It isn’t rare for vendors and suppliers to create marketing campaigns and materials for partners and then wonder why those partners don’t actually use them. These vendors spend considerable resources on this collateral, host it in a partner portal, and then watch as they languish. In many cases, it’s clear: The marketing assets are about the vendor, not the partner. End users care less about the solutions in their tech stack than they care about whether that stack – and the partner who sold it to them – will help address their business needs. Partners need materials that promote their value proposition to the user, not the vendor’s.

What You Need and What Your Partners Need Can Be Aligned

By offering partners quality content they can customize to convey their message along with yours and participating in funding campaigns built around such materials, you can realize far more effective campaigns than you did when you just wanted them to push your products out to their customers.

Pulling your products through as part of their proposals puts them into context, amplifying the value proposition and real usefulness of your offering. This is a much more effective message than simply extolling the superiorities of the product alone. For instance, many vendors are starting to emphasize the various services a channel partner can provide that are attached to or related to their products. In this way, they are recognizing the real revenue-producing priorities those channel partners live by.

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Way More Than Insert Their Logo

For many years, vendors left space on their collateral for their partners to crash-imprint their own logo, contact information, and perhaps a small message. That’s not new. But it’s not what partners want or need from marketing assets in 2023.

Put this in the context of the classic structure of a marketing message:

• The Hook: The very first sentence is called “the hook” because it has the responsibility of convincing the buyer to continue reading the rest of the message. It has to strike right at the customer’s perceived need, provoking them to think about a significant business challenge that the channel partner can solve using the vendor-partner’s product.
• The Groundwork: In the first paragraph, the reader must come away confident that the channel partner knows and understands their challenge, and has an excellent grasp of how to resolve it. This should be written by the channel partner with the vendor’s assistance.
• The Value Prop: In the next paragraph, we present evidence of our excellent ability to solve the customer’s challenge. This involves describing the value delivered by the vendor’s product and following with compelling information as to why the channel partner is so ideally suited to be the implementer of the vendor’s solution. The vendor-partner provides the product value propositions, with the channel partner adding their own messaging about how they deploy the products.
• The Evidence: Then it’s time to allude to many other customers who have enjoyed the indicated value from the vendor’s product, but only when the deployment was performed effectively by a quality channel partner.
• The Close: Finally, the channel partner suggests the next action the reader should take to move themselves forward in the sales motion. This is the call-to-action (CTA) that connects each marketing email to the rest of the sales campaign.

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Through-Partner Should Be “Along-with-Partner” Marketing

Vendors and partners are in this together. It’s like selling a lamp. It’s useless until someone plugs it in and turns it on. Product can’t deliver value to customers until someone configures it, prepares it, deploys it, integrates it, and gets users working with it.

Smart vendors have long seen channel partners as an extension of their sales arm. Now, that relationship expands and deepens as channel partners become an extension of their marketing mechanism.