5 Ways To Improve Your Channel Marketing

“A lot of people wonder is anybody reading email these days. If you get an email list, nurture that list first on LinkedIn. Start posting relevant content so that they feel like they have a relationship with you.” Heather Margolis, Channel Maven.

Getting channel marketing right is a challenge all IT vendors face. How can we drive greater partner engagement and get partners to use our channel marketing campaigns more effectively? That was the topic of my Channel Journeys podcast with Heather Margolis, founder of Channel Maven Consulting.

Heather provides valuable tips based on years of channel marketing experience. She and her firm show IT companies how to combine digital technology like social media and marketing automation with traditional marketing tools to amplify their channel marketing results.   

Key Take-Aways

1. Use a broad channel marketing mix and multiple touches to reach your audience, including email, direct mail, social media, texting, live event, and webinars.
2. Train your partners to nurture their lead generation email and telemarketing lists with social media. Doing this before sending emails and making phone calls will result in a much higher conversion rate.
3. As a channel account manager or channel marketing manager, use LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to nurture your partners and build relationships.
4. Aggregate your communications to your partners into a monthly newsletter. Then train your partners how to read it by always having the same type of content in the same location.
5. When you launch a Channel Marketing Automation tool, don’t expect partners to use it just because you built it. Make sure you have great content and spend time letting partners know what you have and how to use it on an ongoing basis.

Take Action — One Thing You Can Do Today

If you have a partner newsletter, make sure you are putting everything in the same place in each issue to train your partners to read it. Sales information, for example, should be in the top left because they will not look further down. For technicians, their information can be further down because they tend to start at the top and read to the end. If you don’t have a partner newsletter to aggregate content, you and your colleagues are likely flooding your partners with way too many emails.

Listen to the complete podcast to learn more about Heather and her tips for channel marketing success.

About The Author

Rob Spee is founder and CEO of Channel Journeys Consulting and host of the Channel Journeys podcast. Rob applies his channel expertise to help clients create and execute channel strategies to accelerate revenue growth. His global channel experience spans from building channels at startups to vendors and distributors like Arrow, BMC, Carbonite, and SAS. Follow Rob on Twitter and LinkedIn.