started out with an internal web storefront, used by their sales reps. Feedback from these reps was so great, that they asked for a second storefront just for the doctors’ use. We knew it had to have total security and be GDPR-compliant.
So we built it. Now there’s total consistency in the digital assets as well as physical marketing assets for this medical device company. They control the marketing and fulfillment materials, so there’s no chance of their customers “going rogue” with brand ID. The message is the same all over the world.
A second major benefit is that our client has cut headcount. They reduced the administrative tasks associated with fulfilling requests for marketing materials. Additionally, these portals helped free up the employee who had been a fulfillment coordinator – a highly inefficient and stressful role. Today, she’s a brand manager and digital marketing expert who’s become more valuable to the company. She’s no longer consumed by handling ground-ordering requests for marketing materials. (If you’re a CMO, you’re no longer paying someone $80K- $100K to pack boxes and order materials to be printed and shipped.)
Bottom line? If you have a large, international sales force supporting your brand, a marketing fulfillment portal is the key. Medical device companies are only one example of an industry that benefits from dual online portals. Any B2B2C company can streamline much of its marketing function – particularly related to digital/print assets and fulfillment – with web portals.
Picture outsourcing tasks like printing and shipping welcome kits, pocket folders, trade show display materials, literature racks, and product inserts. Budget functions let you control asset allocation per sales rep, and sophisticated reporting functions let you track costs.
If your business model is B2B2C and you’re not already using marketing web portals, your competitors are. This solution helps the fulfillment employees improve their careers, as well as the managers who can now focus on brand development. Plus, it brings consistency and control to your brand ID and your products.
