Shh! You’re in a library. Or are you?

I’ve noticed a trend of suppliers and partners viewing CMM as more of a storage space for campaign materials than as the powerful tool it can be — if you use it properly. The Media Library Phenomenon, or whatever you choose to call it, holds back both sides of the channel relationship from a truly successful experience. By viewing it as strictly a library for content, you’re missing out big time on campaign, lead gen and measurement opportunities.

Are you making the most use of your CMM (channel marketing and management) platform? Suppliers treating CMM as a place just to deposit content will all but guarantee that’s how partners see it, and they’ll react as you’d expect — grab content and log out. Let’s go over how partners and suppliers are both at risk of missing major benefits if CMM is used solely as a media library.  

 

CRM is Clunky

What’s your current process for creating campaigns? Do you log into your CMM platform, download necessary resources, log into your CRM (customer relationship management) platform, upload the assets, and then get to work? Hopefully, having to read all those steps one after the other highlights how many steps it takes to do a task you could accomplish much more easily in CMM alone. Completing campaigns in your CMM platform saves you tons of time and the headache of having to transfer assets around between platforms.

 

A Waste of Valuable Resources

Your CMM platform has so much more to offer than the media you associate it with. When you use the CMM platform to send out social media or schedule campaigns, you get much more bang for your buck than the ten-step system that takes it to tackle digital marketing with a CRM system. You get powerful analytics showing you how your campaigns are performing, which let you make informed next steps for future campaign planning. You also get the advantage of easily using multi-tactic campaigns instead of one-touch campaigns — piecemealing together individual campaigns in CRM takes way more time than it could using a CMM that’s tailor-made to help you get campaigns up and running quickly. For example, many campaigns are optimized for use on the Zift platform. So, you’ll be forced to recode when and if you try to move and manage them inside another tool. That’s more time, energy and resources most partners don’t have on hand.

 

Foster Trust & Collaboration

Trust is an integral component of any successful channel relationship. Partners may be apprehensive to use CMM systems because they don’t want to share precious mailing lists with the system in fears it may be stolen. Prove that wrong — and establish that your CMM system is built in a way that partner-owned mailing lists can’t even be viewed by suppliers (like Zift CMM, which meets GDPR guidelines and the highest standards of security protection of privacy over everyone’s data). In addition, a true CMM system fosters collaboration and better results. Baked-in workflows and best practices provide channel-specific guidance, direction and visibility across the sales cycle that CRM systems just don’t support.

 

Make the Most of Your Investment

Are you using your CMM platform as strictly a library, or do you want to get the most bang for your buck? You’ll get much more visibility into partner activities — and their engagement levels, something you’re definitely invested in — if you convince them to conduct activities in your CMM platform. Incentivize and reward partners for logging into your portal and achieving results.

Another investment you should make the most of? Your campaigns. Give partners good, engaging content to work with. That should be on your mind from day one of a channel program: how can you create content that partners will engage with and keep them coming back for more? Ideally, you should make campaigns less of a product message and more of a conversation. What will connect with both partner and end-user needs? Creating content that connects with both these groups, but especially with end-users, is key to engagement.

 

Want to get started with a CMM system that presents powerful, unique opportunities for both suppliers and partners? Take a look at Zift CMM — or, drop us a line via the comments below telling us about your experience with the Media Library Phenomenon.