How To Build A Strong Channel-Partner Marketing Plan

One of the simplest ways to scale your business — as well as earn more revenue with less effort than it takes in order to build new products — is to work with channel partners. Doing so gives you the opportunity to offer new products and services to your past, current, and future customers.

The trick to making these types of partnerships successful is to build a solid channel partner marketing plan — a strategy for two companies to collaborate on selling or marketing services, products, or technologies. Channel partners can involve value-added resellers, managed service providers, systems integrators, distributors, IT consultants as well as affiliate partners.

What Is Partner Marketing?

Partner marketing forces the synchronicities of two companies – each with its own brand equity, core expertise, unique value proposition as well as its own distribution strength – in order to create strategic alliances to increase the market share of both companies.

What Are The Benefits Of Partnership Marketing?

Partnership marketing has many benefits, including the following:

• Broader reach and wider networks: When your company works with a channel partner, you are, in essence, partnering with its partners and users, thus growing their and your network in the process.
• Building brand trust: When your company receives an endorsement from a trusted and well-known partner in the industry, it helps build your brand’s trust while giving you credibility in your niche.
• Express testing: Working with a channel partner gives a company a quick way to experiment with marketing campaigns, products, promotions, and customer audiences in a less risky environment.
• Improved revenue: Additional revenue is perhaps the biggest benefit, and it’s what leads most businesses to consider partnership marketing. Simply by gaining a new offering for your customers, you can improve your bottom line.

Enable Channel Partners To Be Better Educators

Promotional materials are useful; however your partners also require educational support which helps them to fully understand your products as well as communicate their knowledge to potential customers. For instance, education materials need to show clearly how your products stack up to those of your nearest competitors – both direct and indirect.  Bring hard numbers into your pieces. Collect compelling stats. Channel prospects will ask the difficult questions so make sure that your partners have what they need in order to answer them fully as well as credibly.

Enable Channel Partners To Be Better Marketers

As the CompTIA numbers demonstrate, many channel partners will probably have limited marketing resources. Anything which you can do to help them to polish their skills will make a massive difference in their performance. Provide online or real-world training in marketing essentials, such as how to segment the market, develop buyer personas, craft relevant messages for different market segments, build or buy target lists and create a lead pipeline.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you would like to get a better grip on marketing then you need to do our Marketing Fundamentals Course. Follow this link to find out more.