So what are manufacturers doing? Who is doing things right and what are the results? Here is a glimpse at some manufacturers’ programs we thought were on the right track:
Asigra has provided their partners with huge marketing play by delivering turnkey cloud backup demand generation campaigns, One-2-One marketing support, and executive engagement.
Asigra offers their partners turnkey cloud backup demand generation campaigns. These campaigns enable partners to engage with end-customers and prospects while saving time and money.
By giving partners a marketing team at their disposal for 120-days, Asigra enabled their partners to not only execute on marketing strategies and tactics but also taught them to fish. With us, or with someone else, this short but intense level of support lays the groundwork for years of successful marketing. One-2-One Marketing Support includes a multitude of options depending on a partner’s unique market position. Our services fall into planning, education and execution of marketing tactics. Some of these strategies include developing 90-day tactical marketing plan, LinkedIn training, blog planning, how-to webinars and workshops, social media planning and event planning. Execution of marketing tactics can include, front-line social media engagement, content creation (eBooks, etc), multi-touch email campaigns development and execution, blog writing, SEO, and event execution.
While Executive Engagement is not something you can easily point to or measure, we’ve had the pleasure of working with Asigra on a portion of this project and attribute much of the success of this portion of our strategy to Asigra. Not only are they on bi-weekly calls with the Channel Maven team, they’re also consistently speaking to partners and rewarding partners for their efforts.
A good social media strategy is critical to partner and vendor growth. The challenge with this critical piece of marketing is that it can be both time consuming and overwhelming for partners. Cisco has recognized the difficulty partners face in managing social media and is stepping up its support. A recent Cisco social media engagement for its partners includes:
The Cisco mConcierge team is leveraging the marketing platform StructuredWeb to push automated social media content through its partner accounts—supplementing any partner posts and taking the "pressure" off the partner to constantly update their accounts. Cisco is also partner social media campaigns to its other marketing tactics for a more uniform campaign strategy. Partners can not only subscribe to multiple social media campaigns, but they can also preview, edit, or unsubscribe to any content before it goes out.
Cisco is also piloting a social media roadmap for partners. This 12-week program breaks down the complex world of social media management into digestible tutorials and checklists. Each week partners receive a brief overview of social media tasks to execute for the week and an explanation of how to carry out the tasks. Each week partners also receive a video (by Channel Maven Founder Heather K. Margolis) giving an overview for the week and insight into the rationale behind each task.
Oracle’s recent Executive Summit in early February was an interactive day between partners highlighting partner strategies, product roadmaps, and selling opportunities. The day illustrated many of Oracle’s channel marketing programs to support their partners, including its recent release of the OPN Solutions Catalogue. The OPN Solutions Catalogue is a centralized online directory to provide Oracle partners and customers access to solutions and services around the globe. Highlights of the catalogue include:
Finally partners can leverage slick professionally produced Oracle database videos and customize them with their own information. Slick video, dead-on solution messaging, partners’ contact information. Doesn’t get much more co-brandable then that.
Advanced search capabilities make it easy to for customers to find the right partners, including those who have achieve specialization in a particular product or industry. The catalogue also includes a recommendation module where customers can submit reviews and provide community feedback to help others locate the right partner.
The OPN Solutions Catalogue has considerable customer exposure; currently above 450K hits pre quarter and expected to increase. Additionally, partner profiles are highly search engine optimized leading to more search results hits for partners. To meet the global focus of Oracle’s partners, the Solutions Catalogue is translated into over thirteen languages. Finally, partners featured items and videos on the OPN Solutions Catalogue homepage brings individual publicity to specific Oracle partners (featured items based on the overall campaign of the moment).
This release of the OPN Solutions Catalogue boasts advanced multi and social media integration — placeholders to include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Video integration in the partner profiles. Additionally, Oracle’s RSS feeds allow partners to pull from all Oracle RSS feeds including case studies and press releases to enrich the customer experience
Also new with this release are the lead capture capabilities; contact information on landing pages for eBooks, white papers, etc. is entered into Oracle’s software and distributed in reports for following up with leads. This lead capture reporting allows partners to measure the overall effectiveness of their profile.