2016 Partner Marketing Guide: What Makes For A Successful Marketing Campaign?

Top Notch

CRN's first-annual Partner Marketing Guide highlights the marketing programs that IT vendors offer to solution provider partners. The support, services and capabilities these programs provide to the indirect IT channel can be invaluable, and in some cases, prove to be the key differentiator in a customer's purchasing journey.

We asked the marketing superstars highlighted in the 2016 Partner Marketing Guide to shine a light on their most successful marketing campaigns.

Here, we provide a sample of these responses.

CA

Patricia Atchison

VP, Global Partner Marketing

The most successful marketing campaigns are campaigns that are aligned with the solution provider's business objectives and are integrated with the solution provider's business plan. Marketing campaigns that yield the highest return are measurable programs that are focused on creating demand or accelerating the pipeline, aligned to the customer journey and utilize a variety of tactics to reach customers and prospects.

Cisco Systems

Michelle Chiantera

VP, Global Partner Marketing

It is less about the campaign and more about the methodology. We used to measure results and align more closely with sales. Often times marketing can get ahead of sales and this can have negative impact on any campaign. Sitting at the table with sales to define joint goals and engagement is a critical success factor for any marketing campaign.

Datto

Peter Rawlinson

Chief Marketing Officer

Anything that educates and doesn't pitch. I conducted an integrated campaign on regulatory compliance for small banks a few months ago. No mention of vendor product. The campaign resulted in 40 percent lead conversion by association. Build a trusted brand, show you can give and the emotional resonance pays back every time.

Eaton

Graciano Beyhaut

Senior Marketing Operations Manager

In marketing too often we see adjacent windows to market only through the house we built our prior successes around. Our most successful campaign has been our Product LifeCycle pivot, center-pieced by our IPM certification LMS. By constantly reinventing our portfolio and digital strategy around what the future may have in store, our partners have seen a substantial lift in overall revenue pipeline that is highly accretive to their margins.

Laserfiche

Catherine Ramos

Director of Marketing

Laserfiche has seen a lot of success with marketing campaigns that provide educational materials to our customers, including a comprehensive document management buyer's guide, a guide to records management and other e-books and whitepapers. How-to guides are powerful tools. In the same vein, Laserfiche has a blog, the Solution Exchange - dedicated to highlighting resellers, solutions and customer successes - that is a popular resource for the channel, customers and prospects. The articles typically highlight a reseller or ISV partner that help to get a customer's Laserfiche solution up and running quickly, with examples of integration tools or strategies that can speed deployment or enhance an existing system.

Palo Alto Networks

Melissa Nacerino

Director Channel Marekting

We have a number of campaigns that give prospects direct access to the technology. Put a geek behind the controls and they will determine whether or not you have the best technology to solve their problems. It's brave, but if you have the best solution, it's some of the best marketing you can do.

Resilient, an IBM Company

Brian DePamphilis

Director of Global Channel Marketing

Our most successful marketing campaigns are the ones we co-market with our various partnership organizations to produce insightful thought leadership content pieces.

ViaWes

Tamara Prazak

Senior Manager, Channel Strategy & Marketing

Our new customer colocation cabinet promotion was very successful with our partner community and resulted in a 20 percent growth in new logo business and significant growth in the SMB sector of our business.

WatchGuard Technologies

Michelle Welch

VP of Marketing

The most successful marketing campaigns are always those which take into account the larger ecosystem – that of both the reseller and of the end-user. For example, WatchGuard understands that we are one of many technologies being sold by our channel partners, so focusing on building sales promotions and marketing campaigns that focus on WatchGuard as one component of an overall networking project makes their lives easier, helps them grow, and in turn sees the most adoption. Beyond the partner, those marketing programs have a broader end-user appeal as they focus on solutions for larger problems and not just technology for one or two individual challenges. As a result, there is always more end-user engagement which leads to more exposure and opportunity for WatchGuard and our partners. Two specific examples of this would be half or full day lunch-and-learn sessions where WatchGuard is one of two to five speakers from a variety of technology vendors. It is also very successful to transform this content into a series of live webinars. If you think beyond what is in your price list and provide a value add solution, you will always find success.