The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, MarketClik and BrightTALK are starting the new year with a peer based, thought leadership initiative aimed at furthering best practices in what it calls “Partner Performance Marketing” (PPM). The outcome will be a strategic brief for global technology marketers selling through multi-tier distribution channels. The challenge of gaining channel mindshare, maximizing partner participation in cooperative marketing campaigns, as well as maintaining brand governance and message consistency in the field, has never been greater.
Cross-border localization demands are requiring vendors to be more adept and efficient in teaming with partners in the go-to-market process. They must now create, translate, customize, modify and deliver integrated marketing campaign content across multiple formats (print, web, mobile, eMedia, video, audio), media channels and audience types.
With markets becoming more fragmented, segmented and complex, marketers have many more content elements to manage and a real need to track campaign performance, value and ROI. They need to automate critical campaign execution functions and further empower partners with on-demand, self-service access to marketing assets, insights, opportunities and sales support components. In addition, they have to better manage market development funds, contain costs, and track the impact of cooperative campaigns on both demand generation and sell-through.
Contributions from senior marketing executives at original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, distributors and value-added-resellers will form part of a global report that will be shared with the CMO Council’s membership worldwide. Here is a sneak preview of some of the questions that the study asks:
1. Can you give us a quick overview of how your channel partner programs are structured and run? Who has responsibility for partner marketing performance at your company?
2. What challenges do you face in improving the relevance, timeliness, value, control and accountability of partner/channel marketing content and programs?
3. Please comment on the following partner marketing requirements and issues. How are you currently addressing these, or what plans do you have in place to improve your capability in these areas?
Partner flexibility to customize, localize and efficiently access multi-channel campaign content (print and digital ads, literature, direct mail, electronic messages, case studies, white papers, press materials, video, signage, visual identity systems, etc.)
Consistency and conformity of corporate/product messaging and communications through partner channels
Brand compliance and control of digital marketing assets in the field and in partner communications
Visibility into partner marketing activities, customer engagement levels and effective, timely use of campaign content
Multi-channel campaign execution and contributions to partner lead flow and conversion rates
Co-op program management with efficient and accountable reimbursement of marketing development funds to partner
4. What enabling platforms or hosted services do you use to engage with partners, deliver opportunities and manage co-op marketing spend? Is it home grown, outsourced or subscription-based?
5. How do you rate your overall go-to-market effectiveness through the channel and ability to scale and drive partner marketing performance?
Many of you will have heard of SOPA (the controversial ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’) and PIPA (the ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act’) by now, not least because Google voiced its opinion through a censored doodle today and Obama threw his two cents in yesterday. But how would these acts impact you as a B2B marketer? To find out, let’s understand the purpose of these proposed bills:
SOPA, introduced last October to the house of representatives, intends to stop online piracy by giving US law enforcement and copyright owners greater powers to combat online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property and pirated goods. PIPA is the Senate’s version of SOPA with a recommendation to extend the powers of enforcement to rogue websites registered outside of the US (and some other nuances which I won’t bore you with).
While these bills are very useful for the entertainment and music industries, the current drafts are not taking into account the impact on businesses and the social web. For B2B marketers, here are a couple of very real consequences of the bills:
Social Media could be crippled
Pretty much anything goes in social media. That includes content, the very foundation of all the social brands you can think of today. These bills could shut down or at best paralyze brands such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube to name but a few. Consequently, share of voice, demand and revenue generation across those platforms would be at risk.
Your website could instantly be shut down
If your website is considered to infringe copyright (because of content you posted or other user-generated content), it is probable that online payment systems, search engines and internet service providers would no longer be able to service your website. This could leave you with no search rankings and strip you from the ability to transact online, which wouldn’t matter because you would no longer have a website. Ironically, only your domain gets blocked, not your IP address. This means that once alleged pirates get shut down, they’ll just download copyrighted materials through the IP route and start over.
What can you do about it? You can sign a petition and hope that Obama’s influence will help draft more balanced bills that effectively prosecute counterfeiters and piracy without jeopardizing legitimate businesses and marketers. Not surprisingly, Barack does not support SOPA and PIPA as it stands. Afterall, social media helped him win the presidency…
Before going into the holiday season, I hosted an interesting thought leadership discussion to learn how VMWare, WWT and bChannels are optimizing around online marketing to get the best return on their MDF marketing investment. B2B marketing is rapidly evolving as buyers continue to use the web to self-educate their purchasing decisions.
The marketing heroes on this panel are:
Sarah Vaughan, Marketing Manager at World Wide Technology (WWT) who started driving MDF innovation in sales by overseeing the implementation of salesforce.com across more than 400 users and then proceeded to connect the sales systems with marketing to measure ROI and provide technology partners reliable proof of performance.
Riadh Dridi, Head of Partner Marketing for VMWare. His organization is responsible for channel loyalty and development programs. Prior to joining VMWare, Riadh managed HP’s partner organization and was responsible for driving demand and revenue for industry vertical segments.
Chris Bard, co-founder and International Development Director at bChannels, a leading global specialist in the development and management of indirect channel programs for technology companies. Prior to joining bChannels in 2003, Chris was responsible for managing the EMEA Channel for the Xerox Office Business, including the integration of the Tektronix printer business bought out in 2000.
Tune in to this recorded thought leadership panel webinar if you’re wondering:
- What are the buyer trends that should be taken into account when planning for 2012?
- What are simple things I can do right now to optimize revenue generation for 2012?
- How do I prove my programs are working and get more MDF marketing budget as a result?
B2B channel marketing is rapidly evolving as buyers continue to use the web to self-educate throughout the purchasing process. Successful channel marketers are capitalizing on this by creating, distributing and measuring rich-media content that drives thought leadership, brand awareness, and lead generation. Join me and Insight Integrated Systems’ David Carpenter to learn how these companies are optimizing online marketing and maximizing return on MDF marketing dollars.
Topics discussed:
* Funding your programs with MDF
* Optimizing demand generation to yield more meetings, more pipeline and more closed business
* Differentiating from competitors and capturing more market share
* Rolling out with limited human and financial resources
About your presenters:
Val Pierre-Genton has worked with over 500 senior marketers on campaigns that leverage webinars and videos to be heard, differentiate against the competition and generate revenue.
David Carpenter is a marketing hero who manages Insight Integrated Systems demand generation and boasts 22 years of channel experience. He has worked the full spectrum in technology sales and marketing (distribution for 10 years, manufacturer for 8 years and with Systems Integrators and VARs for 4 years).
I recently had the pleasure of being on a panel with Tony Uphoff (UBM TechWeb’s CEO). The topic was ‘content is king but distribution is key’. This conversation was part of a half-day event hosted by our friends at Just Media which featured great speakers such as Josh Kahn (VP, Private Cloud Marketing, EMC), Marlene Williamson (VP, Global Marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) and David Appelbaum (CMO, Act-On Software).
It was interesting to reflect on the radical impact the web and devices have had on marketing. Conversations are shifting online, no doubt. And the challenge with conversations moving from human interaction to platform-based interaction is content. To be and stay in the conversation, B2B marketers have to produce enormous amounts of content all the time. Not only that, but the content has to hit the mark – and quick. According to the B2B content marketing survey recently published by a 20,000-member LinkedIn group, producing enough and truly engaging content are the two biggest content marketing challenges.
We have moved from a landscape in which few channels reach many buyers, to many channels reaching smaller, more defined communities of professionals. This presents both an opportunity and a threat. The threat is the sheer human and financial resources required be omnipresent in this new fragmented landscape. The opportunity: to develop a powerful in-bound demand generation machine which uses relevant content at each stage of the buying cycle to drive down the cost of sale.
Having said that, and while many brands still haven’t defined a content strategy to respond to the emergence of the digital buyer, there is a dilemma. To produce content at scale, marketers are having to resort to text-based assets (blog posts, white papers, case studies, product brochures). Yet, the web is aflood with text-based information. B2B buyers who are making complex purchasing decisions don’t have the time or patience to read text. Research on video adoption by Forbes and Google show senior business executives are embracing video as part of the social web. Three-quarters (75%) of executives surveyed said they watch work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly.
And that is precisely why the next generation of the web is being coded with multimedia at its core. HTML5 will usher in a new era of information engagement and audio and video-based content may well replace text as the preferred medium for knowledge dissemination and consumption. The challenge is that, until recently, creating, managing, distributing and measuring webinars and video was time-consuming and expensive, making it difficult to scale multimedia in content marketing. The emergence of powerful SaaS platforms is changing this dynamic.
Another scaling issue has been the fragmentation of distribution points (across many websites and devices). This causes challenges in distributing content quickly and keeping content up to date. Content marketing strategy must be hatched with distribution technology at its core. Else all that hard work of developing buyer personas, content roadmaps and the actual content will not be scaled to achieve its full potential.
Key take-aways:
ONE
Develop a more dynamic, differentiated and measurable conversation with your audience by increasing the % of multimedia assets in your content marketing mix (e.g. webinars and videos)
TWO
As well as distributing your content ad hoc, start laying down the technology which allows you to publish and un-publish multimedia content in real time and measure leads and distribution efficacy in one place.
THREE
Content creation doesn’t have to be hard. Select a proven SaaS platform, which doesn’t require AV professionals to produce webinars and videos. The easier it is to use the tool to create content, the more internal thought leaders will want to help you create content.
FOUR
Listen. Keep monitoring ratings and feedback to continually increase content relevancy for the various stages of the buying cycle.
FIVE
The reward for good and relevant content is free distribution. Leverage your audience’s influence by making it easy for them to share your webinars and videos through their social networks, via e-mail and through their websites.
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, MarketClik and BrightTALK are starting the new year with a peer based, thought leadership initiative aimed at furthering best practices in what it calls “Partner Performance Marketing” (PPM). The outcome will be a strategic brief for global technology marketers selling through multi-tier distribution channels. The challenge of gaining channel mindshare, maximizing partner participation in cooperative marketing campaigns, as well as maintaining brand governance and message consistency in the field, has never been greater.
