channel partner content syndication & marketing automation: maintain consistent messaging...
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Maintain Consistent Messaging Channel-Wide
for More Effective Marketing
CHANNEL PARTNER CONTENT SYNDICATION
& MARKETING AUTOMATION
www.sharedvue.comwww.everythingchannel.com
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What could your channel accomplish if you could make it easier for
your Partners to market and sell your product or service?
While the answer to that may seem obvious, arriving at the answer
for making marketing and sales easier for Partners is far less obvious.
Especially in todays world, where marketing and sales requires
technical inputs to supplement each of these processes.
How do you structure your partnerships in a way that ensures
the end-customer is getting the most effective package of
information from your Partners?
What tools are available to streamline information ow,
provide Partners with the best marketing and sales collateral,
and increase co-marketing options?
Marketing best practices paired with marketing automationand syndication may provide the answer.
INTRODUCTION
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45%
49%
6%
MoreImportant
AsImportant
LessImportant
WHY SHOULD WE bE CONCERNED AbOUT THE SOLUTION PROvIDERS?
If youre in the same situation as most manufacturers, its likely that
you have a small group of your Partners that are returning most of
your revenues. In fact, on average, 20% of a manufacturers solution
providers drive 70% of channel revenue.
How did they get there? One of the major reasons is that the top
20% have a high enough level of marketing sophistication, backed bydevoted resources, and they generally dont need too much additional
help. But that doesnt mean you cant further facilitate their program.
And what about the remaining 80%? They tend to require more of
your energy more time, more assistance, more training and more
enablement in order to reach their sales goal.
How do you help that top 20% better track and hone their marketing
while helping the 80% market themselves and your products like the
big guys?
And what happens if a Partner shifts to focus on a different product
or starts a relationship with a competitor?
As you may have experienced, its becoming more and more difcult
to ensure Partner loyalty. Partners think rst of what their end-users
needs are, but thats closely followed by consideration of which
products are the easiest to sell.
More specically, Partners want to sell what makes them
look good. The products they know the most about in technical
terms, as well as those products they can more easily generate leads
and opportunities for, will be the ones they include in their offerings.
45%
63%
of Solution Providers say that DemandGeneration will be more important in 2010.
of Solution Providers organizationsdont have marketing staff.
Its not about investing more, but gettingthe biggest return on investment.
Demand Generation is Increasingly Important to Partners
Source: IPED2010
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ENAbLING PARTNERS IN TODAYS CHANNEL LANDSCAPE
So how do you make your Partners more loyal? By making your
products and services easier to showcase and market. Your channel
Partners are the ones that are customer-facing. Theyre your touch
points to your customers and end-users.
Lets rephrase that: the more Partners you have enabled,
the more customer touch points you have developed.
Enabling your Partners means making their job of
marketing and selling your products and services as
easy as possible. Of course, this doesnt just help them.
By allowing them to make the most effective impression
each time they touch a customer, youre affecting your
own bottom line.
Nowadays, online marketplaces are a major part of how
Solution Providers need to showcase their translation,your products or services to their customers. Product
and service descriptions, information, photos and videos,
and other educational marketing collateral are being
accessed more frequently online than they did ve years
ago.
A recent survey shows that Solution Providers nd their
own websites critical to their daily marketing activities and customer
touch points.
The survey results further prove that product and solution-based
content is the most desired element in a Partner solution, with 46%
of respondents indicating it as their top-ranked feature.
58% - the largest percentage ofsurveyed Partners declared that theirown companys website was the mostimportant marketing activity used inhelping to promote their business totheir customers.
Source: Everything Channel 2010
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Your Partners success translates directly into your success. Helping them
helps you.
You must enable those Partners who dont have the capabilities to maximize
their sales opportunities on their own. Remember, partners are more likely
to sell products that make them look good. By enabling Partners to promote
your joint-value proposition you are increasing the likelihood theyll sell yourproducts rst and more often. Increasing the level of professionalism in their
marketing campaign would do just that.
By providing them with consistent, updated product information, training and
promotional materials, and marketing funds, you empower your Partners to
join the ranks of your high-producers.
In doing so, youve thereby empowered allof your Partners, increased loyalty
across the board, and captured a larger share of the market.
CALL-TO-ACTION
Ok, great.But what are the specic
problems?
Resource constraints Website limitations Marketing challenges
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Having recognized that the majority of your Partners are resource-
constrained, both in terms of personnel and budget, how does that
translate into the online marketplace?
With smaller marketing teams and budgets, campaigns become
restrained and have less impact. This means your product and service
information is harder to keep up-to-date, your brand consistencybecomes difcult to uphold, Partner website features arent fully
leveraged the whole package falls short.
Solution Providers time is spent selling to current customers and
providing consulting and services to recurring customers. Existing
customers account for 72% or all of channel Partner revenues, while
rst-time purchasers only account for 28%. This leaves little time
allocated to prospecting and building their pipeline.
Just as inhibiting is the general trend of having technically-orientedSolution Providers that often have underdeveloped marketing
knowledge or skills. For them, theres a tendency to continue nurturing
the business elements that are familiar and easily-identiable, and
devote limited resources to the elements that are less familiar or
worse yet unidentiable. If search engine optimization (SEO),
multi-touch campaigns, or best practices for website content are not
obvious areas to focus efforts, they end up as missed opportunities.
Partners need resources to allow them to sell and
market their products and services more effectively,
and be in front of them when they need a solution.
THE RESOURCE HOLE
The average American visited111 domains and 2,554 pagesin March 2009, accordingto Nielsen Online. Given thereach of search, its highlylikely that many of thosevisits - especially to brandsites - came from searchrather than direct trafc.
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IT product marketing is happening in online marketplaces. Yet, many
Partners have limited web marketing resources.
In addition to lacking resources for marketing campaigns, Partner
websites the places where your products and services are being
showcased, and the touch points to the customer are not working
as well as they could and should be
WEbSITE WOES..
They have limited and/or out-of-date
product and service information.
The process for getting content online is
inefcient - as product lines expand, the increase in
content becomes signicantly more difcult to scale or
impossible if resources dont exist.
Partners dont have the resources to implement
multi-media content to make their sites a useful and
attractive destination for product and service information.
As a result, brand management and content integrity becomes
difcult to maintain.While they may try, Solution Providers
dont or cant always represent the manufacturers products
accurately. There are countless instances of Partners using
outdated product info or poor quality pictures.
The websites generally have poor lead generation
capabilities. Solution Provider websites often lack a call-to-action or value-add content.
The internet is becoming a much more important and heavily
used sales tool than it had been ve years ago. Many Partners
websites are signicantly underdeveloped, and are
losing sales because they have no way of capturing leads. And
because they cant maximize on their search engine optimization,
they are making it more difcult for leads to nd them. This
creates a huge loss in potential revenues.
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By denition, Solution Providers sell multiple products servers,
storage, software from multiple vendors.
Successfully marketing each of these vendors multiple products
can become difcult for a Solution Provider. Marketing costs can
skyrocket, and confusion and disorganization can stand in the way of
progress.
Deployment capabilities also create a roadblock for many marketing
programs. Partners arent usually capable of producing an HTML
version of vendor product content , and can only do so with increased
resources or outside assistance. Often times, this is enough of a
reason for Partners to ignore updating vendors product content on
their websites.
In terms of branding consistency, messaging and content integrity,
the landscape is chaotic at best. Its difcult to ensure that SolutionProviders with multiple vendors and inadequate tools - will be
able to uniformly and repeatedly communicate their joint-value
proposition and messaging appropriately to the customer. Again,
these are often the only touch points to the small or mid-market
customer that vendors will have!
There are no central analytics, metrics or tracking capabilities available
to monitor the success of a channel marketing program.
Partners have no way of measuring the success of their efforts
while vendors have no visibility into the activities their Partners
are engaging in. If Partners dont have a dedicated Channel Account
Manager (CAM) its next to impossible to initiate let alone track and
measure activities. This means that theres no visibility of what theyve
been achieving, or not achieving.
How can we streamline the online marketing channel
programs in a way that benets vendors and Solution
Providers?
.AND MARKETING WOES
*Source: Gartner
2010 MidmarketIT Spend Forecast=
$279Bin North America*
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Channel Partner Content Syndication achieves ve main goals:
1. Content is easily controlled and updated on Partners websites,
including product and solution offerings. This is a joint-value proposition.
As vendors, youre offering accurate and up-to-date product and service
information, supporting consistent brand messaging. Your Partners are ableto have more effective and successful, touch points with end-customers.
2. Your marketing message is consistent across all Channels.
Ultimately, your Partners want your value proposition messaging, they want
to be able to offer their own customers the best information on products
and services, because it makes them look good.
3. Partner lead generation and capture capabilities are
increased on their existing corporate websites. There are no
microsites or external landing pages. When lead activity and marketing
touches are housed on one platform instead of multiple ones it makes it
much easier to navigate the entire lead buying process.4. Content is t seamlessly into as many Partner websites as
possible for a better customer and user experience. By putting the user
experience as a priority, youre improving one of those crucial touch points
in a way thats entirely benecial to your product and service.
5. Content on the site is customized and added to their own
co-branded assets. By allowing for exibility, you enable your Partners
to sell your products and services in a way that best suits their particular
customer base. This input and well-honed customer knowledge is crucial
for your success.
Managing an online marketplace doesnt have to be so difcult for
your Partners.
Syndication allows specic product and multi-media content to
be pulled directly from vendors either via their websites or a
content library and syndicated to Partners websites. Any updates
to content from vendors will be automatically updated on Partnerssites and Partners can easily pick and choose which products and
services are displayed.
SYNDICATION: SOLvING YOUR WEb WOES
How Does Syndication Help? Immediate Promotional Exposure Real-Time Lead Generation Search Engine Optimization Multi-Media Delivery Analytics & Metrics Capabilities
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Once youve helped your Partners develop their online channel, why
not help them market that channel as well?
Marketing automation platforms allow vendors to provide their
partners with co-marketing campaigns, measurement tools, and
tracking resources to better facilitate and monitor demand generation.
Channel Partner Marketing Automation has several benets:
Lead generation and capturing is easier for Partners
Automation provides immediate marketing and promotional
exposure
Integration with existing systems because streamlined
Marketing communications to customers are integrated
Entire marketing campaigns to Partners are automated
Deal registration is increased
Analytics and metrics capabilities for campaigns are more
in-depth
Using marketing automation, vendors and Partners can manage
their tools and resources much more effectively and in a way
that is mutually benecial.
Marketing Automation and Syndication support and encourage the
use of multi-touch campaigns.
MARKETING AUTOMATION: SOLvING YOUR MARKETING WOES
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End-customers rarely engage after single-touch exposures to
products or services, while tools such as caller ID and spam lters
have made it harder and harder to reach prospects.
And lets not kid ourselves, prospects have become jaded, theyre
tired of being constantly sold to and pitched. Cold calling is a tactic
of the past, as end-customers are bombarded by messaging on a daily hourly! basis, and it takes more effort, more time and a more
valuable offer to get a prospects attention.
Presently, Partners nd themselves in a very competitive environment,
surrounded by other Solution Providers all trying to offer customers
the right solution at the right price.
Vendors need to arm their Partners with tools that
will add value, create relationships, and become
indispensible to customers and prospects.
Partners must utilize a multi-touch approach. Multiple emails that deliver valuable content Valuable content in the form of webinars, videos and eBooks Warm phone calls once theyve been exposed to this valuable
content Social Media tactics that allow Solution Providers to get
to-know prospects.
You must make sure youre reaching your customers
several times, in several ways. Once doesnt workanymore.
Marketing Automation and Syndication create endless opportunities
to increase the number of times you get in front of the customer.
CUSTOMERS DONT HAvE TO bE SO HARD TO REACH
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HP is the worlds largest technology company, with thousands of
channel Partners worldwide. Their Partners were primarily using
face-to-face sales models, leaving them little time for online sales, and
HP was getting consistent feedback from them that they needed help
with their online marketplaces. In one HP Partners words,
...the technology is changing so rapidly, and the only way wehave to get the content is to scrape it down off [the HP]
website. And then we need a whole back room of people
that we cant afford to be web technicians and manage this
content for us.
HP needed a better way to help their Partners become better
champions of HP products.
CASE STUDY SOLvING HPS PAIN POINTS
What were their main challenges at that point?
How could they better enable their Partners to have a morerobust presence - and one with an HP story - on the Web?
How could they make it easy for Partners to get the contentto tell that story in a simple and concise way, and keep thatcontent up-to-date?
How could they enable those Partner websites to generatenew business for the Partners?
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MARKETING AUTOMATION AND SYNDICATION AS THE SOLUTION
To solve these business issues, HP implemented an end-to-end, syndication and marketing automation
system, which delivers content to Partners, keeps it current and updated, and tracks results.
The response? Overwhelmingly positive.
Katie Spence, US Partner Marketing Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking
at Hewlett-Packard reported, The rst thing Partners liked - loved actually - was the content.They love the fact that its quality content, that they didnt have to develop it and that they dont have
to maintain it, update it, or worry about whether its current....we have Partners of all different sizes
and levels of marketing expertise...so [we] can offer different approaches to syndication...[we] helped
some Partners develop a web presence whod never had one before!
In addition to being able to help their Partners manage content effectively, HP
can also help them market this online sales channel, which ultimately benets
their own bottom line. Each Partner is equipped with in-depth marketing
collateral and sales resources that allow them to maximize on each touch
point they have with end-customers.
By offering a multi-layered approach - one that makes both content
management and marketing of that content easier - HP was able to jump
start many of their resource-constrained Partners, and were also able to
further the success of some of their more sophisticated and mature Partners.
One of the biggest benets that HP has noticed is an increase in Partner
loyalty. The simple act of supporting their marketing and sales processes
made it very easy for Partners to keep coming back to HP.
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Marketing Automation and Syndication are powerful tools to provide to your Partners, making it easier
for them to market and sell your product or service, which benets you in the short- and long-term.
Your end-customer can only be reached through Partners theyre your only touch points. Giving
them the most effective way to package your product and service information for these end-customers
is not only helpful, its crucial to your own bottom line, especially in a time when the technical aspects
of sales and marketing are increasing rapidly, risking underperformance by many of your Partners if theyarent given the means to make this process easier.
In doing so, youll develop stronger partnerships, streamline information ow, and increase opportunities
for multi-touch campaigns and co-marketing.
And so, the question still remains:
What could your channel accomplish if you could make it easier for your Partners to market and sell
your product or service?
With these tools, you can get one step closer to an answer. . .
CONCLUSION
Josh GibbsAssistant Director of Marketing and Social Media
Everything Channel
(E) joshua.gibbs@ec.ubm.com(T) 919-573-6985
Miriam KutcherVice President, Marketing
Everything Channel(E) miriam.kutcher@ec.ubm.com(T) 508-416-1162
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