Connect — Second Stop in the 5 C’s of Successful Channel Marketing Programs

Welcome to the next in our series highlighting the Five C’s of Channel Marketing: Create, Connect, Communicate, Convert and Calculate where we cover the critical components in any successful channel program. Last round, we covered Create, speaking to the ability to design strategic marketing programs using an effective content creation strategy. Here we feature Connect, perhaps the most important C of all, and one with a bit of a double meaning. Let me explain.

Connect with your partners

You probably guessed that this is what we mean by Connect — your ability to effectively connect with your partners to communicate your brand’s messaging and keep those partners engaged and selling.

How are you connecting now? Are you able to provide a personalized experience to each partner, localized for their language and delivering access to just the resources that apply to them? And are you able to measure the power of your connections with metrics such as logins, asset downloads and campaign launches? If you’re not connecting in these ways, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to grow channel partner engagement and generate wins together.

Your partner portal (when done right) is the place to begin strengthening your partner connections. The portal becomes your partners’ window into your brand, so show them you’re committed to making the relationship successful.

Connect your partners to the tools

Here’s another angle on why Connect made our list of Five C’s of Successful Channel Marketing Programs: connecting your partners to your content assets and the tools to leverage that content.

Partners are strapped for time and resources to develop and deploy their own campaigns. As a result, their efforts may be haphazard, inconsistent — or nonexistent. As a brand, when you can connect your partners with sales and marketing enablement tools, you make it faster, simpler and more likely that they’ll launch campaigns, syndicate your social media, host webinars, and generate leads and sales.

Your partner portal is the gateway to those tools, which could include co-brandable assets, automated go-to-market campaigns, opportunity and lead management, real-time analytics, and more.  Critically, since partners aren’t all alike, the portal should be flexible enough to provide each channel partner with the right level of marketing support by connecting them to the assets, tools and resources they need to execute marketing successfully.

Connect to success

Building strong channel partner connections is essential for any successful brand — as is connecting partners with the tools and resources they need to efficiently and effectively market your solutions.

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.

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 — Communicate!