The Macro concierge team is the secret key to energizing an otherwise stalled channel marketing program.
Here’s the issue: many channel partners do not have a mature marketing team. Or in many cases, it's a one person show. The same person is often in charge of both strategy, partner alliances and execution.
As a result, carefully crafted vendor campaigns or communications are at risk of being underutilized by all but the most engaged partners. Or worse: not used at all. This is a huge lost opportunity, leaving much support from the vendor on the table.
A marketing concierge team is designed to bridge this critical gap.
A concierge team’s focus is working closely with your partners to run the local execution of marketing programs and campaigns. They collaborate with different partners within regions or market segments. Concierge teams may also play a role in developing the core campaign components for the vendor, depending on the depth and breadth of the vendor’s marketing arm. They have responsibility for:
We’re ready to help out where your partners are. These are the regions where partner marketing concierge resources are available:
This concierge team is financed in part or in whole by pre-established market development funds (MDFs), per the partner marketing program strategy and policy. In effect, the vendor loans out these marketing experts to their partners, proportionate to each partner’s agreement, performance or potential.
This resource loaning may also be based on time—a partner may be allotted access to part of the team for a month, or a quarter.
Many companies we work with seek to further accelerate the relationship with a top-performing partner by assigning them a strategic concierge.
We discovered that our clients find untapped potential in the ‘long tail’ of their partner roster—middle of the road or weak performers that are limited by their lack of marketing execution resources.
Many companies we work with have technology partners. This software integrates into their platform to provide an robust solution for the end client. These require special attention in many cases.
These partners are often found in an App Exchange with special benefits. For example, Salesforce calls these partners ISVs and offers specific benefits to them. Similar to how your smartphone has an App Store, the Salesforce cloud platform has the AppExchange.
A Partner Technology Concierge can maintain relationships with these partners, help them identify leads from the App Exchange and run marketing activities to promote designated partners.
Many partners, who lack internal digital marketing capabilities and time, love a helping hand from the partner marketing concierge who helps them
The concierge team is also responsible for implementing cross-market and cross-partner learnings.
Over time, the team will build up a repository of insights across the entire scope of the vendor’s channel. Not only will this allow for better execution at the local level, but overarching trends may be applicable to the global production of campaigns or communication.
For example, the team may discover that social video ads between :05 and :15 have the highest engagement and lead generation potential across all markets, but that Facebook is more effective in Region A, LinkedIn works best for Regions B & C, and Region D is a mishmash of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
At a global level, creative teams can focus scripting and production capacities to short videos instead of longer spots. Locally, the concierge teams adjust their spending budgets to match the most responsive platform placements.
In a situation where this was all left up to a disparate group of channel partners, the idea about focusing on short video may never have emerged, and the vendor could have wasted time and resources producing content that was either too long or too short.
This is how Macro ensures the global team is performing at its best to ensure both our clients and the partners are fully satisfied with their service.
The client success managers are in charge of planning campaigns, project management and ensuring quality of every campaign we run.
Ongoing CSAT is monitored for red flags and any drop in quality of our promise to our clients.
Our global team collaborates internally via Slack to help each other on projects and re-allocate resources when needed. Global holidays are constantly tracked to ensure work is covered.
Everyone at Macro uses the company Knowledge Base to replicate best practices. The Knowledge Base is something we’ve built over years in the business and cannot be easily matched by unproven agencies.
Channel marketing is a complex system of multiple organizations working towards some common goals. A common missing link is local capacity for marketing execution—many partners simply have not structured their business in a way to handle a consistent flow of vendor marketing material.
Concierge teams fill this gap, and also provide an independent, interconnected information flow between all partners that they service. The result is a dramatic increase in campaign performance and increased efficiency of the entire partner marketing management program.
Macro’s global concierge service is built around the philosophy of lending extra hands and brains to assist with digital marketing execution. We are well versed in a variety of Marketing Technology stacks and ecosystems, including world-class unified channel management platforms such as Zinfi. If your partner marketing efforts are being held back by a lack of engagement at the local level, we can help revitalize and reenergize your campaigns.
Case Study: How Macro Managed an Outsourced Demand Generation Center - Marketing Operations. Read more about this client’s success story here.
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