#ChannelWeek: Lightening The Channel Marketing Load For Corporate Demand Gen Teams

August 20, 2018
Written by Terry Moffatt, Channel Marketer Report
Published in Blog

As companies strive to drive more revenue through channel organizations, corporate demand gen teams may find their to-do lists are growing. During ChannelWeek, a brand new webcast series hosted by Demand Gen Report and our sister publication, Channel Marketer Report, Harbinder Khera, Founder and CEO of Mindmatrix, will discuss how corporate marketers can lighten their load and still implement highly effective channel marketing programs.

Some of the duties that demand gen teams are being asked to support sound daunting. For example, when it comes to on-behalf marketing programs, demand gen teams are actually performing most of the marketing activities for their partners, especially smaller operations that typically have very few marketing resources of their own.

During his presentation, Bridging The Gap: How Corporate Marketing Can Align Activities With Channel Programs, Khera will explain how on-behalf partner marketing activities can actually offset some of the challenges associated with though-partner programs.

“The big challenge that channel marketers face with channel marketing programs is just getting the partners to actually do them,” said Khera. “With on-behalf programs, corporate marketers are in control. The limited duties that partners need to complete are approving the campaign messaging and providing lists of targeted contacts.”

Without a doubt, some marketing teams may discover that providing on-behalf programs or other through-partner marketing support can require more bandwidth than they have available. Increasingly, marketing teams are offering out-sourced concierge services that partners can use to conduct their own vendor-related campaigns.

In his presentation, Khera will outline how concierge services, often covered by MDF (market develop funds) programs, can lighten the load for demand gen teams by making vendor-focused party marketing resources available to partners.

Concierge services can cover a wide range of activities such as scrubbing lists, uploading prospect lists into partner marketing portals and executing campaigns. They can also help partners build their brand at the local level and ensure partners leverage channel marketing tools to the optimum.

Khera will also focus on how demand gen team can streamline their support of channel marketing programs by optimizing content syndication programs. “It is surprising how many companies don’t have a modern content syndication plan in place,” said Khera. “When marketing teams don’t have a strategy for creating and sharing content through their channel partners, the costs related to repurposing content can skyrocket. Worse, when partners identify too many obstacles to using a vendors’ content, they shift their attention to another vendor.”

By carefully crafting syndicated content and, better yet, by facilitating partner access to it with channel automation marketing tools, demand gen teams can ensure amplification of on-brand messages through customer-trusted partner outlets.

To learn more, be sure to tune into Khera’s presentation on Wednesday. Click here to here view the full ChannelWeek line-up.