Everything You've Been Told About Channel Marketing is Wrong: Part 1 - Controlling the Uncontrollable

There is no more powerful concept in go-to-market strategy than the Channel. The idea of hundreds or thousands of Independent Partners passionately selling your products is a wildly attractive concept. There are companies, and industries for that matter, that are solely built on Channel Sales. But longstanding challenges with messaging, funds utilization and performance management have complicated this lucrative way to get your products in the hands of potential customers:  

• Brand compliance will be subjective at best.
• About 50 percent of the money Brands allocate for marketing through Channel Partners will go unused.
• Channel Partners will market the way they see fit.
• You will commit a lot of money and people to manage the highly manual processes of reviewing, approving and reimbursing Partners for their marketing efforts.

But these are all challenges based on a 20th century view of technology. The cloud, dynamic ad templates, intelligent funds management and centralized analytics are literally hacking the Channel model and making it better: more affordable, more efficient, more transparent and more effective.

In this article, we spend time exploring the common misconceptions many modern marketers have regarding getting their message into market through the Channel.

Controlling the Uncontrollable

Marketing through Independent Partners has always meant some loss of control. Partners are entrepreneurial, hardworking individuals who often understand their local markets better than the Brand. They know the community, and they know what they need to win. So this creates a fundamental conflict:

1) Brands need to control the message and maintain compliance on all advertising.

2) Partners need to create ads specifically for the local market.

MISCONCEPTION: Giving Partners Control Means the Brand is Giving It Up

The solution to this Brand/Partner conflict has always been handled the same: more controls. All customization must be pre-approved by the Brand, so extensive guidelines are created. Partners demand more flexibility, so the Brand pays exorbitant agency fees to create a huge inventory of choices. Partners pay agencies to customize ads according to the guidelines. Partners submit the ads for approvals. The Partner or the agency misinterprets a guideline or makes a mistake, and the ad is rejected. The Brands reviews hundreds of ads a day, creating massive amounts of administrative work. The cycle continues and ultimately what we see is a lot of confusion and frustration, but not a lot of ads in market.

Right now, in your company, some poor soul spends most of their time every week reviewing customization requests from Partners. Right now, you probably have 20 Partners pulling their hair out because they thought they did everything they were supposed to do, but they still received a “Denied” email from the Brand team.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, costs are rising, and campaigns are not in market.

TRUTH: Simplify Campaign Execution

At SproutLoud, we put a lot of effort into finding a way to give Partners marketing assets they can customize without requiring the Brand to look over their shoulder. We call it SproutLoud Studio.

The Brand team loads assets onto the SproutLoud platform through SproutLoud Studio. During the initial setup, the Brand selects all the possible formats that a Partner might need. Rules are set on how assets can be modified and what can and can’t be added. These customization parameters can be set across print, digital, social, direct mail, etc.

SproutLoud Studio then creates these assets on the platform using highly dynamic templates. The end result is an inventory of campaign assets that the Partner can access through SproutLoud’s Partner Portal. The Partner will only see the inventory the Brand presents. Then the Partner has tremendous flexibility to change dimensions, add call-to-action, contact and location information and even insert photographs. All this without a single approval email being sent, opened or denied.

Now, what’s the result of this original approach to the problem?  

The Brand team saves time, headcount and OpEx that is currently dedicated to doing really boring administrative work. Brands can reallocate that human capital to creating new messages and new campaigns.

Partners save time currently spent doing really boring administrative work. Guess where that time goes?  On the sales floor creating relationships with more customers and talking about the Brand’s products.

Finally, the process is so simple the Brand team can create more customer-facing campaigns, and Partners are getting more campaigns into market quicker. This casts a wider net, captures more customers and creates more sales.

Read the rest of the whitepaper by clicking the link below.....

Everything You've Been Told About Channel Marketing is Wrong