Using Your Marketing Automation For To-Partner Marketing
Most companies today have adopted some form of marketing whether it’s digital, email, social or content in order to increase brand awareness and generate leads. Why not replicate some of your email marketing initiatives to your partners so they can be equipped to sell your brand successfully? A to-partner marketing strategy with your marketing automation platform, like Hubspot or Marketo, may lead to increased deal registrations, increased partner portal logins, and increased partner engagement. It can be an essential part of a healthy partner ecosystem.
What is to-partner marketing?
To-partner marketing is creating campaigns for partners through your marketing automation platform (MAP) so they can successfully sell your product or service. It’s a key component of the overall marketing mix for many businesses, and to-partner marketing can easily be an extension of your existing marketing efforts. Below are some ways you can ensure the success of your to-partner campaigns by developing a to-partner marketing program within your marketing automation platform.
The Steps to a Succesful To-Partner Marketing Strategy
● Design a partner marketing strategy. Create a marketing plan the same way you would for other channels like email messaging, audience (or partner) segmentation, and cadence. Start with a brainstorm and narrow down your thoughts into a tactical plan with a cohesive vision. Document exactly what type of content will be developed, who will be responsible, how it will be shared, etc. All of your messaging and content should work together for an educational experience for your partners. Remember, the end goal is to fuel your partners with relevant collateral and information about your business.
● Align your internal teams around your partners. Partner marketing will never be successful unless marketing and channel managers are on the same page with the same goals. Once you’ve created a strategy in step one, work with your various teams to create content that supports the various goals. If you’d like more help here, download our eBook “Aligning Your Company Around a Culture of Channel Partner Success.”
● Create content. Make sure your strategy is evergreen yet adaptable based on feedback. Ideally, you will collaborate closely with your partners to get valuable insight on a regular basis. Hopefully, you receive great ideas based on what your partners enjoyed and found helpful to their sales. Take time to understand what their pain points are, what obstacles they face, and what they need to better position your products–then create content around those ideas.
● Develop campaigns at scale. This is where your marketing automation tool comes in. Creating email programs that can be used for larger groups of people will help you reach more partners in a shorter amount of time. Using a system like Hubspot or Marketo to automate your efforts will help you manage programs effectively. The following tips are a good basis for beginners:
●Avoid being spammy
● Test and send to yourself first
● Use a double opt-in structure so you don’t get dinged for unsolicited emails
● Build (and keep) a clean mailing list
● Avoid excess code and use simple graphics
Measure carefully and monitor your success. Use the tools that your marketing automation platform provides to track things like click-through and engagement. Benchmarking these metrics could be a good way to understand your initial success or areas of improvement of your to-partner campaign.
Optimize campaigns for the future. Use the benchmark reports you created in Step 5 to make actionable decisions. Email metrics like open rate, click rate, conversion rate (if there is a call to action) are a good starting point for analysis. After analyzing the data, you might want to ask yourself some of these questions: What type of content was engaged with the most? Was there a type of email format (graphic, html, etc) that resonated best? From there, you can leverage Allbound and see where your partners improved. Did the partners who engaged with your email content have a rise in logins? Were they more active within Allbound? Test everything and learn from the successes and failures of your first campaign.
Target your best growth opportunities. Use Allbound to uncover partner engagement opportunities. Have you noticed a decline in partners who would frequently register deals and now trending less frequently? Or a learning track that isn’t being utilized that would greatly benefit partners? Leverage Allbound to see what valuable resources aren’t being utilized and then send them via email. Combining the power of Allbound with the ability to streamline through a marketing automation tool will help you share content, engage with partners, and track overall success.
Allbound integrates seamlessly with systems you already have in place (like a marketing automation platform), allowing partners to gain key insights into your business. If you are using marketing automation for customers, why not try it for partners as well? If you have questions on how to start, let us know!
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