Great Content Makes Great Channel Partners
At their best, channel partners act as a force-multiplier for sales by helping to find and engage new customers and offer great service to existing ones. Attracting, training, and equipping the right partners requires focused “enablement” content that helps them prospect, present, and provide support for your product.
Partner marketing also acts as a force-multiplier but with an added twist: partners are both a target and an extension of your marketing efforts. To- and through-partner marketing programs have different objectives and success metrics that require two tracks of targeted content. Both efforts start with developing a plan, clear internal and outbound messages, and tools to convey them.
To- versus through-partner marketing
To-partner marketing aims to attract, onboard, and motivate partners quickly and to maintain top-of-mind awareness and brand preference once they join your program. It’s about finding the right partners and maximizing your share of partner, and in turn, joint customer business.
Through-partner marketing equips the channel to promote your offerings to customers and prospects on their own or with your help to fund, create, and execute campaigns.
Partners are People First
To-partner messaging usually revolves around the business benefits—helping partners grow their companies by helping to open doors, differentiate their portfolio, win more deals, and increase profit margin. That’s all well and good, but the most successful long-term relationships thrive because of less tangible benefits.
Partner satisfaction surveys often show companies place a premium on things like:
- Sales engineers (SEs) helping to conduct product demonstrations and ROI calculations
- SEs providing ‘above and beyond’ pre-and post-sales support
- Corporate and field marketing teams helping to increase awareness and accelerate pipeline
- Maintaining an elite brand reputation
- Being more responsive and easier to work with than the competition
To-partner marketing does not always emphasize or take enough credit for these rubber-meets-road benefits. Recruitment efforts, onboarding materials, and enablement content should emphasize these less-tangible, more personal advantages along with your product benefits.
You may also want or need to create targeted content to engage and motivate different teams within channel partner organizations. For example, promotions to incentivize sales and SEs to arrange meetings or conduct product demos.
Targeted to-partner content helps to maintain top-of-mind awareness and grow your ‘share of partner.’ Examples of ongoing communications include monthly channel newsletters, partner-focused email and social media updates, podcasts, webinars, and other events.
“Portals” have their pros and cons
Recognizing channel partners’ unique needs, some companies build “members only” sites used to register deals, track pipeline, and provide sales enablement, training, and marketing tools all in one place. Partner portals require dedicated resources to build, support, and maintain the site, and content needs will vary depending on how they get used.
They’re not always viable or necessary, but can go a long way toward achieving the goal of making it easier for channel partners to do business with you.
“Through-partner” Content Changes, Too
In theory, partners should be able to use whatever content you create to attract and nurture prospects on your own. But getting other companies to integrate your solutions into their own marketing efforts is not a simple “if you build it, they will come” proposition.
Partners may not have extensive marketing resources and their primary goal is promoting their own brand. Your product or service may be only one piece of a broader practice or multi-vendor solution.
Simple steps make it easier for partners to incorporate your messaging. For example, making it easy to add their own logo and content information to ads and PDFs. And, making your logo and simple cut/paste product overviews and company descriptions readily available for easy inclusion in outbound campaigns. Keeping messages simple makes it easier for more partners to leverage your materials out of the box with less customization and, for lack of a better term, “hand holding” required.
Next-level marketing support would involve creating collateral, web copy, and social media campaigns that show how broader solutions fit together. This might take extra effort but can be well worth the investment if partners use them to the full extent. As the relationship evolves, other opportunities to create joint case studies, press releases, and ads should arise.
But in general, the key to through-partner marketing lies in making things simple and easy to use. This is where turnkey events and “campaigns in a box” come into play. Turnkey programs would include all the elements needed to run advertising, social media or direct marketing campaigns – emails, collateral/fulfilment tools, promotional offers, landing pages, and step-by-step guidance on how to run the campaign.
Last but not least, partners may wish to use market development funds (MDFs) to conduct targeted research that helps lay the groundwork for new product introductions (NPIs) or sales campaigns. These efforts also require more upfront effort but can be extremely valuable to evolving your own messaging, reports, blogs, and campaign themes.
You may need to share the spotlight
It’s important to keep in mind that resellers carry multiple vendors’ solutions, which might mean you’re sharing their line card with arch-rival competitors. Being more flexible and willing to engage and assist partners’ marketing teams goes a long way toward securing brand preference within the sales ranks where proposals and recommendations get created.
AimPoint Brings Added Bench Depth and Know-How
AimPoint Group brings a team of veteran industry analysts and proven marketers with decades of experience in to- and through-partner marketing. We’ll help you create high-impact content and conduct research used to attract and onboard partners and equip them to feature your products and services however they choose.
We understand their unique needs—and yours—and the nuances of to- and through-partner content created for every stage of the engagement lifecycle. Whether you’re looking for crunch-time project support – like a ‘partner summit’ or the launch of a partner program, portal, promotion, or campaign – or ongoing help with content and communications, our team becomes your team.
We love to build programs, messaging, and high-impact content from the ground up, but we’re also happy to jump in and make things move faster when that’s all you need. AimPoint Group partners with you to help build and drive channel partnerships, like a force-multiplier for your force-multiplier, when and however you need us.
For details, access our services brief.