The channel marketing landscape has changed significantly in the past seven years alongside general marketing communications. It is the connected marketplace that has fuelled a change in the way in which marketers communicate and influence end users.
However, channel marketing is still a relatively unknown discipline within the world of marketing. Not because it’s a dark art, but mainly because it is a very specific form of marketing communications that often gets lost among the more glamorous world of social media, advertising and PR.
The actual role of a partner marketer is a varied and exciting one. It can take the form of working with a number of competing vendors on a daily basis, following guidelines to represent the vendor brands, while also trying to establish and not lose their own systems integrator or value added reseller brand identity.
Today’s channel marketing is now all about the needs of the partner – and not the vendor – where the emphasis has historically been. Partners understand the importance and power of a brand and its online reputation. They have adapted and invested in the area of marketing, ensuring the right messages are being communicated using the most appropriate channels to influence multiple audiences; employees, existing customers, prospects and the wider vendor community.
As partners have become more sophisticated in their marketing, vendors too need to change the way they market themselves to partners and more importantly, how they market through and with their partners to serve the ultimate goal of generating demand among end users. We all used to talk about the ‘customer centric’ model. Now we must acknowledge the ‘partner centric’ model and how partners are dictating the terms of engagement with their vendors.
Long gone are the days of ‘build it and they will come’. Partners do not want to use events or campaigns-in-a-box any more, let alone GRID campaigns or marketing platforms where they have to log-on with yet another username and password to access pre-populated, generalised marketing assets. Some vendors even try to sign-up partners to pre-packaged tweets and blog platforms, but the partners are just not interested because it is too generalised.
Interestingly, when looking at market development funds (MDF) programs we have seen a recent trend towards vendors adopting a discretionary funding model with their partners, instead of the older accrual process. Discretionary funding is granted on a case-by-case basis to specific partners for use on both traditional and modern marketing activities, offering a better fit for tailored and bespoke marketing campaigns.
The problem for the vendors is that they are all offering more or less the same type of assistance. Partners have had enough of pre-packaged marketing programs and will simply not use the assets created any more. Vendors need to rethink their marketing offering for partner communities and start to ‘walk in the shoes of their partners’ to fully understand the changes they need to make to provide actual assets that partners can use in today’s market.
Vendors should ‘insert a pause’ in their approach to channel marketing and really think about the end game – what are they trying to achieve? The answer should be simple. Vendors need to get creative. Using a more tailored, personalised and inspired approach to marketing will create better campaigns that help increase joint revenues. More business will be won together as a result of well planned and targeted marketing campaigns that generate a real return on investment.
At a simplistic level, partners require bespoke marketing materials and content from their vendors for use in more modern and effective marketing activities, such as tailored EDMs and social media advertising to target specific groups of prospects. Partners need to continue to push vendors to create new assets and try to re-use the content that already exists.
Vendors are known to produce huge amounts of content from newsletters, blogs and product specs, to sponsored market research, market statistics and even new industry legislation. Partners should take advantage of this content as it would be expensive to produce in-house and can be repurposed across many communications channels.
It is the connected marketplace that has fuelled a change in the way in which marketers communicate and influence end users.
The vendors that choose to educate their partners through qualified training are welcomed by the partner marketing community. There is also an expectation nowadays that vendors should invest in the time and training to show partners how to write and manage social policies within their business; before trying to force them to use pre-packaged tweets, and then wonder why the uptake is poor.
One area becoming more recognised in channel marketing to help support sales using modern marketing techniques is leveraging ‘thought leadership’. It is as an overused term in the IT & Telco industry – but partners who embrace it and start to own a particular subject or cause in the market, whether through online advertorial/editorial coverage, social media content, website blogs – will start to build an online reputation associated with that chosen topic, demonstrating how they have the solution to solve a common issue.
We’re currently seeing more vendors being advised by large consulting firms to create a ‘concierge service’ for their partners; a sort of marketing helpdesk where partners can call-in and ask questions and seek assistance. The benefit to the vendor is the payback if the partner decides to create a joint campaign for that vendor’s solution. However, this is an expensive approach that again does not directly address the individual needs of the partner.
Ultimately, partners are looking to build a close relationship with vendors not only to help drive joint ventures and revenues, but to gain access to real-life assistance and a more dedicated, hands-on approach.
The vendors who think outside of the box and the partners who are willing to try something new to attract customers – are the ones that will succeed in the future. Channel marketing is about the individual partner and how they can differentiate their brand from that of a similar partner with the backing of a global vendor.
But, the real smart global vendors are the ones working with their partners, collectively defining go-to-market strategies based on sharing their own market knowledge and expertise to achieve success together. After all, that is the definition of a partnership.
