More and more we hear goals for the channel around partner marketing along the partner journey. Usually, this means materials they can customize and send out via email or platforms that enable drip campaigns, content syndication, and/or social media engagement including posts, videos, and webinars.
While all these things are necessary, there is one piece missing. Something that needs to happen before you ever launch the above programs. Education. Just because you’ve given partners the tools in an effort to save their budgets or enable them to market your solutions better, that doesn’t mean partners know how to truly market.
Marketing is so much more than just sending an email and hoping for the best. It is imperative you teach partners how to brand themselves online, build a stronger list, launch a successful email campaign, and leverage social to drive demand.
So how can you, the vendor, better educate partners on marketing to end-customers? We have a few of suggestions for you here:
1. Format Matters: Getting a guide that’s 25 pages long isn’t going to be read and the information is probably going to change in a year especially if you’re talking about social. Hour long webinars can also take up too much time or span too many topics. Provide partners with materials that teach them incrementally and are provided in an easily digested format. At our Social Media Rally Station {link to video} we teach partners in less than 15 minutes how to use their social profiles to target customers. If you want to educate partners virtually 3-5 minute bite-sized videos like our Roadmap {link to Roadmap sell sheet} that cover one single topic so partners can go back to it or only watch the topics that interest them.
2. Partner Marketing is not Corporate Marketing: Your partners don’t have the marketing resources your corporate team does. Make sure you’re giving partners advice that is attainable. Nothing is worse than suggesting they use adwords or pay-per-click when they have nowhere near the budgets that your corporate team has. Be sure whoever is doing the training truly understands partners’ businesses and their constraints.
3. Ensure Education Aligns with Resources: This is a great time to remind partners about the resources I mentioned above. If you’re teaching them about drip campaigns show them your platform that does drip campaigns (if it does…not all of them do). If you’re teaching partners about social, show them your twitter handle, LinkedIn group, etc. to ensure they follow you as well as your social platform that helps them post to end-customers.
4. Make it Accessible: Whether a webinar or videos or speaking engagement, ensure partners can access the materials as often as they want and whenever they want.
Educating partners to market to end-customers not only makes them more successful; it also endears partners to your solutions and programs. If they see how much you care about their business and that you provide them with unbiased marketing education, they are going to remember you as they’re walking into an opportunity.
Photo Credit: blog.straightnorth.com
