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If you’ve decided you need a channel marketing strategy, you’ve likely allocated a specific budget for it. Convincing stakeholders to fund marketing activities might have been challenging, but now comes the even tougher part: making that investment pay off. Ensuring your strategy is effective and yields a strong return will be crucial to justify the expenditure and achieve your goals.
Our Top Channel Marketing Strategy Recommendations
We’ve worked with numerous channel companies, big and small, national and international, at various growth stages. Here are the top recommendations we always make for their channel marketing strategy.
Your content marketing strategy should Be accessible
Lots of partner programmes are complicated and buried in websites. If you want to recruit partners then you need to:
- Make it easy to find out about working with you and what you look for in a partner.
- Be clear about how the programme operates, especially if it has different tier levels.
- Clearly communicate the benefits.
- Make it easy to sign up and understand.
If you fail to get this part right, then no amount of marketing activities will help you attract and retain great partners. We always encourage an evaluation of the programme and the way it is presented before you do anything else.
Make it easy to promote your brand
If your plan is to win market share, then you need to make it as easy as possible for partners to sell your brand. After all, you are not going to be an exclusive partner and you will be competing for the sales team’s time and energy.
There are two parts to solving this. The first is to give partners all the information and the tools they need to sell your brand. This includes training on the issues your products and services solve, through marketing brochures they insert their logo and contact details into, to support services that help get a sale over the line, such as access to a sales consultant to help draw up quotes.
The second is to make it easy for their customers to understand why you and the partner. Work with your partners to build a story that shows not just why your product is but why your partner is the best one to buy it from. There are things you can do to help.
For instance, do you need to work with the partner to create a unique after-sales model that makes them stand out? Will they need technical support such as help with system integration? Or will an incentive for orders over a certain value encourage consideration of your brand over others?
Read more about our Incentive methodology.
Ultimately you are asking: “What will give different partners the edge?” Get this right and you’ll create more goodwill to sell the product over and above commission rates.
Do the thinking for your partners
Partners don’t always have much or any marketing resources so the more you can hand them on a plate the better. Think about creating promotional campaigns for products or services that they can pick up and run without much effort. If you can provide the outbound email template and copy, the landing page and the online banner adverts then you’re well on your way to success.
It doesn’t have to be complex either – it could be a monthly email newsletter with offers and information about new products that you write and the brand.
Invest in people as well as assets
You need to constantly stay ‘front of mind’ to be in the running for sales and to stay competitive. So consider things like channel sales incentives and training events that will keep the sales teams energised and engaged. Assets will help them do their job, but helping them do their job brilliantly is where you can differentiate.
Measure success and keep at it
Some channel marketing activities will work brilliantly for everyone all of the time. Some marketing activities will work for others some of the time, some won’t work at all, and some ideas will have an impact at launch but need lots of continued investment to keep them alive and deliver an ROI.
Overcoming Challenges in your Channel Marketing strategy
Channel marketing comes with its own set of challenges. Here are a few common ones and how to address them:
- Misalignment of goals: Ensure your goals are aligned with your partners’ objectives. Regular communication and collaboration can help bridge any gaps.
- Lack of control: Since you’re relying on third parties, you may have less control over how your products are marketed. Provide clear guidelines and maintain open lines of communication to mitigate this issue.
- Performance variability: Different partners may perform at different levels. Continuously monitor performance and provide additional support where needed to ensure consistency.
Summary
Channel marketing can be a powerful tool for achieving growth and building a strong brand presence. It has become increasingly important for tech companies, to use B2B channel marketing strategies to boost partner sales!
They all have their pros and cons so continually assess what works for you, and what works for others, and use your insight to identify what you need to adjust so you have a channel marketing programme that builds results and sustains them.
Speak to our Head of Channel & Incentives to see how we can help you get more from your Channel Marketing Strategy!