For your products to reach customers, you rely on indirect sales through an ecosystem comprised of retailers, dealers, franchisees, distributors, agents, value added resellers (VARs), and influencers. However, managing and scaling marketing campaigns for your local partners can require different platforms for SEO, CRM, paid advertising, email, and social media in order to share consistently on-brand marketing materials. In addition to digital branding, it’s vital that direct mail, printed signage, and all print marketing material and promotional products remain brand compliant as well. To ensure the ROI on all marketing efforts, you will need analytics capabilities to translate large amounts of performance data into actionable insights that can be leveraged to strengthen strategies for growth, audience development, and collaborations with your partners.

Getting the job done requires a tech stack of specialized tools that execute messaging and brand compliance across thousands of local partners throughout a diverse and distributed network. Fortunately, you don’t need to go to numerous platforms to manage each facet of your campaign and gain an overview of everything that’s happening with your local partners. Simplifying and integrating your national-to-local marketing tech stack with through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) is the next important step toward improving efficiencies across your entire channel partner system.

What is Through Channel-Marketing Automation?

Through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) provides a way to make marketing simple for both brands and their local partners. From one central dashboard, brands have the ability to align strategic, innovative, AI-powered technologies with successful integrated marketing initiatives. That means you can scale your national campaigns into personalized, local marketing efforts while maintaining brand compliance throughout every phase for your one-time promotions or on-going marketing campaigns. Optimizing engagements through automation helps you become more strategic about marketing costs and gives your local partners the support they need to showcase your products.

Local retail partners get local marketing automation with personalized solutions and managed services that improve their marketing performance, help them generate awareness and demand, and drive their growth and revenue. TCMA makes it easy for them to stay on board and market your products to their customers effectively.

Enterprises Benefit from TCMA

From one, easy-to-read dashboard, enterprises can share marketing resources and content with their channel partners for brand consistency and compliance. It provides robust tracking capabilities to determine ROI of marketing dollars invested and improve decision making across your entire spectrum of partners. Features can include digital asset management, campaign management for channel partners, co-op funds management, and marketing analytics. It makes it easy to order brand-compliant printed materials from one central location.

Benefits of TCMA include:

• Increased efficiency for both enterprises and partners that lets them focus on what each does best through every step of the process from design to execution to measurement.
• Ensured brand consistency for all marketing materials across every channel and with every local partner.
• Scalability and adaptability allow you to react to changing market conditions quickly and assign assets to campaigns and programs that are successful and show potential for growth.
• Strengthened relationships with partners based on cooperation and collaboration to create a winning customer experience.
• Ability to replace and consolidate the tools in your tech stacks to manage partners more efficiently and faster.

TCMA Encourages Fuller Partner Buy-In

TCMA removes the complexity of organizing and sharing strategies and content and overcomes the concerns of local partners who may lack experience or feel overwhelmed in the evolving environment of multichannel marketing. TCMA can immediately help them build credibility with customers and develop a more engaging experience for shoppers regardless of whether it occurs in a brick-and-mortar establishment, through a website, or at an ecommerce site. 

TCMA gives your local partners:

• Access to your library of marketing collateral to accompany new product launches, seasonal campaigns, and other brand initiatives. You can give them the ability to order and co-brand brochures, ads, promotional signage, and digital and social posts through an easy-to-use dashboard.
• Automated email campaigns generated from landing page leads, loyalty programs, customer and prospect behavior, and website visits.
• Relevant content and co-branding opportunities for local market-specific campaigns, product-targeted promotions, and lead-generation activities to drive local customer experiences.
• Real-time analytics and reports that let them see and appreciate the advantages of your TCMA and realize the impact that your relationship with them makes on their sales revenue.

What To Expect From Your TCMA

The key features of your TCMA should include:

• Multi-channel marketing integration. Through one dashboard, you can manage brand-consistent digital, print, signage, social media, email, web content marketing, and other media to reach targeted audiences with consistency and accuracy.
• End-to-End Automated Campaign Management. Invite collaboration and input at every stage of national-to-local marketing efforts. Expand on capabilities to plan, execute, measure campaigns, and communicate seamlessly throughout campaigns to adapt to changing market conditions.
• Streamlined Content Availability. Give local partners easier access to approved marketing content to ensure brand consistency. Allow partners to customize the content within brand guidelines for their local audiences.
• Robust Reporting. Both you and your partners should be able to gain insights from marketing metrics so that together you can craft strategies for continued growth.
• Co-marketing budget management. Easily track fund allocation for greater transparency and more effective use of market development funds during joint marketing efforts.

Steps To Implementing Your TCMA

The best TCMA provides ease-of-use, relevance to marketing objectives, efficiency, and adaptability to engage, incentivize, and retain diverse networks of channel partners. Consider the following to stay ahead of your competition and drive revenue for both your enterprise and your local partners.

1. Determine Needs and Fit
   Find TCMA that aligns with your goals and plans for growth and has the resources to handle the many tools that comprise your tech stack today. With through channel marketing platforms, like Marketing.com’s Dot™, you get simplified management of content, online ordering, data and analytics for complete campaign management. Make sure the platform is easy to implement to ensure wider adoption across users and has the functionality to streamline your most important processes. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to your unique challenges managing partner growth and brand consistency, so find a TCMA that can be customized to support your long-term business objectives.

2. Get Buy In from Stakeholders and Key Partners
   Your TCMA will impact different stakeholders across your operation that may include sales, IT, data security, and legal. Work with them from the start to understand their needs, the measurements the rely on to make informed decisions, and their expected success benchmarks. Get input from your local partners on the through-channel marketing issues that matter most to them. Be sure your TCMA is easy for them to navigate and that management of content and your fund program is streamlined.

3. Communicate Regularly With Local Partners
   Long term success depends on your relationships with your local partners. Don’t stop marketing your TCMA to them. Keep them excited and continue to show the ways through-channel automation is delivering results that matter to them. Resolve issues quickly and keep partners engaged in improvements to your through-channel platform as markets and technology evolve and innovate.

If you expect your enterprise to remain competitive in today’s marketplace, you will need a TCMA that improves productivity, lowers costs, allows for collaboration, and empowers local partners to scale your national campaigns to match their markets. Marketing.com’s Dot™ provides a robust through-channel marketing platform that will help you accelerate growth and nurture stronger relationships with your local partners. Contact us today.