Symantec Sees 516% Increase In Deal Registration Size With Elastic Digital

Companies such as Symantec rely extensively on their partners to not only generate brand awareness, but also acquire a base of loyal and highly engaged customers.

To build a strong customer base, however, partners must have the marketing savvy to drive engagement, conduct meaningful conversations and drive conversions. But according to internal research conducted by Symantec, about 80% of partners did not have a dedicated marketing person, and if they did, the executive was stretched across multiple projects.

In 2012, Symantec conducted an extensive analysis of partners and learned that “the majority of partners really wanted to work with us on marketing initiatives, but they were generally resource poor or spread thinly across multiple vendors,” said Amy Christopher, Partner Marketing Manager for Symantec Asia Pacific and Japan. “We knew we needed to provide a solution that offered partners choice, flexibility and simplicity.”

After a comprehensive review of the market, Symantec implemented the Grid from Elastic Digital, which is designed to enable partners to leverage existing campaign content and execute more robust marketing campaigns. Following the formation of the partnership, Symantec garnered the following results:

• Average deal registration size for Symantec is 516% higher than expected;
• Approximately 33% more contacts acquired than expected;
• Average campaign click-through rates 30% higher than expected; and
• Overall conversion rates 30% higher than expected.

Users had access to different modules, such as Grid Webinar, which was designed to extend the lifespan of pre-recorded video to effectively target prospects and customers. The Grid Promo enabled partners to leverage promotional offers in a more tactical way by delivering an email, reminder email and landing page. All grids are co-branded to specific partners.

Initially, the modules were available in English to partners in Australia, New Zealand, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong. Due to their success, partners in China soon had access the modules.

To ensure partners successfully leveraged the Grid to their full advantage, the solution was supported by The Symantec Partner Marketing Centre (PMC), which offered “concierge and support service to partners,” according to Christopher.

Data Helps Measure Campaign Success

The partner demand generation program featuring the Grid and the Partner Marketing Centre “added a dimension that really brought together all of our partnering benefits — from enablement through to demand generation through to profitability,” Christopher said. Touting an intuitive interface, the Grid offered partners a self-service tool that outlined how to build and execute campaigns.

Because PMC is now linked to the Grid, all partners receive a tailored experience with Symantec reps based on their unique marketing wants and needs.

“For some, that can be as simple as locating a banner for their web site,” Christopher said. “For others, it’s helping them to select and set up a campaign through a tool like the Grid, in many cases even taking on full responsibility as a campaign manager and running the entire campaign, including the lead to opportunity conversion, and then reporting the results back to the partner.”

Offering real-time support for the Grid through PMC helped Symantec increase the overall volume of campaigns being executed. Additionally, split-level tracking and reporting provided partners with detailed data on campaigns, and delivered high-level results to Symantec, while still maintaining database confidentiality.

“Prior to the introduction of this program, we had extremely limited visibility of the impact of the investments we were making in joint marketing initiatives with partners,” Christopher said. “The Grid was a great game changer for us as it allowed partners to maintain privacy around their customer records, but negated the requirement to manually report back on results as the Grid contains all of the campaign data and analytics. Symantec can see the statistics on the success of the investment we make in each Grid campaign and partners can access the detailed customer records to assist them with follow up and conversion.”

• analytics
• content marketing
• data
• deal registration
• demand generation
• engagement
• marketing
• marketing automation
• sales
• Symantec
• The Grid
• video