Part 4: Everything You've Been Told About Channel Marketing is Wrong - The End of Marketing Magic
The End of Marketing Magic
For a lot of individuals on your corporate team, marketing has always seemed a little bit like magic (raise your hand Finance team). No one is exactly sure how you do it, but they definitely applaud when it works.
When you are marketing through a distributed Partner network it can get even more “magical”— and that is not a good thing.
With national campaigns, Brand marketers have direct feedback on what is working and what isn’t. You can launch a digital ad and if the click-thru-rate stinks, you know you have to make a change.
But if you are running a wide variety of tactics through hundreds or thousands of Channel Partners, getting a consolidated picture of how those dollars are working is very difficult. In fact, Brands find it so difficult to measure success that 61 percent only put in a modest effort to get performance metrics while another 22 percent put little to no effort at all.
MISCONCEPTION: Pulling Performance Analytics Out of a Channel Marketing Hat is a Trick that Doesn’t Work
First, all your marketing vendors give you separate reports. Measuring the effectiveness of Email Marketing compared to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising can be difficult. Consolidating these statistics to get meaningful insight takes a lot of work.
If your Partners are using local vendors for campaign execution, the performance metrics get even more “magical.” Trying to consolidate metrics across all the tactics and all the Partners would take a team of data-crunchers forever and a day. So the reality is, we live with less-than-perfect analysis of Channel Marketing performance and then use this bit of magic misdirection: “Channel Marketing is as much a competitive tactic as a marketing program. We have to put these programs out there or we risk losing Partners to the competition. The actual performance of the spend is almost secondary.” Talk about sleight of hand.
TRUTH: Comprehensive Analytics for Channel Marketing is Not an Illusion
At SproutLoud, we believe in that tried-and-true business axiom: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That is why we have put so much effort into developing SproutLoud Analytics. SproutLoud Analytics offers performance analytics on every tactic launched through the platform. Your Brand and your Partners can see simple, easy-to-digest reporting on the success of every campaign. This historical reporting is crucial to guiding investments at the local level.
And because all executions run through the Marketing Service Provider (MSP) ecosystem, the Brand can get consolidated views of performance by tactic across all your Partners. For example, you activate a Dynamic Digital Display Ad campaign on your program at an 80 percent SproutPay contribution. Three hundred Partners from coast to coast take part. Each Partner will get a performance report on the impressions and click-thru-rate at the local level. But the Brand can get a 10,000-foot view of the total spend associated with that tactic and the nationwide roll-up of performance analytics.
SproutLoud Analytics doesn’t stop there. Through our innovative Call-Tracking technology, Partners can attach a local exchange phone number as the Call to Action (CTA) for almost any type of campaign. So, while it is easier to track performance in Digital Display or PPC Ads, we can now provide response rates on Newspaper, Direct Mail and more. This allows Partners and Brands, for the first time, to accurately see the value of different tactics within your Channel Marketing program.
SproutLoud Analytics is redefining the way we think about Channel Marketing through centralized performance reporting, aggregated tactic metrics and campaign insight.