Picture this scenario, you are the first Channel Marketer hired at your organization. You have a handful of partners; a strong investment has been made to support your efforts and you have spent the past few months building out content for your partners to use via your new partner portal. You put out a huge press release, run a month-long marketing campaign and host a webinar to orient all your partners on how to use your recently
deployed PRM. You have every expectation that the deal registrations are going to start flowing in because of your partners being armed with all your awesome marketing collateral. Crickets… 60 days later, you are scratching your head wondering
why your cobranded content is not being used, why your campaigns in a box have largely gone un-deployed and why your case studies aren’t being shared on social. Wondering why? The problem is not your content. The problem really comes down to two things, one of which you can do something about. It might just be on your shoulders to help your partners understand how to become better marketers in the first place. Maybe the problem is not your content, but rather your partners do not understand how to effectively deploy the content in the first place?
1) Never assume your Partners know the basics
Pick your top partners, and the first thing you might want to do is an audit of their marketing technology stack. Start with the fundamentals by ensuring they have Google Analytics set up, they have social media profiles created and their web to lead forms are all working correctly. Then you can move into more advanced topics like
Marketing Automation, paid search, and paid social campaigns. From your organization’s perspective, this should be viewed as a worthwhile use of your time. Your salary is an investment, the resources you are building for your partners are an investment. If your partners are not effectively deploying and measuring the success of that investment the
ROI is likely not as high as it could be. Spend the time upfront to validate that your partners have a fundamental understanding of how technology should be deployed and then orchestrated to measure the impact of your marketing efforts with and through them.
2) Bring in some Air Cover
YouTube alone has enough content to help any marketing newbie understand how to improve their skills, if only by a small margin. You can do better than that, without spending a dime on training. Most of the leading technology companies today also provide best practice training that you can organize and curate in an organized manner for your partners. Take for example HubSpot, and their 100% free online training. If your partners are struggling with understanding how to write blogs or build an effective social media strategy point them to HubSpot’s amazing free training sessions. The same training is available for Google AdWords, LinkedIn etc. Make it easy for your partners and go find it for them!
3) Organize it for Easy Access
If your
partner portal gives you the ability to group experiences and content based upon user roles, make sure marketers only see the right content. Leverage playbooks and learning tracks to deploy links out to these free resources so partners don’t have to go find it themselves.
Request a demo today to explore Vartopia's partner portal to take your channel partner marketing strategies to the next level and see greater returns on your investment.
