Top 2 Reasons You Aren’t Reaping the Growth from TCMA – Here’s How to Get It Right

Are you feeling like your through-channel-marketing efforts aren’t delivering the results you want from your investments?

The ability to market through your partners is a remarkable hidden power, and when done well, through-channel-marketing or through-partner-marketing can result in incredible growth. In fact, partner-provided leads are the next best thing to referrals in terms of close rates. Unfortunately, organizations that reap the full benefits of through-partner marketing are few and far between.

According to Forrester, only 50% of tech brands have implemented traditional, organic TCMA. Of that 50%, only 17% are fully satisfied that they are getting the most from the systems. Most end up being held back by two major roadblocks:

1. More often than not, partners are reluctant to adopt (and actually use) through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) solutions.
2. The role of traditional TCMA is not lead generation, although this is the promise made by many TCMA suppliers. So, often, partners are left dissatisfied with the number of leads generated.

These top challenges are commonly faced by many channel programs and not necessarily solved with traditional TCMA tools. More on these challenges and the way to solve them through the advanced TCMA solutions available today.

Challenge #1: Traditional TCMA = Too much to handle

As we know, traditional TCMA tech is nothing new. It promises the world in driving partner-led brand awareness and demand while accelerating channel lead generation and pipeline through automation. And many have made the claim that they can do it and deliver results.

Think about it, in the TCMA space most know, there’s email, social, branded graphics for ads; it can get complex quickly. And if you provide all those wonderful tools all at once, it becomes overwhelming, even for the most sophisticated marketer. Then think about how many brands your channel partners are working with.

According to Impartner’s director of sales engineering Robb Franks, in one of our Lessons from the Edge sessions, many brands turn on through-channel-marketing automation for their partners and simply wish their partners well. To no surprise, this strategy leads to an always-fail outcome – no matter how good the tech is.

So, what’s the deal? How are leading brands and distributors like Xerox, HP, and TD SYNNEX, among others finding success with TCMA?

Before we answer, we need to lay out what they aren’t doing and why.

Why Salesforce is not the winning solution to a successful TCMA strategy

In evaluating Salesforce Communities to power through-channel marketing efforts at Mojo Networks director of global channels Brian Thomas said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” for very compelling reasons.

Interesting considering Salesforce is so instrumental to many tech stacks. You use Salesforce CRM to track interactions, improve sales processes, and bring sense to the traditional chaos of sales and marketing. The same goes for Salesforce Communities, which you may use as a makeshift PRM. But neither tool is effective for helping you increase marketing in coordination with your channel partners. What’s missing?

1. Pure-play TCMA
   Salesforce Communities doesn’t offer a pure-play TCMA solution. That means you’d have to do it through your software partnerships and complex, custom-built solutions that aren’t fully handled by Salesforce.
2. Automation
   TCMA through Salesforce Communities is a manual process. 85% of your long tail channel partners won’t use tools manually. Granted, you can host content, and share it with your partners – but you can’t push it out on behalf of your partners, which advanced TCMA enables you to do.
3. A seamless partner experience
   Introducing a third-party solution into your Salesforce experience creates confusion and tech friction for your partners. It’s difficult to adopt, not to mention there’s no guarantee that your partners are getting what they need when they need it. 20% or more of partners are never reached with “push-content-out” automation. Not exactly ideal for the partner experience now, is it?

Robust, flexible, and powerful, Salesforce is a mighty giant that enables many companies to grow and continue to scale at the pace of their business. Undoubtedly, Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Communities are valuable tools to many organizational areas, however, to achieve a leading infrastructure that supports a fast-growing partner ecosystem, customers like Splunk are combining the strengths of Impartner PRM and Salesforce – and seeing phenomenal growth in their partner logins and significant improvement in their scalability, efficiencies, and partner satisfaction.

But the ability to scale while offering a smooth partner experience is just part of the equation, particularly when it comes to dealing with small and mid-sized (SMB) resellers.

Challenge #2: Traditional TCMA ends at organic

Historically, traditional TCMA has been positioned as the solution to increase brand awareness and lead generation. While possible to an extent, the ability to greatly impact the top of the partner funnel with traditional TCMA is limited to organic efforts. In fact, traditional TCMA is more valuable when leads are already in the funnel. It is essentially a powerful tool for lead nurture.

For example, a partner that is using traditional TCMA to push out branded content across social and to their existing email database is hitting mostly known prospects through these efforts. They are essentially nurturing existing soft leads that came in through events, networking, and organic social following growth, among other organic avenues. Without a doubt, these soft leads need to be nurtured with traditional TCMA tactics to move through the funnel to convert. However, traditional TCMA alone doesn’t expand reach to new, unknown prospects looking for exactly what a partner is offering.

Now imagine being able to tap into the potential of unknown new prospects. That’s where paid media TCMA comes in. Paid media TCMA is focused on real, new lead generation and getting those deals in – through precise targeting, to an intent-driven audience. Combining traditional organic TCMA with paid media TCMA opens that avenue. You’ve got paid media TCMA supplying the reach, and traditional organic TCMA supplying the nurture. It’s a win-win.

Impartner Paid Media TCMA success story

SMB resellers make up 90% of the tech channel market, yet they’ve traditionally been underserved by big corporate brands. This is largely driven by the fact that smaller resellers rarely have the marketing resources required to work with one big brand, let alone multiple brands, or juggle multiple marketing programs. Distribution to these resellers, too, is a big challenge, as distributors typically tend to lag a little on the marketing side, especially digitally.

With an average of just 8 to 10 employees, these resellers don’t have the time, bandwidth, or marketing expertise to properly execute campaigns. You’ve also got to consider that many of them don’t even have some of the basic social channels that are crucial to driving demand and sales. Reality bites, but banking on organic partner marketing efforts isn’t going to get your message very far.

To overcome this challenge, our partner AscendX Digital created an innovative multi-vendor model that enables corporate brands, distributors, and resellers to automate their channel activities. By using Impartner’s TCMA solution, AscendX can offer resellers a single centralized location to learn about the program, embed a single set of code on their sites, and a simple opt-in to take part.

Using automation, the model/platform takes the content provided by the big brands, syndicates it not only on the resellers’ websites but through their social channels, delivering a level of brand awareness and engagement in the market they never would have dreamed of achieving without it. And they barely have to lift a finger!

As a result, AscendX created a differentiated channel marketing service with automated, scalable TCMA that helps:

• Distributors bring a suite of corporate brands to the resellers, so they have one place to go for the content and for the marketing programs.
• End the need for resellers to manage multiple marketing and demand gen programs with a set-it and forget-it model.
• Cut the need for in-house marketing resources.
• Big brands expand their marketing reach (through distributors) to thousands of resellers.
• Resellers leverage the marketing investments big brands have made.
• Automate content on resellers’ social channels and increase follower growth (even if they don’t have these channels prior).
• Resellers elevate their own digital presence on their websites and social media while generating thousands of impressions and hundreds of new customer website visits monthly.

Getting TCMA right with advanced marketing automation

Through-channel-marketing automation provided by Impartner meets the needs of channel program leaders looking to get started and those looking to scale rapidly.

Imagine handing over some automation to your partners, and within hours having a syndicated site set up, clicking just a few buttons, launching a social campaign to engage with your existing followers, and working on turning them into sales opportunities that same week. Yes, it’s that and more.

Impartner TCMA enables you to:

• Expand your top of funnel with paid Google Ads for the Channel to push relevant search traffic – hot prospects – directly to your local channel partner.
• Experience clean lead generation that allows you to get leads directly to your partners and not be in the messy middle.
• Scale seamlessly by using built-in automations and “out-of-the-box” campaigns that make it just as easy to serve one partner as it is to serve thousands.
• Ensure brand compliance through centralized management of all through-channel assets to ensure every partner remains in tune with your marketing.
• Own the right message, at the right time, with unique and demand-driven content that’s smart enough to send users to the right place on your partner’s website.
• Optimize efforts with access to lead attribution insights that show the full ROI view, plus top lead generating partners and content.
• Increase efficiencies with critical integrations to necessary business systems, like Salesforce, Zoho, and HubSpot, that matter to provide operational efficiencies and improved visibility between program leaders and partners.

By considering your channel tech stack carefully – like a PRM tool that integrates seamlessly with your CRM tool, and further integrates with an advanced TCMA Demand Generation Platform – you can say goodbye to underutilized TCMA solutions and organic partner marketing efforts that fall short and shut the door on inefficient paid partner marketing with Google Ads.

Impartner’s TCMA makes it easier, more automated, and more scalable for you to do the work for your partners. Not only do you have full, automated control of your brand from a centralized location as you syndicate your dynamic co-branded microsites, but you’re also driving traffic to these sites via email, social, and paid media campaigns that you’re launching through your partners – all they have to do is opt in and see quality leads and deals flow in.

(Possibly the best part?) The advanced capability of adding Google Ads for the Channel to your TCMA package guarantees that the right message, branded as intended, hits the right market, for the right partner, at the right time through automated digital advertising – without any partner effort.

You’ll finally be able to tap into that extra market reach the long tail of your channel provides, with the added benefit of analytics to help you make data-driven decisions that optimize the demand your partners generate.

It’s time you expanded your marketing reach and increased the ROI on your through-channel marketing investments. Our expert team is ready to help you do so at the speed you need. You could be up and running in as little as 14 days! Request a demo to get started.