Most large companies have entire departments focused on optimizing their marketing supply chain. Firms recognize that high product costs, poor stock availability, and uncompetitive speed to market are major threats to their success.
Yet, in smaller organizations the marketing distribution channel gets much less attention. An efficient marketing supply chain can contribute significantly to a firm’s financial success as well as ensure its brand consistency.
It has been estimated that 60% of supply chain marketing costs can be consumed by less valuable ancillary areas such as distribution, freight, storage and obsolescence. It makes sense for companies to focus on improving this spend.
Here are 5 recommendations for efficient supply chain management marketing:
1. Focus on fewer vendors
It’s tempting to add more vendors as new products are introduced within the marketing supply chain. Your team is likely to encourage you to add more options. But paring down your supplier list often pays dividends.
- As you reduce your supplier base, your purchasing power increases while the transactional costs of processing fewer vendors falls.
- Relations often strengthen as more time can be devoted to select providers.
- Risk typically decreases as the firm can focus more time on ensuring compliance with fewer vendors.
Challenge your team to whittle down its active vendor list by 20% in 2022.
2. Drive users to a single online store
Physical assets such as apparel, promotional products, print, signage and POP kits are often widely located across an organization, making inventory management and efficient distribution a costly, marketing logistics and supply chain management challenge.
Posting all marketing assets on a single, personalized online store that can be accessed by authorized users makes ordering much more efficient and consistent.
Many suppliers will build and host such a site for little or no investment. Ask your marketing supply chain management provider what they offer.
3. Improve brand compliance with a single location for all digital assets
Multiple versions of flyers, collateral, and other materials — whether digital or printed — can vex many marketing departments. Your team may need to scramble across various distributed servers to find the latest version.
Locating all of these assets, especially the digital ones, on a single online portal simplifies ordering and ensures the latest, approved versions are being used by your community.
4. Streamline workflow/approval processes
Many marketing departments devote considerable time reviewing, editing, and approving ad-hoc marketing requests. It is estimated that an improved supply chain in marketing can save up to 25% of a marketing department’s time which can be devoted to other revenue-generating tasks.
An integrated portal through which submissions flow to the right team members for approval and editing is a big time-saver. Seek such a solution for your company.
5. Implement better reporting, tracking and allocating of costs
Do you know where your materials are and what they cost you? A marketing supply chain management system that can track inventory and availability is critical, particularly for rush projects.
A key part of improving the marketing channel and supply chain management is tracking and measuring your spending, including ensuring that specific budgets track the right items and costs. A single integrated supply chain management marketing platform with fewer vendors and more consistent workflows makes this task considerably simpler.
We’ve laid out 5 steps to improve the efficiency of your marketing supply chain. As you head into the next quarter, implement the steps that you believe will pay the biggest dividends for your company.
Clayton Kendall can help. Our branded merchandise programs for efficient marketing supply chain management help franchise communities scale rapidly, save money and better manage their promotional items, signage, apparel and marketing pieces.