Addressing The Channel Marketing Challenge

By Dana Harder, Senior Editor

In an environment that is increasingly competitive, many vendors are facing the same challenge: securing and maintaining mindshare among partners that are representing tens, or even hundreds, of other vendors.

Regardless of a vendor’s channel strategy, organizations can garner long-term engagement and loyalty by empowering VARs to sell and market effectively. Vendors can support channel sales and marketing programs by addressing the following:

Generating leads for partners;

Making it easy for VARs to sell solutions; and

Enabling VARs to engage in social media conversations.

However, many VARs lack the time or manpower to consistently update resources, share content and connect with prospects and customers online.

Content syndication solutions were designed to help vendors directly and automatically publish microsites, collateral and topical campaigns on partner web sites quickly and seamlessly. As a result, vendors can ensure consistent branding across the entire channel and provide partners with the resources to power their marketing and sales efforts.

Through syndication, vendors also can improve email marketing results. Partners can integrate targeted lead lists, deploy co-branded email campaigns and capture new interest by driving traffic to syndicated landing pages. Channel partners can even send automated, co-branded email campaigns on the vendor’s behalf.

Simplifying Social Communication And Engagement

Social media is playing a more prominent role in lead generation and nurturing processes.

Research from Twitter and Compete revealed that 59% of Twitter users visited B2B tech sites during their time online. Moreover, 30% of social network users actively searched for B2B tech brands on Twitter.

Yet many B2B executives don’t have the resources to dedicate their days to connecting with and engaging prospects on social networks. Automated social syndication helps vendors and their partners close the loop on social lead generation.

For example, TIE Kinetix automates the distribution of small pieces of content through partners’ social identities. Vendors can create a Twitter message and all partners can tweet it out. At the same time, if any prospect clicks on the link in the tweet, they’ll be directed to the appropriate VAR web site and the relevant content.

In an effort to provide full flexibility, vendors also can choose whether to automatically tweet on behalf of partners. Or, partners can review and approve tweets before sending.

By closing the gap for partners, and making content and social media marketing for them to participate in, vendors can experience a substantial improvement in lead generation and overall sales results. Not only will this help increase the vendor’s bottom line, it also will improve the partner business, resulting in stronger channel relationships.

To learn more about how content and social syndication can impact channel marketing and sales results, fill out the form below to download the white paper, titled: The Keys To Channel Partner Success.