Create — First stop in the 5 C’s of successful channel marketing programs

Last time, I introduced you to the Five C’s of Channel Marketing: Create, Connect, Communicate, Convert and Calculate  — a list first developed by StructuredWeb’s founder, Daniel Nissan, and promised we’d take an in-depth look at each “C” in subsequent posts. For many channel partners, the first C — Create — is a major stumbling block. When your brand can solve for this challenge, you open up new revenue opportunities and build a more engaged, active channel. 

Create Content and Campaigns

Speak with any of your partners and you’ll likely hear the same thing — they’re busy and have little time and few resources to commit to marketing. Even if they have a dedicated marketing team with great ideas and capacity, they lack content to use in their marketing campaigns.

It’s the reality of this channel partner challenge that makes Create the first stop in every successful channel marketing strategy. Create refers to the capability to provide channel partners with strategic marketing programs consisting of ready-to-launch campaigns filled with effective content. In addition to the creation of campaigns and collateral, vendors need to consider the efficiency with which partners can access and execute on the assets (more on this in an upcoming post).

Create Scalability

When dealing with large channel networks, scalability becomes critical to your marketing initiatives’ success. As a brand, you need the capability to provide relevant content to hundreds or even tens of thousands of channel partners across multiple regions and geographic areas. 

Without scalable solutions for content deployment, the time and resources required to provide localized content in different languages specific to each channel partner marginalizes both your and the partners’ ROI.

Create Customization

Channel partners aren’t all of one stripe. Among your partners may be multiple languages, different levels of sophistication, and other variables that make flexibility, personalization and customization imperative.

To keep partners engaged, vendors must provide partners with content that clearly communicates their solutions to end customers in their local language — as well as content that partners themselves find relevant and valuable. 

From a partners’ viewpoint, relevance often means that content can be available in the native language of local markets. To be valuable, content must also represent the partner’s business, so offering co-brandable assets that uniquely promote the partner’s firm is crucial.

Create Success

StructuredWeb’s channel partner marketing automation platform fully supports the 5 C’s framework with innovative technology and broad functionality, improving each critical aspect of your company’s channel partner marketing efforts. I invite you to connect with one of our channel marketing experts and see how our solutions come to life to simplify channel marketing and drive channel sales for global brands around the world.

Please join me throughout this series as we discuss how your brand can leverage the 5 C’s to amplify the effectiveness of your channel partners. Next up — Connect!