Enterprises that distribute their products and services via dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of channel partners know it’s a challenge to simultaneously focus on global, regional, and local growth. Corporate marketers have the overarching goal of building brand awareness, preference, and reputation through strategic initiatives—and to support this goal, they must ensure their channel partners are empowered to grow at a local level.
The bigger the enterprise, the harder it can seem to monitor, manage, and optimize each channel partner and their marketing results—but an effective channel partner marketing plan can help enterprises of any size grow market share and revenue.
Optimize Your Channel Partners’ Resources With an Effective Plan
Between operating their on-the-ground business, providing customer service, selling, and maintaining relationships, your channel partners’ resources are already stretched pretty thin. Furthermore, channel partners don’t always have a dedicated in-house marketing team that’s well-versed in the best practices that effectively attract and retain customers.
Your enterprise marketing team likely has the skills and know-how to create sophisticated marketing campaigns, and a proper channel partner marketing plan should enable your channel partners to tap into this expertise. By formalizing—and centralizing—the way local teams access things like branded templates, messages, and graphics, you’ll rest assured that your brand’s marketing campaigns are always professional, contemporary, and compliant. On top of better content, when your local teams aren’t wasting time rooting through files for the right templates and using inefficient systems to customize their messaging, they can allocate their resources to the strategic initiatives that develop business and close sales.
Enable Your Local Teams to Be Experts in Your Offering and Processes
Your channel partners know your offering is the best in the business—that’s why they’ve chosen to be a franchise, distributor, advisor, etc.—but do they know how to sell your product or service in a way that ensures your customers feel the same?
According to BrainShark, only 35% of companies have effective coaching and development programs for their channel partners. A channel marketing plan should incorporate a strategic education program that focuses on improving employee knowledge on your products and services, as well as how they should be pitched and sold to customers.
In addition to deeply understanding your product and how it’s positioned, channel marketing plans should include proper employee training on the tools and technology that power business processes. By ensuring your employees are adept at using the software and systems they’re provided with, you can help drive efficiency and productivity—both of which contribute to gains in revenue and channel partner (and in turn, customer) satisfaction.
Track, Analyze, and Improve Channel Partner Marketing Campaigns for Better Results
Corporate teams need a finger on the pulse of each of their channel partners’ marketing results—but that gets difficult when you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of channels and only two hands
Your channel partners are unlikely to have the sophisticated technology and skills it takes to make data-driven decisions and improvements. In fact, a 2017 study on IT Channel Marketing by Lauchlan found that tracking ROI is, by far, the biggest marketing challenge channel partners face.
Implementing an analytics tracking program enables your channel partners to gain data on their marketing campaigns’ success, all while providing corporate teams with the visibility they need to identify opportunities and optimize local campaigns. Effective channel marketing plans place measurement at the fore—ensuring that corporate teams have the ability to track customer behavior on a local level and can make expert recommendations to help their channels boost performance.
Corporate Marketers and Channel Partners Can Achieve More Together With Distributed Marketing
For enterprises with multiple channel partners, a formalized plan streamlines your processes, provides consistent information and collateral to local teams, and helps them deliver more impactful campaigns—all of which contribute to corporate success.
Distributed marketing is helping enterprise teams develop comprehensive channel marketing plans that are designed to grow brands at a local level. Ready to learn more about how distributed marketing can help you achieve better communication with your channel partners, resulting in more visibility, better compliance, and a better use of resources? Get the Ultimate Guide to Distributed Marketing now.
