It was another busy day at the Channel Focus North America with Latin America conference. It was definitely the day of Partner Marketing.
It started with Shaun Jones, VP Marketing, IBM Software – Business Partner and Mid-Market with his inspiring keynote, “What’s the Role of the Vendor in Enabling More Effective Partner Marketing?” He challenged the audience to re-think their requirements for channel partners when it comes to marketing. Not only do you need a true marketing owner at the partner organization, but you also need to provide the necessary training to ensure they are successful marketers. Much like you do when it comes to educating partners about your products and technology, you must do the same with your marketing strategy and tactics. He also discussed the importance of providing a mix of multiple tactics in order for your Through Partner Marketing to be successful.
This was a great transition into another workshop about the “Five Golden Rules of Partner Marketing.” This session covered many of the same topics covered in the Day One session, which you can read from my Channel Focus Conference: Day One post. There were a few additional thoughts shared by this group including:
- Provide partners with pre-built campaigns, but also allow them to do their own.
- Remember partners are at different stages of their business and therefore you need to understand their specific needs to support them with marketing.
- Email campaigns are most successful when used to drive upsells and for ongoing nurturing of current prospects.
- Remember to re-purpose the content you already have across the various channels to offset the need to create new content.&
- Consider going into the field to train your partners and drive adoption.
- Analytics and measurement was again an important rule to ensure you have visibility into what is working and what is not.
The conference sessions closed with Ken Romley, CEO at Zift Solutions as he shared “Five Steps for Improving Marketing Through Channel Partners”. Here is the summary slide with the five steps:
As you can see it was another great day in Miami with a lot of great conversation and key takeaways for suppliers. I hope that you will consider these as you continue to drive more through your channel.
Whether you were at the event or you’ve just been following online, we would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think are the key things suppliers must do to have effective partner marketing? Let us know in the comment section below!
