Most distributors have solid capabilities with outside sales and inbound telephone sales, as Part 1 of The Distributor Marketing Imperative outlined, while there is room for improvement with in-store marketing, outbound telephone sales and e-commerce depending for many distributors.

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In Part 2 of this report, which presents results from the MDM-Real Results Marketing survey on distributor marketing practices, the authors say that there is also room for improvement when drilling down deeper to the marketing vehicles distributors use. The researchers from Real Results Marketing analyzed the use of print catalogs, print flyers, email, social media, search engine marketing and telemarketing. The research also looked at the perceived importance of these vehicles to a company's growth.

Read the article: The Distributor Marketing Imperative, Part 2

The imperative for many distributors is to improve their approaches to three areas:

• catalog marketing
• search engine marketing
• in-store events

On the search engine marketing front, there was a clear point of differentiation in the survey between the practices of the largest distributors in each sector and other distributors. More than 70 percent of MDM Market Leaders use search engine marketing versus 54 percent of other distributors. This increased usage by the larger distributors reflects their increased focus on the Web as a channel.

The goal is to use both free and paid tools online to optimize your company's visibility to Web search engines. But while a good e-commerce site is important, it is not a pre-requisite for SEO/SEM, according to authors Jonathan Bein and Rob Kelley of Real Results Marketing. Sites with good content and clear calls to action are also worthy of search engine marketing. Unfortunately, in many cases companies without e-commerce capabilities avoid search engine marketing or search engine optimization altogether because they may feel that the aesthetics or content on their websites are inadequate, and so they feel it may be counterproductive to draw attention to them.

Want some tips on improving your website? This article, Go Beyond Brochureware Online, outlines some best practices on where to start to make your website more productive as a marketing vehicle.