Are Your Channel Partner Marketing Materials One-Size-Fits-All?

For many channel programs, a majority of partners are small organizations that don’t have their own marketing departments to create materials. That leaves your partners’ sales teams to fend for themselves when it comes to creating their own sales materials and collateral.  Do you deliver your content in a format they can most effectively use?

Do you or your marketing team create channel partner materials in a myriad of Adobe products, then PDF them for distribution? This will work for materials that you don’t want modified by your partner, but you may find that this doesn’t fit every sales process or market. Creating content that can be easily modified by your partners to apply their brand, content information or logo may make it more likely they will use your content and messaging when selling your product. This will also make it easier for partners to tweak your collateral for their particular customer audience for keeping the integrity of your message. Just as you have partners of all sizes and needs, your partners also have to modify their sales process to accommodate their prospects.

Standard business tools like MS PowerPoint or MS Word can be a great choice for producing data sheets, white papers, sales presentations or e-books. Making them available in their native format–rather than creating a PDF of everything before distributing them–enables your partners to make any modifications they feel will help them better sell your products to their customer base.

Sometimes simpler is just better – even for your larger partners. Even if partners have a fully staffed marketing and design shop, you may be unknowingly creating a time-consuming and unnecessary step in the sales process before your content gets into customer hands. Worse yet, your content may not even get used because its value is diminished. Depending on the purpose of the piece, it’s more efficient and just as effective to offer it in a format that sales can modify themselves.

Let Channel Partners Create Co-Branded Marketing Materials

Another way to make life easier for your partners and ensure brand consistency is to automate the creation of co-branded marketing collateral. Using templates and automation tools, your partners can quickly generate materials such as brochures, data sheets, and proposals that feature both your branding and theirs, along with customizable fields for contact information. By reducing the manual effort needed to modify these assets, you not only help partners move faster but also ensure that your messaging and branding stay intact, even as partners tailor materials for their specific audiences. Automating this process saves time for both your partners and your team while enabling scalable collaboration across your channel.

And of course, providing all of this valuable content in an easy to use channel partner portal makes the process of getting your message to your suppliers (and their customers) both easier and faster.

Make Friends With Your Own Marketing Department

Creating content and sales materials for your suppliers on your own? If your organization does have full marketing department, making friends can reap huge rewards. They can often adapt your corporate marketing materials to work in a channel scenario, and even help you convert them into a format more conducive to your partner’s modifications.

With partners, the old adage that ‘content is king’, still rules. Make sure that your content is delivered in the most effective way possible to help support partner success.