Digital marketing’s role in shaping customer’s buying and brand experiences is more prevalent and critical than ever. B2B customers are already 60 percent through the buying process before they ever speak to a sales representative and 61 percent of B2B transactions start online. With over 62,000 partners globally and approximately 85 percent of Cisco’s revenue going through the channel, partners play a critical role and digital marketing has become a crucial component of their overall success. Feedback from partners continuously reiterates that digital marketing is one of key areas they need help with.

That’s where Cisco comes in.

To help partners perform and transform their marketing practices, Cisco is announcing an expansion of the industry leading Marketing Velocity brand to help partners reach customers in transformational ways through their marketing activities. The new Marketing Velocity connects and integrates Cisco’s existing ‘best-in-class’ capabilities under one offering, bringing to industry a first-ever comprehensive program of its kind to support partners own digital transformation. The expansion will enable partners end-to-end from elevating their marketing practices, to delivering marketing funds to enablement tools to accelerate their field activation.

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“This is more than just bringing all of the partner marketing resources under one brand,” said Boon Lai, Vice President, Global Partner Marketing, Cisco. “It’s ultimately about integrating and up-leveling our partner’s marketing practices with an end to end solution to attract new customers, deliver more sales and drive profits. We are deeply committed to investing and accelerating our partners’ marketing expertise though this new platform.”

The newly expanded Marketing Velocity consists of four components:

1. Cisco Marketing Velocity Learning: an education and empowerment gateway to fuel growth of partner marketing practices. Real-time access to marketing education is essential to keep pace with rapid industry change, deliver an amazing customer experience and drive demand in the market.
2. Cisco Funding for Marketing Velocity: to help partners perform their everyday tasks, the Cisco Joint Marketing Funds (JMF) provides authorized channel partners with marketing funds to market their companies, the Cisco products and services they sell and to drive bookings through co-marketing initiatives.
3. Cisco Marketing Velocity Central: Formerly known as Partner Marketing Central, Marketing Velocity Central is a full-service marketing portal to assist partners in performing and transforming. It is the partners’ go-to spot for free-to-use customizable campaigns featuring automated email journeys, both social media & website syndication and an enhanced marketing content library. It also offers advanced campaign analysis capabilities including campaign tracking and customer contact engagement scoring. With the agency marketplace, partners can browse and connect with specially chosen demand generation agencies and order services ranging from paid search, social media activation and digital event promotion to traditional telemarketing.  Partners can seamlessly apply their Funding for Marketing Velocity in this portal as well.
4. Cisco Marketing Velocity Activate: Marketing Velocity Activate is a new co-marketing service in limited-release with a select number of partners and is a true transform component. As customer experience becomes increasingly digital, the ability to jointly orchestrate customer journeys together with Cisco and its partners becomes increasingly important. Marketing Velocity Activate is an industry-first program that combines business data and insight-driven joint planning together with Cisco and partner omnichannel journeys to engage customers and drive revenue.

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“This further evolution of Cisco Marketing Velocity displays how committed Cisco is to helping their partners to grow their digital marketing capability and more importantly outcomes,” said Steve White, IDC, Program Vice President, Channels and Alliances. “Marketing Velocity was already a leading light in the partner marketing space, but these changes really do show that Cisco is the benchmark for marketing with partners.”

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