If you adopted a two-tier commercial strategy you’ll be confronted with contractual obligations as to the allocation of funds. Managing these investments and tracking their success is just part of your channel marketing task: you should recruit and retain partners first.
This task requires a deep knowledge about activities with the highest ROI potential on your target market, which can’t be taken for granted, particularly if you run your international business from outside the target country.
Being basically co-op marketing activities part of your marketing strategy, a correct management of the budgets which you put at the disposal of your partners should be a key strategic element of your business development plans, exactly as the funds you invest in the recruitment of new partners.
Even more resource consuming is an effective tracking of results and continuous interaction with your partners, to motivate them on the one hand and to safeguard your interests on the other, by ensuring that the selected joint activities contribute to a higher joint brand recognition and not just to either the margin or visibility of your partner.
But this is not all! A good channel marketing strategy includes far more than just managing a co-op budget and delivering artworks or templates for presentations and campaigns. Your partners are your very first multiplicators on your target market, they should be informed upfront about any new product launch, they should benefit from insights on your roadmap, should feel and be pampered like VIPs (as they are indeed) and should be incentivised through ad hoc campaigns.
Last but actually first: they should be recruited!
What if you do not have the time / resources to take care of what – in our humble opinion – are the basics of channel success?
What we mentioned above is just an extract from the channel marketing services we deliver to our customers. If you are considering oursourcing this branch of your marketing strategy, ask experts: Ask us!
- Our Strategy
STEP
01
Assessment
Performance of co-funded campaigns
Before developing a new channel marketing plan, you should objectively evaluate how successful were former co-funded activities.
We analyse the value add and return in terms of "joint" brand awareness and sales, no need to reinvent the wheel if something worked just fine. The contrary is the case if the activity did not deliver the expected result.
STEP
02
Planning
Channel Marketing Strategy
There is no strategy without a plan. But if you want this plan to becomes strategy, you should balance co-funded activities which help you reach your targets and measures to directly recruit new partners and to retain existing partners.
We provide you with a full channel marketing strategy involving the above mentioned elements.
STEP
03
Traceability
Monitoring is a must!
This last task is the most time consuming one. Indeed once you have a strategy and a plan, you have to dedicate resources to the tracking and monitoring of both joint and direct channel activities.
Traceability and results monitoring is a must, we see this as an integral part of our the Channel Marketing Services delivered.