CHANNEL PARTNER CONTENT SYNDICATIOn

& MARKETING AUTOMATION

Maintain Consistent Messaging Channel-Wide
for More Effective Marketing

www.sharedvue.com
www.everythingchannel.com
INTRODUCTION
What could your channel accomplish if you could make it easier for
your Partners to market and sell your product or service?

While the answer to that may seem obvious, arriving at the answer
for making marketing and sales easier for Partners is far less obvious.
Especially in today’s world, where marketing and sales requires
technical inputs to supplement each of these processes.

• How do you structure your partnerships in a way that ensures

the end-customer is getting the most effective package of
information from your Partners?

• What tools are available to streamline information flow,

provide Partners with the best marketing and sales collateral,
and increase co-marketing options?

• Marketing best practices paired with marketing automation

and syndication may provide the answer.

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Why should we be concerned about the Solution Providers?
If you’re in the same situation as most manufacturers, it’s likely that
you have a small group of your Partners that are returning most of
your revenues. In fact, on average, 20% of a manufacturer’s solution
providers drive 70% of channel revenue.

How did they get there? One of the major reasons is that the top
20% have a high enough level of marketing sophistication, backed by Demand Generation is Increasingly Important to Partners
devoted resources, and they generally don’t need too much additional
help. But that doesn’t mean you can’t further facilitate their program. 6%  
And what about the remaining 80%? They tend to require more of
your energy – more time, more assistance, more training and more
enablement – in order to reach their sales goal.
More  Important   45%  
How do you help that top 20% better track and hone their marketing As  Important  
while helping the 80% market themselves and your products like the
big guys?
Less  Important  

And what happens if a Partner shifts to focus on a different product 49%   Source: IPED2010
or starts a relationship with a competitor?

As you may have experienced, it’s becoming more and more difficult

45%
to ensure Partner loyalty. Partners think first of what their end-users’
needs are, but that’s closely followed by consideration of which
products are the easiest to sell.
of Solution Providers say that Demand
Generation will be more important in 2010.
More specifically, Partners want to sell what makes them
look good. The products they know the most about in technical
terms, as well as those products they can more easily generate leads
63% of Solution Provider’s organizations
don’t have marketing staff.
and opportunities for, will be the ones they include in their offerings.
“It’s not about investing more, but getting
the biggest return on investment.”

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Enabling Partners in Today’s Channel Landscape
So how do you make your Partners more loyal? By making your
products and services easier to showcase and market. Your channel
Partners are the ones that are customer-facing. They’re your touch
points to your customers and end-users.

Let’s rephrase that: the more Partners you have enabled,

the more customer touch points you have developed.

Enabling your Partners means making their job of

58%
marketing and selling your products and services as
easy as possible. Of course, this doesn’t just help them.
By allowing them to make the most effective impression
each time they touch a customer, you’re affecting your
” - the largest percentage – of
own bottom line. surveyed Partners declared that their
Nowadays, online marketplaces are a major part of how own company’s website was the most
Solution Providers need to showcase their – translation, important marketing activity used in
helping to promote their business to
your – products or services to their customers. Product
and service descriptions, information, photos and videos,
and other educational marketing collateral are being
accessed more frequently online than they did five years
their customers.”
ago.

A recent survey shows that Solution Providers find their Source: Everything Channel 2010
own websites critical to their daily marketing activities and customer
touch points.

The survey results further prove that product and solution-based

content is the most desired element in a Partner solution, with 46%
of respondents indicating it as their top-ranked feature.

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Call-to-Action
Your Partners’ success translates directly into your success. Helping them
helps you.

You must enable those Partners who don’t have the capabilities to maximize
their sales opportunities on their own. Remember, partners are more likely
to sell products that make them look good. By enabling Partners to promote
your joint-value proposition you are increasing the likelihood they’ll sell your
products first and more often. Increasing the level of professionalism in their
marketing campaign would do just that.

By providing them with consistent, updated product information, training and

promotional materials, and marketing funds, you empower your Partners to Ok, great.
join the ranks of your high-producers. But what are the specific
problems?
In doing so, you’ve thereby empowered all of your Partners, increased loyalty
across the board, and captured a larger share of the market. • Resource constraints
• Website limitations
• Marketing challenges

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The Resource Hole
Having recognized that the majority of your Partners are resource-
constrained, both in terms of personnel and budget, how does that
translate into the online marketplace?

With smaller marketing teams and budgets, campaigns become

restrained and have less impact.This means your product and service
information is harder to keep up-to-date, your brand consistency
becomes difficult to uphold, Partner website features aren’t fully

The average American visited

leveraged – the whole package falls short.

Solution Provider’s time is spent selling to current customers and 111 domains and 2,554 pages
in March 2009, according
providing consulting and services to recurring customers. Existing
customers account for 72% or all of channel Partner revenues, while
first-time purchasers only account for 28%. This leaves little time to Nielsen Online. Given the
reach of search, it’s highly
allocated to prospecting and building their pipeline.

Just as inhibiting is the general trend of having technically-oriented likely that many of those
visits - especially to brand
Solution Providers that often have underdeveloped marketing
knowledge or skills. For them, there’s a tendency to continue nurturing
the business elements that are familiar and easily-identifiable, and sites - came from search
rather than direct traffic.
devote limited resources to the elements that are less familiar or
– worse yet – unidentifiable. If search engine optimization (SEO),
multi-touch campaigns, or best practices for website content are not
obvious areas to focus efforts, they end up as missed opportunities.

Partners need resources to allow them to sell and

market their products and services more effectively,
and be in front of them when they need a solution.

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Website Woes…..
IT product marketing is happening in online marketplaces. Yet, many
Partners have limited web marketing resources.

In addition to lacking resources for marketing campaigns, Partner

websites – the places where your products and services are being
showcased, and the touch points to the customer – are not working
as well as they could and should be…

• They have limited and/or out-of-date

product and service information.
• The process for getting content online is
inefficient - as product lines expand, the increase in
content becomes significantly more difficult to scale or
impossible if resources don’t exist.
• Partners don’t have the resources to implement
multi-media content to make their sites a useful and
attractive destination for product and service information.
• As a result, brand management and content integrity becomes
difficult to maintain. While they may try, Solution Providers
don’t – or can’t – always represent the manufacturer’s products
accurately. There are countless instances of Partners using
outdated product info or poor quality pictures.
• The websites generally have poor lead generation
capabilities. Solution Provider websites often lack a call-to-
action or value-add content.
• The internet is becoming a much more important and heavily
used sales tool than it had been five years ago. Many Partners’
websites are significantly underdeveloped, and are
losing sales because they have no way of capturing leads. And
because they can’t maximize on their search engine optimization,
they are making it more difficult for leads to find them. This
creates a huge loss in potential revenues.

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….And Marketing Woes
By definition, Solution Providers sell multiple products – servers,
storage, software – from multiple vendors.

Successfully marketing each of these vendors’ multiple products

can become difficult for a Solution Provider. Marketing costs can
skyrocket, and confusion and disorganization can stand in the way of
progress.

Deployment capabilities also create a roadblock for many marketing

programs. Partners aren’t usually capable of producing an HTML
version of vendor product content , and can only do so with increased
resources or outside assistance. Often times, this is enough of a

2010 Midmarket
reason for Partners to ignore updating vendors’ product content on
their websites.
IT Spend Forecast=

$279B
In terms of branding consistency, messaging and content integrity,
the landscape is chaotic at best. It’s difficult to ensure that Solution
Providers – with multiple vendors and inadequate tools - will be
able to uniformly and repeatedly communicate their joint-value in North America*
proposition and messaging appropriately to the customer. Again,
these are often the only touch points to the small or mid-market
customer that vendors will have! *Source: Gartner

There are no central analytics, metrics or tracking capabilities available

to monitor the success of a channel marketing program.

Partners have no way of measuring the success of their efforts

while vendors have no visibility into the activities their Partners
are engaging in. If Partners don’t have a dedicated Channel Account
Manager (CAM) it’s next to impossible to initiate let alone track and
measure activities.This means that there’s no visibility of what they’ve
been achieving, or not achieving.

How can we streamline the online marketing channel

programs in a way that benefits vendors and Solution
Providers?

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SYNDICATION: SOLVING YOUR WEB WOES
Managing an online marketplace doesn’t have to be so difficult for
your Partners.
How Does Syndication Help?
Syndication allows specific product and multi-media content to
• Immediate Promotional Exposure
be pulled directly from vendors — either via their websites or a
• Real-Time Lead Generation
content library — and syndicated to Partners’ websites. Any updates
to content from vendors will be automatically updated on Partners’ • Search Engine Optimization
sites and Partners can easily pick and choose which products and • Multi-Media Delivery
services are displayed. • Analytics & Metrics Capabilities

Channel Partner Content Syndication achieves five main goals:

1. Content is easily controlled and updated on Partners’ websites,
including product and solution offerings. This is a joint-value proposition.
As vendors, you’re offering accurate and up-to-date product and service
information, supporting consistent brand messaging. Your Partners are able
to have more effective and successful, touch points with end-customers.
2. Your marketing message is consistent across all Channels.
Ultimately, your Partners want your value proposition messaging, they want
to be able to offer their own customers the best information on products
and services, because it makes them look good.
3. Partner lead generation and capture capabilities are
increased on their existing corporate websites. There are no
microsites or external landing pages. When lead activity and marketing
touches are housed on one platform – instead of multiple ones – it makes it
much easier to navigate the entire lead buying process.
4. Content is fit seamlessly into as many Partner websites as
possible for a better customer and user experience. By putting the user
experience as a priority, you’re improving one of those crucial touch points
in a way that’s entirely beneficial to your product and service.
5. Content on the site is customized and added to their own
co-branded assets. By allowing for flexibility, you enable your Partners
to sell your products and services in a way that best suits their particular
customer base. This input and well-honed customer knowledge is crucial
for your success.

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Marketing Automation: Solving your marketing woes
Once you’ve helped your Partners develop their online channel, why
not help them market that channel as well?

Marketing automation platforms allow vendors to provide their

partners with co-marketing campaigns, measurement tools, and
tracking resources to better facilitate and monitor demand generation.

Channel Partner Marketing Automation has several benefits:

• Lead generation and capturing is easier for Partners
• Automation provides immediate marketing and promotional
exposure
• Integration with existing systems because streamlined
• Marketing communications to customers are integrated
• Entire marketing campaigns to Partners are automated
• Deal registration is increased
• Analytics and metrics capabilities for campaigns are more
in-depth

Using marketing automation, vendors and Partners can manage

their tools and resources much more effectively and in a way
that is mutually beneficial.

Marketing Automation and Syndication support and encourage the

use of multi-touch campaigns.

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Customers don’t have to be so hard to reach
End-customers rarely engage after single-touch exposures to
products or services, while tools such as caller ID and spam filters
have made it harder and harder to reach prospects.

And let’s not kid ourselves, prospects have become jaded, they’re
tired of being constantly sold to and pitched. Cold calling is a tactic
of the past, as end-customers are bombarded by messaging on a daily
– hourly! – basis, and it takes more effort, more time and a more
valuable offer to get a prospect’s attention.

Presently, Partners find themselves in a very competitive environment,

surrounded by other Solution Providers all trying to offer customers
the “right” solution at the “right” price.

Vendors need to arm their Partners with tools that

will add value, create relationships, and become
indispensible to customers and prospects.

Partners must utilize a multi-touch approach.

• Multiple emails that deliver valuable content
• Valuable content in the form of webinars, videos and eBooks
• Warm phone calls once they’ve been exposed to this valuable
content
• Social Media tactics that allow Solution Providers to get
to-know prospects.

You must make sure you’re reaching your customers

several times, in several ways. Once doesn’t work
anymore.

Marketing Automation and Syndication create endless opportunities

to increase the number of times you get in front of the customer.

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Case Study – Solving HP’s Pain Points
HP is the world’s largest technology company, with thousands of
channel Partners worldwide. Their Partners were primarily using
face-to-face sales models, leaving them little time for online sales, and
HP was getting consistent feedback from them that they needed help
with their online marketplaces. In one HP Partner’s words,

“...the technology is changing so rapidly, and the only way we

have to get the content is to scrape it down off [the HP]
website. And then we need a whole back room of people
that we can’t afford to be web technicians and manage this
content for us.”

HP needed a better way to help their Partners become better

champions of HP products.

What were their main challenges at that point?

• How could they better enable their Partners to have a more

robust presence - and one with an HP story - on the Web?

• How could they make it easy for Partners to get the content
to tell that story in a simple and concise way, and keep that
content up-to-date?

• How could they enable those Partner websites to generate

new business for the Partners?

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Marketing Automation and Syndication as the Solution
To solve these business issues, HP implemented an end-to-end, syndication and marketing automation
system, which delivers content to Partners, keeps it current and updated, and tracks results.

The response? Overwhelmingly positive.

Katie Spence, US Partner Marketing Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking

at Hewlett-Packard reported, “The first thing Partners liked - loved actually - was the content.
They love the fact that it’s quality content, that they didn’t have to develop it and that they don’t have
to maintain it, update it, or worry about whether it’s current....we have Partners of all different sizes
and levels of marketing expertise...so [we] can offer different approaches to syndication...[we] helped
some Partners develop a web presence who’d never had one before!”

In addition to being able to help their Partners manage content effectively, HP

can also help them market this online sales channel, which ultimately benefits
their own bottom line. Each Partner is equipped with in-depth marketing
collateral and sales resources that allow them to maximize on each touch
point they have with end-customers.

By offering a multi-layered approach - one that makes both content

management and marketing of that content easier - HP was able to jump
start many of their resource-constrained Partners, and were also able to
further the success of some of their more sophisticated and mature Partners.

One of the biggest benefits that HP has noticed is an increase in Partner

loyalty. The simple act of supporting their marketing and sales processes
made it very easy for Partners to keep coming back to HP.

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Conclusion
Marketing Automation and Syndication are powerful tools to provide to your Partners, making it easier
for them to market and sell your product or service, which benefits you in the short- and long-term.

Your end-customer can only be reached through Partners – they’re your only touch points. Giving
them the most effective way to package your product and service information for these end-customers
is not only helpful, it’s crucial to your own bottom line, especially in a time when the technical aspects
of sales and marketing are increasing rapidly, risking underperformance by many of your Partners if they
aren’t given the means to make this process easier.

In doing so, you’ll develop stronger partnerships, streamline information flow, and increase opportunities
for multi-touch campaigns and co-marketing.

And so, the question still remains:

What could your channel accomplish if you could make it easier for your Partners to market and sell
your product or service?

With these tools, you can get one step closer to an answer. . .

Josh Gibbs
Assistant Director of Marketing and Social Media

Everything Channel
(E) joshua.gibbs@ec.ubm.com
(T) 919-573-6985

Miriam Kutcher
Vice President, Marketing

Everything Channel
(E) miriam.kutcher@ec.ubm.com
(T) 508-416-1162

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