Campaign-in-a-Box: All-in-One Marketing for Channel Partners

Looks Matter: Partners don’t want to use a vendor’s branding, they don’t want to use the colors associated with the vendor and they certainly don’t want the vendor’s logo screaming at the top of a marketing sheet while theirs whispers in the footer, if at all. Vendor must create a more unbiased look and feel that provides partners with equal billing for their logo in the header, and colors that may be in the vendor’s approved branding guidelines but aren’t the colors it uses for its direct marketing.

You’re Awesome, We Get It: Ever get one of those emails from a company that talks about how great they are? ” Established in 1906, thousands of service people around the world, best-in-class, blah, blah, blah …” What a snoozefest. People don’t care about the company; they want to know how the company is going to help THEM. Materials should first identify the customer’s pain point, discuss ways the reader may have tried to solve them in the past, and explain how the vendor is going to help the customers finally solve that pain point today. Know your strengths: I’m not a writer, I know this, I just surround myself with great writers who love doing campaigns. I suggest you do the same.

Content as an Incentive: While every partner might not use every piece within a campaign in-a-box, vendor must be sure to include the staples. Emails are an obvious, but those emails need to point to a piece of content — this is the carrot at the end of the stick. That content can be from corporate if it doesn’t scream “We’re so Awesome!” Also, event emails are huge. Many of partners and channel account managers use these to promote live and virtual events, so help make their life a little easier. Banner ads help point visitors to the great piece of content or event and, of course, signage and materials for an event such as presentations and telemarketing scripts are incredibly important as well.

Socialize Your Campaign In-a-Box: Here’s an easy equation to recognize: Partner buys list, partner sends campaign-in-a-box email, no one opens email, partner never uses the materials again. What went wrong? If partners aren’t integrating social to build stronger lists and get content out to the people that are looking for it when they are looking they simply won’t be as successful. Partners need their vendors to educate them on how to use social and then as partners are launching your campaign in-a-box email, vendors should provide them with posts/tweets/feeds they should be posting out as their social media amplification.

Launch Pad: Now the vendor has a great campaign-in-a-box, and it looks like something a partner wants to send out: the message is on target, it contains all the right pieces and even has elements for partners to use on social media. Now how are partners supposed to send it out? Vendors that have done it right have included places on the marketing materials for the partners to add their name and contact information, but can they edit the pieces? Providing partners with a marketing automation tool that can edit their content before it’s sent out or printed is key. Vendors should use a platform that allows partners to edit HTML emails, edit PDF datasheets and download other content such as presentations and telemarketing scripts. Some of the platforms we’ve checked out are Zift, Marketing Advocate and StructuredWeb (which also has some slick social media capabilities that we’ve been lucky enough to check out while working on a customer project together).