All About Partner Marketing

Sharing: The Key to Successful Channel Marketing

Sharing the Good Stuff

When it comes to channel marketing, we all want to maximize our results while limiting our expenses. We want to ensure that our channels work with us so that both parties generate as much revenue as possible and benefit from the co-marketing relationship.

But, what is the best way to accomplish these basic goals? There are lots of stats out there that can give you advice on channel marketing trends, how to leverage social media, how the cloud and other new technologies are changing channel marketing patterns – but, at the end of the day, it all comes down to one simple idea: Effective channel marketing is all about sharing.

You and your channel partners need to be open and share with each other as much as possible. Here are some examples that every B2B channel marketer should be open to.

• Share your ideas back and forth with your co-marketer. Hearing what they think might spark your own ideas. Letting them know what's on your mind might make them think of new ways to innovate and profit from the channel. When you share ideas back and forth, you each get a better understanding of what you want from the relationship – and you'll come up with new product and service ideas, and new ways to market them. You'll also find better ways to meet each other's needs.

• Share your leads. Your channel partner is not going to try to steal business from you, and you are not going to try to steal business from your channel partner. So, make a point of distributing new leads to your channel partners. By doing so, you'll both enhance your marketing reach and you may be able to find new revenue streams.

• Share your marketing expenses as much as possible. Both of you benefit when products or services get sold, so neither one of you should be burdened with the brunt of the marketing costs. Find ways to split up the costs of campaigns with your channel partner, so you both generate more revenue while maintaining a fairly equal ROI.

• Share your technological resources - Make it easy for partners to leverage your marketing infrastructure. There is no need for you and your channel partner to double up on technology expenses and resources. You may be able to provide them with access to your technology at no additional cost to your company – while saving them a lot of money - and making sure you remain a preferred vendor. They too may be able to share some of their technology with you, reducing your costs as well, so both of you benefit.

Sharing benefits both parties, strengthens your relationship with your channel partner, and is good business. 

The Most Effective Way For B2B Companies To Build Their Email Lists

Building an email list is important to any company. Having a way to connect with your customers, promote special offers and maintain brand awareness is crucial, and email is a great tool to make it happen.

That said, there are many different ways to build your list, so how do you know which ones are going to be most effective, particularly if you are a B2B company? Luckily, Marketing Sherpa recently released a study mapping out the effectiveness of various email list building techniques, "Email marketing 2011 top list building tactics that really work".

Interestingly, the study demonstrates that what works when trying to build an email list to attract consumers doesn't work as well for the B2B marketplace, and vice versa. By far the most effective way for a B2B organization to build up their list is to require registration during downloads – this had a 64 percent effectiveness rate. Compare that to webinars, which only had a 47 percent effectiveness rate, and you get a fairly decent idea of where to put your list building efforts.
Email newsletter subscriptions seem to be not as successful as you would think – showing a fairly small 27 percent effectiveness rate. Social media sharing had the worst overall results, with a zero percent effectiveness rating. 

Having up-to-date metrics like this is important, because it allows you to figure out how to allocate your resources most effectively. It's also good news for B2B companies, since requiring registration for downloads is not only the best way to build your list, it's one of the least costly of all available options.  

Channel marketing organizations – whether the vendor or the distribution partner – can benefit from this knowledge.   Vendors should syndicate their marketing content in the form of white papers, ebooks, etc out to their channel partners; who in turn, can make them available for download  …with a simple registration form of course!   And voila: they have a growing email distribution list.  

 

Content Syndication and SEO

Occationally questions come up around the effect of content syndication on SEO. We see letters like:

We are considering using the [syndicated content], however I’m still researching. I’m told by our web people (Hall Marketing) that we’ll lose a lot of our search capabilities [SEO] because all the content goes back to you or Sage, not us. I’m hoping to make decisions mid January, or so…

Hall Marketing in this instance is just incorrect. Correctly syndicated content helps with SEO. Since the exact search engine scoring algorithms are never published to keep people from gaming the algorithms, it is hard to quantify the effect, but it is definetely positive.

How can I be so sure? Google (who knows the algorithms it uses), uses syndicated content with their partners to help in promoting Google Apps. Just check out the public site http://google.zift123.com. I can assure you that Google is not hurting the SEO scores of its partners.

For a detailed discussion about why it helps, check out Paul Marshall's post on Search Engine Journal, Is Syndicated Content Duplicate Content?

For more information of what syndication content is, and how it might be useful check out either web syndication or content syndication.