We've been fortunate to work with over one hundred partners over the past few years, and In that time, we've delivered hundreds of campaigns and spent close to over £500k on ad spend.
Dealing with this volume of individual campaigns offers a significant amount of insights and provides a unique perspective that very few can rival.
In this blog, we look at the common ways that partners fall down and where the opportunities lie.
Common partner marketing challenges
A lack of strategy
Partners - at scale - are executing activities without any clear strategy in place. As a result, the majority struggle to gain traction and find themselves wasting time, resources and money. When you don't have a robust strategy in place, you end up committing to - and investing in - rogue activities. Stop buying random bits of branded merch. Stop sponsoring local golf days.
If it's not part of your strategy, don't do it. Invest your marketing budget wisely.
A one-size-fits-all approach
From experience, partners are reluctant to take a segmented approach to marketing campaigns. Instead, spreading the net far and wide. The result? Wishy-washy marketing campaigns that struggle to cut through and therefore fail to engage prospective customers, and thus tend to generate poor-quality results.
Segment your campaigns, be more personalised with messaging and prove that you understand the specific needs of a specific group of people.
Struggling to cut through the noise
When you're operating in a crowded channel space, with thousands of (on paper) direct competitors, you need to do things differently. You need to stand out. Yet few partners get creative when it comes to marketing. And by creative, we mean two things:
- Creative thinking - how do we do something that is both different and better than the competition? What tactics can we introduce and carry out marketing experiments with?
- Creative concepts - everything in the IT space looks the same. The same stock images. The same CTAs. The same headline messaging. To the end user business, you could well be the same company as the ad they saw last time round. Be bold.
Outbound telemarketing no long works
A lot of partners we've spoken to are scratching their head: how can what was once a successful tactic no longer yield any decent results?
For us, this is two-fold:
- People are no longer spending as much time in offices. Landlines are a far less effective way of getting in touch with somebody, and mobile numbers are generally harder to get hold of.
- Salespeople too eagerly cold reached out to people at scale without purpose and the rest of the sector is feeling the consequences. We're big believers that if you haven't got something meaningful or relevant to say, you shouldn't be picking up the phone (or sending an email or message).
Capability & skills
One of the greatest challenges we see is that partners struggle to deliver the growth they desire because the tactics and strategies are wrong. Often, that's no one person's fault. Working in B2B - and tech specifically - is hard. And unless you've got plenty of experience like us, knowing where to focus efforts and how to do it is difficult.
Add to that the fact that most channel businesses have marketing teams far smaller than other sectors, it's no surprise.
The marketing opportunity for partners
We've covered several of the common challenges that channel partners face - and by no means is this an extensive list. But what about the opportunities?
Invest in strategy
Creating a marketing strategy doesn't need to be a huge time commitment. It can be as simple as committing - in written format - what your focus is and how you're going to do it. For example, your strategy might be a one or two-pager, which includes:
- Marketing objectives (and how they align to your business objectives)
- Who we're talking to - the exact ICPs (ideal customer profiles) and target personas within those businesses (i.e., IT directors, CEOs, finance managers)
- The primary tactics you're going to use
- How you'll measure success
From here, building a plan of action becomes so much easier. And it helps you to focus attention when a rogue tactic or opportunity appears.
Build brand
Short-term tactics are becoming increasingly expensive and less likely to yield the results they did a few years ago. As a result, you need to think about the long-term play: how do you build brand awareness?
Building brand can be as little as posting regularly across social media, or it can be using paid ads channels to promote your brand-led content, for example a blog about your latest Microsoft specialisation achievement.
By building brand awareness, evidencing your credentials and expertise, you'll build credibility with your primary audience. It just might take a bit of time to come to fruition. The brands who win fuse a mixture of short-term tactics (i.e., ads or emails focusing on book a discovery-style CTAs) with long-term, more strategic, brand-focused content and tactics.
Be more segmented
Rather than trying to engage every business (and being forced to use generic messaging as a result), why not pick a sector or vertical that you already have credibility in and use that as the baseline for activity? If you've got credibility in retail - for example - you'll probably find it much easier to engage retail businesses because you already understand their challenges and desires. Whereas if you tried to engage legal businesses with no experience, and they mention a challenge that they're having - that is specific to the legal space - and you're unable to offer advice and guidance in the moment, they'll see your lack of experience.
Focus time and effort where you already have credibility if you want to drive short-term success. Or be prepared to play the long game and invest in entering a new space.
Personalise
Take time to understand your marketing personas. Understand their needs and challenges and build your content and how you engage them around that. Use persona-led messaging in your content and tailor 1-1 engagements based on the conversations you've had with them and what you know about both them as a business and them as an individual.
Modernise your outreach
We firmly believe that the future of outbound lies not in telemarketing, but in a proactive approach to account-based marketing. People rarely answer the phone these days, or if they do, they're unwilling to give you their time. They see it as an annoyance.
Channel partners need to adopt a slower-burn approach to social selling; one that aims to build relationships before we jump in with sales communications. Check out our social selling programme for further information about this.
Invest in people
Your marketing efforts are only as good as the people delivering marketing within your business. To get the best out of them, you need to invest in skills and development. That could be formal training or 1-1 mentoring. As busy IT leaders, we know you're busy delivering complex customer projects and closing deals. And it doesn't have to be you - take advantage of third-parties who can offer the right type of support and mentoring for your marketing teams. At Resultful, we offer 1-1 training and mentoring for this purpose: marketers don't know what they don't know. By helping them develop, they win on an individual level and you win on a company level through more effective marketing efforts.
