Delivering an Effective Marketing Strategy for Channel Partners

Thinking smarter may just mean thinking smaller

Marketing is a central element to achieving, maintaining, and expanding reach and engagement with channel partners and end users. To fully enable their partners and maintain brand consistency throughout the product or service journey from development, through partner channels, and ultimately to the end customer, vendors need to put on their digital marketing caps and nurture effective campaigns with their partners’ needs in mind.

Both to and through partner marketing is now heavily dependent upon the effective use of social media, marketing by persona, and analytics. Vendors have the software, portals, and business intelligence to make that happen. Partners however, are often short-staffed from the marketing end of things, that is if they even have a marketing staff, so it’s critical to provide clear, concise, bite-size content so that a clear brand message can travel through the channels for an effective partner marketing strategy. According to the 2019 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, short formats are overwhelmingly preferred by busy professionals, who call out brevity as a key. The study goes on to note that 57% -- over half of decision makers said their preferred format for thought leadership is snackable media that can be digested in a few minutes. Content must be able to be quickly consumed and easily shared or repurposed across mobile and even wearable devices, if needed. Catching and keeping that attention, if only for a matter of seconds, is key.

With that in mind, here are some marketing content recommendations for your partner marketing strategy and why:

• Videos - Educate partners about pains they or their customers may experience and what you have learned about solving these pains
• Infographics - Provide immediate and uniquely informative visuals that use statistics and facts to attract interest; these can be critical to a channel sale
• eBooks - Deliver short-topic writing that speaks to a pain and offers potential solutions for your channel partners; contrary to the name, these are often shorter 1000-2000 word think pieces, as opposed to the 20 -page-long white papers of old
• Blog Articles - Focus on trend-worthy topics and be approximately 400-600 words in length, contributing to overall thought leadership in the industry
• Curated Lists - Remain popular, because top 5 or similar lists are easy to read, drive higher click rates and can be repurposed from channel to end customer
• Copy Blocks - Allow partners to combine content with their own original writing to produce new or revamp existing content
• Social Media Copy Blocks - Enable busy partners to utilize blurbs you provide for use on their social networks in quick and easy fashion
• Keywords - Help your partners focus their content (when using these words within their writing) for better search optimization rankings

For vendors and their partners to succeed and deliver the experience a customer might expect from the product or service, their marketing strategies must be focused and innovative, as to maintain brand awareness and secure customer satisfaction. The initiatives put forth above are not as difficult to accomplish as one might think, as so much of the content, once originally conceived, can be repurposed across many formats and platforms. In the end, you’ve provided relevant and brand-consistent marketing tools that most partners and, in turn, customers can digest a little easier. Who said thinking small was such a bad thing? Sometimes it’s the smartest way to go.