Marketing automation has changed the way direct marketing is done. Companies like Marketo and Hubspot have made it easier and quicker for companies to repeatedly send marketing campaigns to a large number of people at once, to target specific audiences, and to generate leads. This change is happening in the Channel as well.
Like direct marketing, marketing automation for the Channel often called Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) is making it easier for companies and their partners to generate leads. It also makes it easy for partners to send their vendor’s campaigns to their (the partner’s) customers.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the process of using technology to automate repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media, and more. It can also be used to personalize marketing campaigns such as addressing each campaign to a specific person. All of this personalization and automation make it easier to get qualified leads as with automation, you can send marketing messages to the right prospects at the right time. This frees up your sales and marketing teams to spend their time doing more important things such as market research and selling.
Marketing automation has most commonly been used for direct marketing and sales for both B2B and B2C. According to Marketo, businesses that use automation grow their pipeline by 45% and their revenue by 25%.
Automation also helps businesses respond to prospects faster by reaching the prospect through various channels and touchpoints. For example, a marketing campaign can be automatically set up to launch as soon as a prospect signs up for a webinar, fills out a form on the website, or downloads a whitepaper. It also makes it easy to stay in touch with prospects and customers which helps businesses stay relevant and is something most prospects and customers want.
Marketing Automation and The Channel
While Marketing Automation has become the standard for direct marketing, it isn’t the standard for the channel. From what we’ve heard from our customers and prospects, it’s because of 2 reasons: awareness and adoption. Most of the people we’ve talked to don’t know that marketing automation can be used for the Channel and the people who did know about marketing automation haven’t adopted it for their business. This is either because they don’t see the need for marketing automation and don’t know what it can do for them or because they’re not ready.
Through Channel Marketing Automation
Unlike direct marketing, channel marketing involves more than just the company and the person being marketed to. You’ve got yourself, your partners, and their prospects or customers, so your marketing has to go through your partners before reaching your target audience. However, TCMA can benefit the channel in the same way that marketing automation benefits direct marketing.
Customers who use us or other TCMA platforms have experienced an increase in revenue growth for themselves and their partners and an increase in partner engagement. They’ve also gotten increased visibility into what their partners are doing with the marketing material they’ve been given.
These platforms make it easy for partners to send vendors’ marketing campaigns as all the work has been done for them by the vendor. For example, partners simply have to upload a contact list for an email campaign and press send. However, these “done for partner” campaigns don’t just have to be email campaigns. They can be videos introducing new products, webinars or other event announcements, or even landing pages for special offers.
Also, partners and vendors can easily co-brand campaigns such as joint webinars, coordinated social media posts for a new product launch, email campaigns for industry news, and more using a marketing automation platform as the platform will automatically insert both the partner’s and vendor’s information. All both of them have to do is add their content.
Also like direct marketing automation, TCMA gives you the data you need to see how well your marketing messages performed. You’ll get metrics such as the open rate of emails, the number of views on a video, what links were clicked on, and more. However, with TCMA, in addition to metrics on how well your marketing messages did, you’ll also see partner metrics. You’ll see metrics such as the number of downloads for a piece of collateral, the number of times a campaign was reshared, the location of your partners’ contacts when they view your video, and more. With this data, you can see who your top-performing partners are and who you may need to talk to.
Conclusion
TCMA has proven that it can change channel marketing strategies while making marketing easier for both partners and vendors. Vendors benefit from the visibility TCMA provides that allows them to increase partner engagement without requiring more time. Both partners and vendors are given the freedom to focus on more important aspects of their businesses, such as selling products, innovating, responding to customers, and more.