Analyze & Communicate the Value of Through-Partner Marketing

This is Part #6 (and the final piece) of our Through-Partner Marketing (TPM) Best Practice Series. In this blog, we discuss the challenges of measuring traditional partner marketing, how that can be solved, and the importance of communication across your internal organization and partner ecosystem.

Partner marketing and MDF-sponsored marketing activities have historically been difficult to evaluate and measure. 

When Vendor marketing teams fund activities that direct buyers to partners (as they should!), it’s difficult to maintain control over that customer journey, know what steps the customer is taking on partner sites, and have a closed-loop process to measure success.

Often, Vendors have to rely on their partners to do the work, report back, and even prove their results. In today’s day and age of digital maturity and “everything-automation”, we still see processes that are manual and rudimentary. (Do you still require your partners to email you screenshots of their websites?) Even some of the biggest Vendors report that once they hand over marketing funds to partners, they don’t know exactly how it’s spent or whether it was used for its intended purpose.

Through-Partner Marketing (TPM) automation enables Vendor marketing teams to better control their marketing budget through partners, have visibility of the impact on their partner community, and, importantly – measure the return on their own marketing investment. 

All of this is important, not only for the Vendor marketing teams, but also for your partners, and other internal Vendor organizations. So what can Vendors measure?

• Co-branded impressions across each partner, and in aggregate
• How many potential customers landed on Vendor content on partner websites
• Co-branded Email opens and click-through rates – by campaigns, by partners, and in total
• Partner social posts, impressions, and click-throughs
• Which category of content was most engaged with by customers across campaigns, and each channel (web, Email, and social)
• How many documents were downloaded by category and partner
• Leads distributed to partners
• If the partners are using the deal tracker, we can tie the results to revenue

Now that you’ve got visibility to the data – share it far and wide! You almost can’t over-communicate. But you definitely can under-communicate – and that can cost you.

Internal Analytics & Communication

If we circle back to the first post in this series, you’ll remember that we wrote about the different internal organizations that need to be aligned to make Through-Partner Marketing a success.  A big part of that includes reporting back and demonstrating how TPM is positively impacting their business units.

• Channel sales and operations teams can evaluate partners for digital engagement, maturity, and growth. They also have data that enables them to follow-up for co-selling opportunities.
• Management and finance teams will have new metrics on marketing budget efficiency and effectiveness and specific returns from channel marketing activities.
• If you have coordinated with your corporate inbound marketing teams, they will have metrics to claim, including customer visits, traffic, content engagement, click-through and conversion rates, and leads.
• Outbound marketing teams will have metrics from the coordinated email and search campaigns, including impressions, engagement, leads, and revenue.
• Product management teams can evaluate how product launches fared through partners, where there is traction, and which partners are most engaged with their product areas.
• Over time, you can identify your top partners in the TCM program and correlate loyalty and revenue growth.

Partner Analytics

All of the metrics matter for partners, too – including the top-of-funnel, awareness metrics. If buyers don’t know a partner exists, or they can’t find the partner online, their journey will take them elsewhere. So, partners must be online consistently, presenting the Vendor content. Telling your partners how many thousands of impressions they’ve had, how many new potential customers have visited their site, and how many opens, clicks, and downloads they’ve had is important. Not every touch will convert, but the more activity that’s generated, the more we are moving that customer journey toward a lead and a sale.

Lead notification should be automated and immediate. If you’re also collecting website visitor tracking (like we do), it can be batched and communicated periodically (ex: weekly) for partners.

Communicating results to partners keeps you top of mind and ensures that they have ongoing, consistent visibility to the value you are bringing to their business. It drives loyalty.

When we work with Vendors, we also provide recommendations to partners on what they can do next. For example, if we reported strong interest from a particular campaign, we provide partners with advice on how to follow up with customers, using the assets and tools in the TPM program. This data enables Vendors to help partners with a roadmap for success.

Optimize and Improve

Data allows you to measure your success. It allows you to analyze your marketing campaigns and identify where you performed well, and areas that can be improved. Maybe a particular campaign performed well in a particular region, or with a specific segment of partners. All of this can be gleaned from the TPM information to help channel marketing teams improve their value over time.

Conclusion

Through-Partner Marketing gives marketers visibility to real results and can help solve the dilemma of measuring channel marketing budget efficiency. 

It works when it’s well-planned, when it has cross-functional organization buy-in, and when it’s measured and communicated internally and across your partner ecosystem.

We recommend that you start with a simple strategy and build additional components and partner benefits as you grow.  Having tight oversight with metrics keeps the program on track, keeps partners highly engaged, and helps the marketing organization maintain management and financial support for their investments.

AscendX Digital Inc. specializes in Managed Through-Partner Marketing. We help manufacturers and distributors optimize through-channel and partner marketing initiatives. We can help you build a strategy and integrate it into existing processes. Whether you have a TCMA investment that needs some strategic and/or operational support, or if you are looking for a fully managed solution, AscendX Digital can help.