A Balanced Channel Marketing Diet

It's easy in business to limit yourself to just a few marketing techniques especially if you are in the channel with limited resources and marketing budgets. You might look at the success others are having on social media and want to confine your marketing to LinkedIn and Facebook. Or, if your company has been around for a while, you might feel reluctant to dive into new digital marketing techniques and try instead to keep growing your channel using sponsorships and events.

One of the most dangerous phases in American business is “but we’ve always done it that way.”  If your channel fails to add the marketing diversity it needs to succeed in the modern market, your channel might continue to grow, but at a slower pace and without many key ingredients needed to sustain that growth. Eventually, a person that tries to survive on only pasta will notice they don't feel as healthy as they once did, and you'll notice the same thing about your channel if you limit yourself to just one or two marketing strategies.

Partners will likely interact with your business in a variety of ways before they decide to refer customers to you. They may browse your website, view an ad, scroll through your social media, search for reviews… the list goes on and on. This reinforces the fact that today’s partners are no different than today’s consumers who prefer to start their discovery process online and start exploring without your help. Partners are more autonomous than ever and choose to access information online and on demand. 

Our goal at Convey is to help you achieve a more balanced diet in your channel marketing strategy by adding that all-important element, digital and online presence through our Convey Channel program.  Here is how we help you create a balanced marketing diet.

First you have to get the partner to the table, so they know what you are serving. In the world of Convey Channel, you have a wide audience of partners who are hungry for services. There are around 40 master agents who have subscribed their over 23,000 sales partners to a Convey partner portal.  If you have a content catalog in our network, partners have many ways to find you because we help those master agents drive traffic to the portal.  In 2019 alone, we had over 2 million content views and downloads from partners who began their online journey to find you through Convey.

Then it’s time to start the meal with an appetizer. The partner may not know you yet, but they know they are hungry for the type of service you offer because their customers are asking for it.  In a balanced digital diet, you give the partner a taste of who you are, so they want to dig deeper.  Content catalogs on Convey master agent portals can contain a summary of your services in a battlecard, a quick video about your program, or a page that overviews your value proposition.

Now, let’s go to the main course.  Now that the partner has come inside your content catalog for a meal, you need to feed them what they want.  Partners need to know the type of customers that they should pursue, how to sell to them, how to interact with you and how they make money.  Partners looking for a deeper dive want a full meal of case studies, white papers, product features, or descriptions of high target vertical markets. You can vary that meal inside of a Convey catalog by promoting webinars, adding content, or being featured in outbound email campaigns.

And no balanced marketing diet would be complete without the dessert.  For partners, the dessert is most often that financial incentive that sweetens the deal.  We’ve seen Convey providers get very creative about how they showcase their spiffs and promotions.  They add creative banners to their content catalogs that can also appear on the master agent home page.  They get creative w