Saepio's Distributed Marketing and Marketing Asset Management Blog

Why Channel Partner Marketers Need Marketing Asset Management

Boost Channel Partner Marketing, Drive Sales

Companies can miss significant revenue opportunities if their channel partners don’t market effectively.

Multi-channel marketing is rapidly emerging as a fundamental requirement for marketing success.  The fragmenting of mediums, the emerging role of social channels and the consumers’ desire for coordinated messaging all point to the importance of the use and coordination of all channels for marketing activities.

Unfortunately, however, many companies are not reaping all of the benefits that effective multi-channel marketing can provide.  This is especially true for companies that sell primarily through channel partners such as distributors, dealers, and value-added resellers.  Companies that go-to-market through independent or quasi-independent partners face a unique set of marketing challenges.  They can run advertising or a local marketing campaign to raise awareness of the brand and create favorable brand impressions, but success in the marketplace often depends largely on the marketing efforts of channel partners.  And when your channel partners don’t market effectively, your revenues suffer.

Despite substantial incentives, many channel partners underutilize multi-channel marketing resources such as a distributed marketing platform.

Many companies that sell through indirect channels offer substantial incentives to encourage their partners to market more aggressively.  Some provide significant financial assistance for marketing in the form of cooperative advertising and market development fund programs.  Many companies also assist channel partners by providing brand-compliant logos and images or even complete marketing materials such as direct mailers, e-mail marketing messages, print advertisements, and point-of-sale displays.  However, even these incentives don’t always entice channel partners to market as aggressively as they should.

Channel partners underutilize multi-channel marketing for a variety of reasons.  They may believe, for example, that the marketing programs provided by the corporate marketing department don’t fit their particular needs or respond effectively to local market conditions.  Therefore, they aren’t highly motivated to run those programs.

The more significant problem, though, is often a lack of resources.  Running a multi-channel campaign can be a complex and time-consuming undertaking even when the corporate marketing department supplies many of the components of the campaign.  For example, to run just an email campaign, a channel partner will probably be required to find a resource, hire a graphic designer or find content and find an email solution to distribute the content.  Anything printed also requires the graphic designer or a marketing agency to complete the campaign materials, and the partner will need a printing company to produce and possibly mail those materials.  Many channel partners are small businesses, and they simply don’t have the internal resources to coordinate the work required to execute single-channel marketing programs on a regular basis let alone a multi-channel programs.

Marketing asset management solutions boost channel partner marketing efforts and brand compliance by making it easy to create and execute customized local marketing programs.

To increase the frequency and boost the effectiveness of partners’ multi-channel marketing efforts, companies need to enhance their marketing support programs in two ways.  They must—

• Enable channel partners to customize marketing programs to fit their specific marketing needs and local market conditions.
  

• Make it simple for channel partners to create and execute multi-channel campaigns. 

The good news is there are tools available that enable corporate marketers to accomplish both of these objectives.  Today an advanced breed of distributed marketing management technology such as Saepio’s MarketPort platform technology provides full multi-channel marketing that is simple for channel partners to use.  With these systems, the local marketer simply has to select the content and the mediums to be used in the multi-channel campaign and then submit the multi-channel campaign for execution.  No phone calls or emails to the various fulfillment partners are needed as the campaign implementation process is fully automated.  Payment for the entire campaign and to all the various parties involved, for example, can even be a single credit card payment process.

The core component of a distributed marketing management solution is an online “marketing storefront” catalog of marketing assets, campaigns and collateral.  When a user needs to order materials, he or she logs into a secure website, selects the desired items from the catalog, and places the order.  Behind the marketing storefront, digital asset management, dynamic cross-media collateral customization and marketing fulfillment automation work in seamless harmony to make the process simple for the local marketer.

Implementing a next-generation distributed marketing management platform can be a powerful tool for enhancing and improving the direct marketing efforts of channel partners.  By enabling extensive customization, these solutions permit channel partners to tailor direct marketing programs to fit their individual needs and local competitive circumstances.  Just as important, these solutions make it easy for channel partners to create and execute the multi-channel campaigns the channel partners’ customers expect today.  Everything required to run a campaign can be handled at one place, at one time, using one solution provider.

The bottom line?  If your company sells through channel partners, implementing an enterprise marketing technology such as a multi-channel distributed marketing management solution can help both you and your partners improve marketing effectiveness and drive increased revenues.

If you’d like to learn more about Marketing Asset Management solutions, here are a few links you may be interested in:

 

White Paper Series Outlines How Marketing Asset Management and Collateral Customization Solutions Result in Streamlined Processes, Faster Cycle Times and Higher Return on Investment

© This document contains copyrighted materials from PointBalance, Inc. Saepio also contributed to the content creation and editing.