Channel Partner Content Syndication & Marketing Automation: Maintain Consistent Messaging Channel-Wide for More Efficient Marketing

8/9/2019 Channel Partner Content Syndication & Marketing Automation: Maintain Consistent Messaging Channel-Wide for More Efficient Marketing

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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) [email protected](T) 919-573-6985

Miriam KutcherVice President, Marketing

Everything Channel(E) [email protected](T) 508-416-1162

Documents

Channel Partner Content Syndication & Marketing Automation: Maintain Consistent Messaging Channel-Wide for More Efficient Marketing