Channel Maven Consulting Unveils New Marketing Automation Platform

Channel Maven Consulting founder and CEO Heather Margolis has created a new marketing automation platform to ensure partners’ campaigns use effective multimedia to accelerate demand generation and comply with privacy regulations.

Spark Your Channel allows channel partners’ sales and marketing teams to personalize and share vendor-provided multimedia content, such as webinars, podcasts and especially video, which is proved to be more effective in generating leads, according to the company. Marketers and salespeople who use video gain 66% more leads, according to Optinmonster.

Margolis tells Channel Partners there aren’t any other through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platforms that allow partners to personalize a video, webinar or podcast. All other platforms leverage email, forcing partners to load their lists, compromising customer data privacy, she said.

Channel Maven Consulting’s Heather Margolis

“Spark Your Channel was based in large part on feedback from the partner community,” she said. “As Channel Maven Consulting, my team has been working with partners for more than a decade, and we’ve heard that usage rates for TCMA platforms were between 7% and 12%. Partners are downloading the content from the platforms, cutting off the vendor’s ability to track activity. Once we decided to create Spark, we quickly formed an advisory board of partners to get very pointed feedback and guidance. We heard from partners that they have their own marketing automation tools and don’t want to log into a tool for each vendor just to send a single piece of content with a single one-off email. We also heard they don’t want another application to log into on a regular basis, so we’re implementing some AI functionality to make it so partners don’t have to.”

Along with multimedia content, Spark also supports personalization and sharing of text-and graphic-based content, such as e-books, sales sheets, presentations and infographics, so all assets are accessible from one place.

Plus, partners can use the Spark platform without compromising their leads or data privacy by loading their customer contact lists, but still giving vendors tracking and performance metrics, Margolis said.

“We believe Spark Your Channel will provide partners with a competitive advantage,” she said. “Video has a huge impact on the success of demand generation. Up until this point, partners either have had to shell out thousands of dollars (which few have) for a single video or go without. Now, partners will be able to share engaging, educating and demand-generating videos on a regular basis because it takes them less than 30 seconds to customize videos produced by their vendors.”

Spark will be generally available Feb. 24 to enable channel sales partners in a variety of industries, including IT, telecommunications, automotive, manufacturing, insurance and financial services.

Sean Lardo, vice president of partner development for managed VoIP provider OIT, is an early adopter of Spark. He plans to use the platform to allow hundreds of white-label and commissioned sales partners to market his company’s cloud communications services to their customers.

“Spark Your Channel is the only platform that lets us personalize video—– that’s one of our favorite things about it, and we’re creating sales video campaigns for partners to share,” he said.