Digital Marketing Strategy for Channel Partner Enablement

An overview of Digital Marketing best practices for channel programs.

Digital Marketing for Channel Sales Development essentially comprises two main dimensions:

• Digital Marketing practices common to all businesses.
• Channel-specific functionality enabled by PRM (Partnership Relationship Management) applications.

Digital Marketing

The core building blocks of successful digital marketing are creating exciting content and taking steps to maximize the audience for that content.

• Content Platforms: Software like Wordpress and many others cater for the main process of creating and hosting content, and are ideal for campaign enablement tools like micro-sites.
• Content Marketing: Content Marketing is the primary method of translating your expertise and product offerings into engaging online resources.
• SEO and PPC: Advertising and search engines are then the tools that place that content in front of the audiences you are targeting.
• Podcasts and Webinars: Having captured the initial attention of potential customers the next essential step is the ‘Call to Action’ – What should they do next to learn more? Online events, podcasts and social networking tools are ideal to engage them further into your brand experience.

PRM Capabilities

PRM (Partner Relationship Management) apps also provide functionality for these activities, with the critical aspect being this is within an overall context of a suite of tools for recruiting and developing an ecosystem of partners.

This means they aren’t standalone activities but a component part of an end-to-end channel management strategy. For example Allbound, one of the leading PRM vendors, offers:

• Content Library: A platform to organize and publish content for channel campaigns, which enables partners to co-brand the materials. Insight reporting provides a deep look into content engagement: which partners are interacting with your content and how engagement correlates to overall channel success.
• Destination pages: Enable partners to easily republish and reshare your content to gain a broader audience, from social media to website, product catalog, webinars and videos. Make it easy to edit and launch relevant, ready-made web pages to drive traffic and capture leads from partner marketing activities.

By utilizing these tools within an overall PRM suite means they form component parts of channel development strategy, coordinated through shared marketing calendars and MDF reporting.