The 3 key challenges that businesses with channel partners usually face involve enabling the channel partners to market their brand without distortion, the inability to measure the effectiveness of the marketing investment made on or by their channel marketers and the inability to get their messages out on time and to a wide audience.
Here’s how marketing automation can help in these challenging areas:
Brand management
Good marketing automation software programs come with brand management capabilities that will allow businesses to enable their channel marketing partners to engage in marketing their products and services, without worrying about branding inconsistencies. A marketing automation software that’s strong on the brand management side will allow you to limit the access and permissions of your channel partners, thus allowing them to edit only those portions of your marketing message that you’d want them to. That means, not having to micro-manage every e-mail marketing campaign or check every landing page, because you know the scope for misrepresentation of your brand or its message is considerably reduced.
Spreading the word
Having a strong channel partner network is great, but that alone is not enough to get your brand the attention it deserves. What you also need is a way for your channel partners to get your marketing message out to their prospects through all possible media channels. And, this is where a marketing automation software with multichannel collateral creation capabilities can be of great use. However, make sure you choose a marketing automation program that adopts a template-driven approach to marketing and sales collateral creation. The benefit: you get to sketch out the key elements such as template design, layout and core content, while your channel partners can use them to create localized versions of your marketing campaign that relates best to their target market. While you are at it, remember that a marketing automation software that offers social sharing features would be an added bonus.
Measuring the marketing investment
With multiple channel partners, putting concrete figures on your marketing returns can become challenging. You end up grappling with questions like—how to quantify the marketing efforts of your channel partners or How to justify your marketing investment in them. Well, with a marketing automation software in tow, you wouldn’t have to worry about these questions. Your marketing automation software should be able to help you put a number onto your marketing figures. Get answers to questions like how many e-mails your channel partners sent out, how many prospects opened them, which marketing media elicits maximum response and so on.
To know more about how you can make your channel partners more effective, please contact us today…
