Observing from outside how your channel partners market your products is no longer the solution.
With through-channel marketing automation, you can manage how the distribution is done and how marketing campaigns are executed.
This article explores the key benefits of the TCMA approach and guides you through its implementation using marketing automation software.
Key takeaways
- Through-channel marketing automation is an approach designed to optimize how channel providers — distributors, retailers, and resellers — carry out marketing activities for your products.
- A TCMA approach is represented by automation tools, such as marketing automation software or content management systems, that enable partners to easily access and co-brand materials for distribution in local markets.
- TCMA solutions can integrate with partner tools, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, to gain analytics on how customers engage with marketing assets.
What is through-channel marketing automation?
Through channel marketing automation (TCMA) is a strategy that involves sales and marketing automation tools to enhance how channel partners market services and products.
TCMA benefits both vendors and channel partners.
For vendors, it provides visibility into partner performance and lead management.
For partners, automation tools provide an easy way to access branded content, messaging, product info, and ad assets to use in marketing campaigns.
How is TCMA beneficial for business providers?
Enhances brand consistency
Through-channel marketing automation platforms serve as a common hub for marketing resources.
By sharing access with your channel providers, you ensure brand compliance, including imagery, language, and aesthetic branding materials in multiple channels across the market.
Moreover, TCMA platforms offer customization features, so your channel partners can adapt visuals to their local requirements without ruining your brand imagery.
Better collaboration with partners
Channel partners are often small businesses with limited time and resources to develop marketing, not to mention their workload in promoting other brands.
Giving them complete marketing materials reduces the effort they need to invest in development — clearly, they are more likely to engage with a brand that boosts sales revenue for them while requiring minimal effort on their part.
Speed up getting your product to market
When dealing with a network of channel partners, the traditional method of distributing up-to-date branding materials via email is time-consuming.
TCMA streamlines this process by providing automated email distribution and collaboration features within documents.
It helps partners launch multiple marketing programs and lead generation in a fast manner, results you can see in your sales pipeline.
Measure partner performance
Businesses often expand their networks to hundreds and thousands of channel partners to drive more sales, not knowing how they engage with their brand materials.
TCMA tools provide detailed analytics for each partner, showing their interactions with your emails and documents — when they were opened, viewed, downloaded, and the time spent.
These features help you assess if you’re investing in the right channel providers.
Scale marketing campaigns
TCMA solutions often have integrations, so you can connect to partners’ content management systems and CRMs.
This ensures you can monitor the volume of outgoing emails, track end user engagement with your materials, assess the performance of social media and web content syndication, and get a close view into your leads.
This way, you can stay in the loop of your current campaigns and adjust your sales strategy.
How to implement TCMA with marketing automation software
1. Select the right marketing automation tool
When choosing a tool, find the one that empowers your through-channel marketing strategy.
A fundamental feature set should include content distribution, tracking, and metrics, all of which are available with PandaDoc’s marketing automation software.
This automation tool enables collaboration with channel partners, facilitating document editing and seamless sharing of docs.
2. Centralize your marketing content
With PandaDoc’s solution, you can keep all your marketing assets in the documents repository.
You can create docs from scratch and customize them with pre-built content, such as images, video, and design patterns — or create docs from the template library.
To keep your product and pricing data updated, upload items to the Product Catalog and share them with your local partners.
3. Invite your partners to interact
When creating a document, your marketing automation software will offer the option to send it to recipients.
Additionally, you can invite partners to collaborate on marketing materials, leave comments, and co-brand certain assets.
As an admin, you can set up permissions and access roles to ensure that your materials are in the right hands.
4. Integrate with partner systems
A modern TCMA solution offers integration options.
With these integrations, you can connect to your partner’s CRM systems, track their leads, and stay informed about lead management.
If a lead originates from your marketing assets, you can view it directly in their CRM.
With PandaDoc, for example, these integration options include Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and other CRMs.
5. Monitor performance
Make sure you have access to an audit trail of behavior within a document to track when it was opened, downloaded, and whether any links were clicked.
This data provides insights into how your partners engage with your documents, the time spent on the page, and the number of views to adjust your partner engagement plans if necessary.
Final thoughts
When implementing a through-channel marketing automation approach, you get insights into how your distribution partners engage with your brand, execute campaigns, and capture leads.
With marketing automation software utilized, these insights are seamlessly available for your marketing team.
Tap into a 14-days trial to try out PandaDoc’s marketing automation software and see how it enhances the way you operate with your partner network!
Disclaimer
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