Three steps to driving partner adoption

The premise today is that Partner Experience (PX) is as important as Customer Experience (CX) – across all verticals.

The catch is, making things simple for partners is not always simple for vendors – but when it drives adoption, sales growth, and partner and customer satisfaction, the rewards far outweigh the effort.

Here we take a look at three key steps vendors can take to drive partner adoption and increase ROI.

1. Customer-focused content

Through constantly developing great new customer-centric content, and rolling it out in a regular cadence, vendors have experienced great success with their channel program.

Infographics, e-books, white papers, and other pieces of collateral to help bolster marketing campaigns and add value for customers are all well-received by your partners – and can be customized by the partner with their logo, color pallet, and company branding. Helping build their market profile and expand their digital marketing footprint in existing and emerging markets.

Additionally, creating to-partner communication ensures your partner network is aware of all the new campaigns and collateral available on your portal and in your content library.

A growing content trend is animations. Creating simple animations that clearly explain and sell the value proposition of your product/solution, then using them across multiple tactics enhances engagement.

If you can, keep it short and to the point. If your video is long (such as a webinar), it’s ideal to chapter the content into shorter easy viewing segments.

2. Cadence

This is an area where many vendors feel overwhelmed. Adding a constant stream of new and updated collateral and campaigns encourages partners to revisit your portal while allowing them to maintain conversations with customers as they progress along the buyer’s journey.

It may not always be possible to create a sales or product-focused campaign. But it’s essential you don’t go quiet. Offering your partners campaigns that feature relevant and helpful business advice, the top industry trends to be aware of or best practice thought leadership pieces are highly popular.

Partners are in desperate need of new content. Producing and delivering a constant stream of new or updated content into your channel program is challenging. But it’s the key to driving partner engagement and campaign adoption.

3. Portal design

The first piece of content partners see is your channel portal. How this is presented can drive or diminish their PX, and be the deciding factor in adopting or abandoning your portal.

Your portal should be stylish and uncluttered in its layout. Make your portal intuitive so it’s easy for partners to find what they’re looking for within one or two clicks. Partners don’t have the time to go searching for relevant content or campaigns.

Partners want, and expect, everything they need to be readily available and to quickly find answers to their questions.

Build your reputation as the vendor that makes business and sales easier for your partners.

Creating content for multiple products and solutions and building them into multi-tactic campaigns is time-consuming and often challenging for our clients, so the Elastic Digital creative team is able to do it for them. This is resulting in higher partner engagement and reach, while enhancing demand generation and delivering visible ROI.

Sponsored by our partners at Elastic Digital, written by Cameron Dimopoulos (Agency Manager)