Should You Provide Marketing Automation for Your Channel Partners?
In today’s day and age, thanks to recent advances in technology, we’ve come up with different ways to effectively automate many work processes, saving individuals as well as businesses significant quantities of time and effort in the process. Marketing is no exception to this rule — many marketers use software solutions that specialize in marketing automation.
As stated in a report by Social Media Today, 75% of all companies use at least one of the many kinds of marketing automation technology. It’s expected that this number would rise to 90% among companies and other organizations by the end of 2021. However, when it comes to investing in through-channel marketing automation (TCMA), the figures show a different story.
What Is Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA)?
TCMA is a SaaS tool that allows brands to effectively and inexpensively provide support for advertising and regional marketing communication through a collection of indirect channel partners, dealers, resellers, agents, distributors, branches, and franchisees. TCMA is used by businesses with the aim of enabling their channel partners to conduct effective marketing campaigns. TCMA platforms are also known as distributed marketing platforms.
TCMA provides brand marketers with services, programs, and automation that they require in order to build an easier marketing system for partners. In fact, TCMA dramatically alters the way brands go to market through their partners.
TCMA allows all of your business partners — particularly channel partners — to leverage your brand’s messages and demand generation efforts, and use these initiatives within the local marketplace. Being able to use a great array of materials — such as logos, raw files, images, marketing campaigns, customizable content, and more — is crucial for all kinds of partners, including those that use the TCMA platform in a different way.
In other words, when a primary brand has intentions to reach its end customers and is in need of a secondary or a tertiary firm to operate as a channel of distribution, the primary brand wants to make sure its messaging and positioning are accurately conveyed and preserved when its agents market its solutions to its customers as the end-users of its products and/or services. Using TCMA tools can help brands with managing these tasks in an organized way, and save them some money in the process. In addition, these tools can also assist partner organizations to carry out numerous different tactics and plans as they advertise and sell the brand’s solutions.
Reluctance to Use TCMA
While TCMA systems can bring businesses countless benefits, many brands are still hesitant to invest parts of their budgets to provide their channel partners with the advantages of TCMA. Three of the most common justifications for not using TCMA tools are the following:
- The existing customer management system (CRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) work just fine on their own;
- TCMA is an underused tool and not worth the investment;
- Channel partners focus more on technology instead of being actually interested in marketing.
Truth is, if you believe these statements, you’re likely missing out on some facts. Below, we’ll try to explain why it is so for each of the above statements.
Why Using a CRM and a Marketing Automation Platform Software Isn’t Enough
Without a doubt, marketing automation platforms have made dramatic changes in the field of go-to-market (GTM) strategies on a global scale. Even so, MAPs are not created to assist you with the efficient advertisement of your products and services through your channel partners. For this reason, you will need a TCMA platform because it’s built intentionally for the job. A few of the reasons why your MAP is no replacement for a TCMA are that you can’t localize business partner campaigns with your MAP, you can’t customize through-channel initiatives, and you can’t prioritize the timing of channel marketing ventures with a MAP technology.
It’s important for you to consider the specific things you cannot do with a MAP that you can comfortably do with a TCMA. With a robust TCMA platform, you would be able to customize your campaigns around different products, price points, reseller authorizations, services, geographies, and much more. A MAP does not provide you with these services. To add to this, with a MAP you would be unable to provide your partners with the flexibility to conduct your campaigns on their time schedule.
Another advantage of TCMA technology is that with it, you can easily attach your partner’s logo to your landing pages and mailings, as well as insert your partner’s social media feed or its URL there — which is, again, something you can’t do with a MAP.
TCMA Is an Underused Investment — But Is It Worth the Money?
Although in many cases, businesses are correct when they deem that they won’t use TCMA very much, this point of view is also incomplete. In addition to other things, business partners often make complaints about how ease of use leaves them wanting and that there is not enough automation of key steps.
There exist several TCMA functionalities that offer a solution to overcome these problems. Ultimately, the decision will rest in your own hands — consider whether you prefer saving on funds you’d spend on TCMA technology, or providing extra value to your channel partners by using TCMA.
Channel Partners Focus More on Technology Rather Than Being Actually Interested in Marketing
Although in many cases this might be true as well, this maxim is actually outdated. As channel partners have tried promoting their own brands alongside those of their contractors, contrary to popular belief, marketing spending as a percent of revenue has in effect increased among these partners. In particular, smaller partner companies have increased their spending on marketing as of late. On average, small companies spend a larger percentage of their revenue on marketing as contrasted to their larger channel counterparts.
On this matter, you can consider the annual study State of the Channel by CompTIA. Researchers have historically explored thousands upon thousands of partners all around the world, asking them about their opinions on go-to-market strategies among other things. Most notably, channel partners were asked what facets of joint selling and marketing with their contractors they found to be most relevant to their business and/or most likely to bring value to it.
When it comes to the answers, the usual suspects, as might be expected, are highest on the lists: improved negotiating leverage and more quality leads. However, the opportunity to tap into the expertise of digital marketing and social media practical knowledge of seller partners is high on the lists as well, which is something that emphasizes an increasing desire among partners to strengthen their marketing with seller allies. Another thing of high relevance to partners, according to this research, is the potential to “appear bigger and more sophisticated to the customer” due to new capabilities in the digital field.
Advantages of Using TCMA
The fact that the internet and rapidly advancing technology have drastically changed everyday lives has brought up the issue of outdated communication systems and processes between producers and their channel partners in need of modernization. People have developed a habit of searching for your company and your company’s partners online.
Nowadays, modern online-based consumers want instantaneous answers to all their questions and solutions to all issues they’re facing — and they also want the products and services they paid for delivered to them swiftly. Having this in mind, the automation that TCMA provides to your channel partners is already a huge advantage in favor of your brand’s outreach.
Besides the benefits mentioned above, there are few more things to consider as a reason for implementing TCMA technology as a tool. Your partners probably have contacts from regional events or sales activities that even you are unfamiliar with yet. By contributing product-line or specific market campaigns for these types of leads, you will both have a successful outcome. Delivering the right message at the right time to your targeted audience is the ultimate goal of marketing. Use the closeness of your channel partners to win over potential consumers.
Finally, strengthening your relationships with your partners is also an important element. It might not often be the main business goal of starting a TCMA initiative, but the development and strength of your relationship with the channel partners can be a by-product of your investment. For the most part, the successful onboarding of partners and their loyalty, in the long run, can be ascribed to the support of their partners when they launch their brands in their regional market.
Considerations and Implications
If you’re starting a new TCMA platform, bear in mind that new channel partners are often the most accepting of new activities, and they tend to overlook any errors that take place during launching. When it comes to new partners, a useful thing you can do with them is include them in focus groups to make your relationship stronger.
Forrester points out that only about half of brands provide TCMA technology to channel partners, and even though this number is getting bigger, it’s still not even near the optimal level — which, when reached, would make a significant amount of companies using TCMA feel like they’re making the most out of these systems when it comes to attaining their marketing goals. Forrester’s analysts have foreseen that a “third-wave” of digital trading will begin to develop in the corporate world, one that is pushed forward, partly, by business partners that haven’t much partaken in vendor brand enhancement in the past.
At the end of the day, regardless of its potential, a lack of extensive adoption of TCMA technology is withholding this encouraging wave of business transformation. But what does this mean for your brand? If you still haven’t started using TCMA technology to the benefit of your channel partners, think about how automation has helped (or could have helped) your own brand. In much the same way, your channel partners would also benefit from automating channel processes through TCMA.
With all this in mind, take your time to think about starting a TCMA initiative. At the end of the day, it will likely turn out to be far less intimidating than what you might think and can have more benefits than downsides for your brand.
Channel Partners
A channel partner is an individual or an organization that provides assistance, products, or technologies as a representative of another organization that originally produces or distributes them. Most of the time, channel partners sign co-branding accords with the manufacturer or main distributor, serving as the foundation of the channel partnership.
A lot of brands see merit in consumers purchasing their products or services through a system of indirect partners. These partners best understand their local markets and they rapidly establish connections in their regional communities, which, in a way, makes them the “local experts” for the products or services they offer.
Some of the biggest obstacles in selling through channel partners consist of the fact that local business holders are not always advanced marketers, and the inner systems of their brands and processes can be complex and outdated. What’s more, for brands whose products and services are being sold in numerous locations, by numerous partners and representatives, one of the major marketing obstacles can be preserving brand integrity from location to location. Consumers nowadays expect consistent interactivity with the brands they purchase from and they are willing to find a new supplier if their expectations aren’t satisfied.
Marketing Automation
Since there are high stakes for standards and stability, in many instances, national marketing managers spend notable time in attendance and micromanagement of local marketers in order to avoid mixed messaging, renegade collateral design, or other potential weakening of the power of their brand. As might be expected, all those obligations are on top of the brand marketing leaders’ already busy workload and can move their attention away from the central tasks that are necessary for their brands’ growth.
Clever marketing managers always try to come up with methods to empower local marketers to generate and deploy excellent campaigns that stick to brand standards — usually with little input from the team of national marketers, or no input at all. The intention of these methods is to ease the very cumbersome duty of managing a brand, local marketing, as well as support for local marketers. Many of them will rely on TCMA technology to accomplish this task more often than not.
The industry of marketing automation is flourishing at a staggering rate. As stated by Forrester in their Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 to 2023 (Global), the amount of money spent on marketing automation tools will increase significantly in the period of the next few years, going from $11.4 billion in 2017 to $25.1 billion by 2023.
Summary
Automation plays a key role in today’s dynamic business world, and marketing is no exception to this rule. There are many marketing automation software solutions that businesses use, and in some cases, they do so together with their channel partners.
Through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) is a SaaS marketing platform technology that allows brands to effectively and inexpensively scale advertising and regional marketing communication through their dispersed collection of indirect channel partners, dealers, resellers, agents, distributors, branches, and franchisees. While it has great potential, businesses that fail to properly and extensively adopt TCMA technologies are less likely to take full advantage of their marketing potential.
Clever marketing managers are thinking of methods to empower local marketers to generate and deploy excellent campaigns that stick to brand standards. The main idea behind these practices is to reduce the cumbersome duty of managing a brand, local marketing, and the support of local marketers. This is why a lot of marketers lean towards TCMA technology to accomplish these tasks.
A few of the most common justifications for not using TCMA tools are that the existing CRM and MAP work just fine, that TCMA is an underused investment, and that the focus of partners is more on technology than marketing. But despite the misconceptions, TCMA provides many benefits, and those benefits are proven by research as well as in practice. TCMA can also be a successful tool for strengthening a business’s relationship with its channel partners.