Uncover 5 Powerful Tips to Improve Your Partner Marketing

Evaluate your brand. With so many vendors to choose from, potential customers will surely be weighing your brand, services and support against the competition. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Would you want to do business with you? Why or why not? What brand decisions or online improvements could you make to ensure that your prospects decide they want to reach out to you? Is your site too busy or too blank? Make sure it’s designed with your potential customer in mind.

Put your best foot forward on social media. LinkedIn is largely accepted in B2B as the go-to place for first impressions. So, if you’re meeting with customers for the first time, chances are good that they’re going to look at your profile before your meeting. Keep that in mind, and view your profile with a critical eye. Make sure you, your executives and the sales team have a professional headshot, updated/edited profile links, complete contact information (such as for Skype and Twitter), as well as short descriptions with keywords for each of your past positions. People are always looking for things you have in common, so the more you tell them, the more opportunities for discussion topics. Make sure that these same underlying principles are applied with 100% consistency across social media–from your Twitter profile, website, Facebook page, Google+ account and YouTube channel.

Rally the troops. Getting your employees involved is a great way to cast a wider marketing net. Encourage employees to update their profiles and write blogs on topics that matter to them. You can also create content on a weekly or monthly basis for your employees to post out across their social sites. This way, you have a unified message that has a much further reach. Just think of the possible retweets and click-throughs you can generate. Did you know that Google monitors this newfound traction and gives you higher search ranking as a result? Ultimately, employee involvement can be the key to making your company significantly easier to find online.

Make your website a lead-generating machine. All of your marketing activities, whether it’s an email campaign or a post on LinkedIn, should highlight your business and give a clear route via links to your website. But, is your website ready for those visits? In order to make your website a lead-generation machine, you need to ensure that when prospects arrive they intrinsically know how to navigate your site, understand how you can solve their pain points and, finally, quickly see how to contact you. Also, today’s B2B consumers are tired of stock photography on vendor sites; they’d much rather see the real people they’ll be working with. It’s a little detail, but it can impact their evaluation of your site and your company.

Continue to leave bread crumbs to gated content. Use gated content (whitepapers, e-books or videos) in exchange for visitors giving you their email address and contact information. Gating some of your information will allow you to capture user data. You can then use that data to generate demand with lead-nurturing newsletters and other email correspondence. Through our Partner Demand Center, VMware partners can use highly customizable email campaigns with landing pages for demand gen while also driving traffic to their site. And, through website content syndication, partners can use high-quality assets as additional sources of gated content for capturing emails or free product trials to generate leads. Just think of the time these resources can save your company.