Yes, but -- again - the problem was Bell (as well as Mercury/Vertigo) had no dedicated label rep in Cleveland, so they were thrown into a general "various labels" distributor which was deadly for new, unknown album artists, as the local rep couldn't (or wouldn't) take the time to find out about these people and pitch them to the radio programmers.
A "general label" distributor is different than a promotion department or a hired independent promotion company or person.
The "distributor" handled getting physical product to the one-stops and big chains that had their own internal department that worked like a "one stop". A one stop was a company that stocked all the active product, old and new, from all the labels and delivered it to local record stores on demand. It had nothing to do with promotion.
An "indie" was one or more record promoters who contracted with labels to push currents to radio stations and, sometimes, clubs and the like. If there were local TV variety or music shows, they worked them, too. Indies would go on a full label basis or on a song-by-song basis.
In some cases, a promoter would work with artist management when a tour or market visit brought the artist to a particular city.
Further, sometimes bigger labels would hire independents to push a very important product and to key stations in addition to their normal promotion which included all the newer singles on the label. Indies were also used (Think "Joe Isgro" here) to do promotional activities the label did not want direct ties to.
Few record companies had promotion offices in smaller markets like Cleveland. A lot of the promotion was done either by regional promo people or supplemented by independents.
If based in Cleveland, a promo person of either kind, indie or label, would cover at least as far as Columbus, Toledo, Youngstown, and all the smaller markets around it. They might even cover Buffalo and Pittsburgh and Detroit if the "center" was in Cleveland.
Back in the 60's and 70's, there was no toll-free long distance. There was no overnight delivery of releases.
In 1972 I was with the largest AM/FM combo in Birmingham, quite a bit smaller, but we were two stations with what today would be called Hot AC and Rock 40 formats. We were serviced out of Atlanta, and seldom saw a record promoter. We got releases in the mail. Rarely we got phone calls. Yet we were considered a "breaker" combo as we went on songs fairly rapidly.
Our main source of information was FMQB, Hamilton and, some of the time, Gavin.