The Future Of Partner Marketing: Through-Channel Marketing Automation

With 75% of world trade flowing indirectly, the time has come for channels, partnerships, and alliances to be enabled with the same level of marketing passion as direct. The third stage in sales and marketing transformation will be anchored around effective partner management and through-channel marketing automation (TCMA).

Enabling partners of all types to leverage vendor content, messaging, branding, and demand generation initiatives in their local markets is critical to driving a winning customer experience. Those brands that can balance their direct and indirect execution while ensuring consistent customer experiences through distributed and localized marketing will have outsized success in the market.

The TCMA market is growing because more B2B marketing professionals see distributed and local marketing as key to influencing new buyers. They are placing trust in TCMA providers to act as strategic partners, allowing them to broaden their reach and influence customers in new ways.

Key takeaways:

• Look at channels, partnerships, alliances, and emerging influencers as a lead-generating engine.
• Better understand the growing number of partners, what they specialize in, their sales and marketing acumen, and how they go to market.
• Build partner programs that are scalable, automated, and self-service-oriented.

Vendors mentioned: Ansira, Aprimo, Averetek, BrandMarker, BrandMuscle, Bridgeline Digital, Gage, Impartner, Netsertive, Sproutloud, StructuredWeb, TIE Kinetix, Twogether, Zift, ZINFI