Matt Nisonger to the newly created position of Director of Customer Engagement. Previously Matt has served SharedVue as the Director of Technology reporting to John Brown, Chief Technology Officer.

M. Reid Overcash, Sr. Vice President of UBM Channel and founder of SharedVue, stated, “In his new role Matt will be responsible for managing the inside processes and people who work with our most valuable asset, our customers. Matt’s new position will include directing the Facilit8 account management team and the partner support department, the content web production group and interfacing with the platform technology development team.”

“Matt has proven time and again that he brings fresh ideas to our company and understands the need to create processes and training that enhance the overall customer experience with SharedVue products and services. We feel making this move now is a re-affirmation of the SharedVue commitment to our customers and their channel partners.”

“I am thrilled at the opportunity to build on SharedVue’s industry leading service levels. By nurturing our valuable customer relationships, we will continue to develop innovative products backed by intelligent, analytics-based execution that demonstrates clear value. Our customers can look forward to a smart mix of cross channel integrated marketing strategies touching on all the interactive platforms that drive sales for their partners.” states Nisonger .

In a related development, SharedVue announces the promotion of Sara Bryson-Wheelan to the position of Director of Strategic Projects. She previously served as Director of Facilit8. Her job will entail directing new customers through the on-boarding process with SharedVue as well as managing the integration of outside resources and partners with SharedVue technology.

“Sara is the first employee of SharedVue and knows our products and processes as well as anyone in the organization. She is an excellent project manager and has exhibited outstanding judgment in her previous positions with us. Sara is a very special and important person with our organization and we feel her skills are perfect for this very important new position,” states Overcash.

Wheelan will transition fully to her new position in the next few weeks as she completes several projects she is currently finalizing.

Wheelan commented, “As SharedVue continues to develop strategic integration points and grow its reputable client base, the creation of this position solidifies our commitment to driving market innovation and continuing to bring industry leading products to our customers.”

Working at SharedVue I have spoken to hundreds of channel and partner marketing professionals. I learn something new on each call yet one thing that always stands out is the variety of ways these companies, both big and small, manage their channel.

If any company has a channel strategy or see’s its channel as a significant part of their overall revenue then it should be important to them, right?

Nine times out of ten, when talking with clients and prospects I hear, “Well, we have a partner portal where we have a secure log-in for our partners to download or upload assets and company/product information”.  They also use a variety of content or marketing solutions which they believe satisfies the tactic of empowering their channel partners web presence. What I hear most often are CRM solutions such as Salesforce and ERP solutions such as SAP, Eloqua, Lyris or Constant Contact.

The essential challenge here is that using one or more of these solutions as a single company is great, but how do we get our partners to use them? How can we be sure they are actually using them? How can we better manage and empower our partners?

Using all those other tools is great, but guaranteeing partners actually use them — especially when they have a lack of resources — is next to impossible. SharedVue consolidates all of these solutions into one content marketing solution, allowing our clients to effectively manage their partners and their channel as a whole. We provide channel vendors the ability to offer their partners a program that effectively ensures and allows them to manage the content and information for their partners. SharedVue closes the loop between marketing, web content and lead generation through a server-side, cloud-based solution.

When Kevin Kostner’s character Ray Kinsella, in one of the greatest baseball movies of all time, Field of Dreams, begins hearing voices, he thinks he’s going a bit mad.

Ultimately, “If you build it he will come” convinces Ray to use prime acreage on his corn farm in Iowa, to build, of all things, a baseball field. The crop revenue he forgoes to build the baseball field, nearly puts him into bankruptcy and he becomes the laughingstock of the town. He sticks to the power of his convictions, word gets out, and the ball field turns into a cash cow (farm pun intended).

When channel marketing professionals put together plans for their partners, do they follow the same approach? If you build it will they come?

Does a lead gen program, without the proper follow up, deliver the desired results? Do marketing automation programs without partner buy-in and engagement drive revenue?

There are many moving parts required to drive a successful channel marketing program, and often times those moving parts come from multiple vendors.

How do you integrate? Which vendor takes the lead on it? Do these multiple vendors consider themselves competitors, making said integration difficult at best?

At SharedVue (a UBM Channel Solution) we struggle with the same questions.

Our business has been about helping vendors deliver their brand, product, and promotional content to their partner web sites. Content Syndication as it is known, has been the ball field…we’ve built it, now how do you get them to come?

In the movie, Ray’s companion, Terence Mann, played by the great James Earl Jones, tells him:

“Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it…”

They come for the experience…

At SharedVue we’re always working on improving the experience, and making it so…if you build it they actually will come.

We’ve added platform functionality over the last couple of years to include email marketing tools for the partner to their end user community.

In the New Year, we will be announcing other functionality, including social, press releases, CRM integration and others….and you won’t have to go to Iowa to get it.

PR Newswire CEO Ninan Chacko talks about the importance of content in building relationships with customers and stakeholders:

[From PRN] Marketing, today, is about driving closer, authentic, deep and meaningful relationships, on an individual level, between an enterprise and its constituents – customers, prospects, investors, business partners, key influencers, and more.

These constituents are far more informed; and as such, much smarter than ever before. To that end, if an enterprise is unable to articulate its purpose, its ideals and values and how these impact the products & services it brings to market; if it is unable to offer something more than just its wares; and if it is only interested in being heard but not listening, the enterprise will never establish a true relationship with its constituents.Read More »

I recently watched a great Hubspot webinar by Tim Ash and Mike Volpe on website design and lead generation. The webinar made some great points on how small changes can lead to significantly more leads.

Many of the concepts covered in the webinar can be applied to improve lead generation in your channel marketing program. If you are a vendor using the SharedVue platform, you have control over these factors and can take action to improve your lead gen capabilities for all your syndicating partners at once. If you are not using a content syndication platform, your channel partners can still implement these steps on an individual basis.

Here are three steps to help you generate more leads:

1. Make Call-to-Actions More Prominent
2. Re-evaluate Your Lead Gen Forms
3. Be Concise with Your Product Content

1. Make Your Call-to-Action Clear and Prominent

Your call-to-action is text, a button or graphic that drives customers to your lead generation forms. Whether you are offering a free trial, case study, or whitepaper, it’s important that the call-to-action is clear about what the reader is getting and what you want them to do. Here is an example of a clear call-to-action in one of SharedVue’s content syndication programs:

You also want to ensure your call-to-action is optimally positioned and prominent across your content. Customers should be able to easily identify your call-to-actions as they navigate through your site. [Boagworld has good post on effective call-to-actions, here is an example from their post.]

2. Re-evaluate Your Lead Gen Forms

Once you’ve optimized your call-to-actions, you will have more customers reaching your lead capture forms but that doesn’t mean they will be converted to a lead. Too often, these forms ask for too much information in relation to the value being offered to the customer. This results in the customer leaving the page without entering his or her information.

Take a look across your call-to-actions and match the length of your lead-gen forms and the value they are offering accordingly. If you feel you are offering a lot of value for your customers’ information, then they may be more lenient in filling out a longer form, thus disclosing more personal contact information. However, if what you are offering is not of significant value, don’t expect your customer to take the time to fill out a form at all. Maybe you should offer this download for free.

Another way you can squeeze more leads out of your downloadable assets and call-to-actions is by reducing your forms to the bare minimum information you need right now. Do you need to know your customer’s industry or title right now? Or can you follow up with an email or call and gather more information then?

3. Be Concise with Your Product Content

You obviously want to offer a lot information on your site about your company and products, but don’t get carried away with writing too much. Provide customers the basics of what they need to know, and structure your content in a way that is easy to scan through using headings, bullet lists and hyperlinks.

If you are concise and provide your customers with clear, prominent call-to-actions and contact buttons, customers will be able to reach out to you for more specific questions, which can help generate more qualified leads.

Content marketing is clearly gaining more traction in the B2B space.

1. Improves search engine rankings
Maintaining a regular blog on your website can improve your search engine rankings and boost traffic to your site. Writing quality content relevant to your industry can help attract new site visitors and customers.

2. Helps generate leads
If you regularly post quality content you have an opportunity to capture more leads from your site’s increased traffic. Including calls-to-action at the end of your blog posts and throughout your website can make the lead generation process more effective and efficient.

3. Establishes you as a thought leader
In addition to SEO and lead generation benefits, publishing quality blog posts, whitepapers, and ebooks can establish you as a thought leader in your industry. As thought leader you may benefit from increased inbound links and referrals from those who see your company as an expert in your field.

Content Marketing for Channel Partners

Whether you are emailing channel partners to recruit them to your content syndication program or to let them know of content updates and promotions, the timing of your email significantly affects how many partners read your message.

Dan Zarella, Social Media Scientist at Hubspot, put together a very informative webinar called The Science of Timing. In this webinar, Zarella presents extensive research regarding the best times to reach people through email.

Here are some takeaways regarding email timing that you can apply to optimize communication efforts with your channel partners:

What Time Should You Email Your Channel Partners?

Zarella’s research shows that more people read emails in the morning than at night, with open rates particularly higher early in the morning between 6:00 A.M. and 7:00 A.M.

If you are not in the office that early, you or your channel managers can schedule your partner communications for delivery during one of those times. It is pretty easy to schedule emails with Outlook, and you can find add-on extensions for most other email clients.

What Day Should You Email Your Channel Partners?

Zarella’s research also shows that open rates are higher on weekends than on weekdays. This may not be too surprising since people are usually not as busy on weekends and may have more time to go through all their emails. However, it’s important to note that spam reporting is also higher on the weekends.

Before you start blasting weekend emails to your channel partners, consider the subject of your email and whether or not your partners would be more receptive to reading it during the week.

Put yourself in their shoes. When would you be most receptive to the email you’re sending? Is the content heavy and work related? Or is it just informative and easy to relay?

How Often Should You Email Your Channel Partners?

The research data shows unsubscribe rates are not significantly affected once you get past sending 4-5 emails per month. Surprisingly, there was no substantial difference in unsubscribe rates between companies that sent 4 emails a month to companies that sent 33 emails a month.

A possible reason for this is that most subscribers who are not interested in your content will unsubscribe after the first few emails. Once this initial group unsubscribes, you have a qualified base of subscribers who are interested in your content and are less likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Your channel partners are already a qualified list since they have opted into a partnership. While you don’t have to worry about unsubscribe rates, this data is useful in getting an idea of an acceptable amount of emails that won’t annoy or push your partners away.

While 33 emails a month does seem excessive, the takeaway here is that most companies are not even close to sending too many emails. So unless you’re already sending out a daily email, consider increasing the frequency of your emailing efforts.

Understand Your Partner Base and Find YOUR Optimum Timing

While these are all great starting points, the research data is based on a large aggregate pool. Habits and reading tendencies are likely to differ across different audiences. Use these takeaways as starting points and experiment with sending more emails during different days and times to find the optimum time to reach your partners.

Have any timing insights based on your experiences? Share with us in the comments below.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned how important it is to do a situation analysis and understand how people in your circle are using social media. Different audiences use different platforms (Twitter, blogs, etc) for different purposes. Should you promote enablement programs to your partners with social media? If you move forward with promoting marketing tools to your partners with Twitter, Facebook and the like, you’ll need a firm grasp on how your partners are communicating and socializing on those platforms. This will allow you to fit in and see big results.

There is a methodology for developing any social media campaign — P.O.S.T.:

• People you’re trying to reach
• Objectives you want to accomplish
• Strategies to reach those objectives
• Technology/social media platform

When SharedVue was charged with onboarding partners for one of our client’s syndication programs, we used the above methodology to develop a campaign. We wanted existing channel partners (P) to become aware of and register for the SharedVue syndication program (O). We found that most of our client’s partners were using social media personally, not corporately, so it was necessary to push out content relevant to their needs (S), not their companies’. Since we had a large database of partner contact information, we used Twitter’s (T) built in address book search to find 200 partners. There, we conversed with partners about relevant industry topics, subtly creating demand for our syndication tool.

As a call-to-action, we would post benefits of using the SharedVue program with a link to register. After the program matured, we converted the Twitter account into a program update and partner support tool. Now, this is SharedVue’s most widely adopted syndication program with over 3,500 registered partners.

Even though Twitter was a big win in this instance, it won’t be a cookie-cutter approach for every channel vendor. Likewise, it isn’t a good idea to only use one method of communication to drive partners to action. Social media is merely a category of tools vendors can use. In the case above, SharedVue also used traditional methods of getting partners to register, such as email and call campaigns and registration incentives.

If you need help promoting your syndication program to partners, Sharedvue has a comprehensive list of integrated communications strategies we can use to help increase adoption.

Vendors face many challenges when it comes to motivating partners to participate in channel enablement programs. With 63% of all solution providers having no designated marketing resource, finding the right person to run a partner enablement program can be nearly impossible. And after you get them to sign up, how do you guarantee they follow through with the program?

This webinar focuses on the challenge of onobarding partners to your enablement programs and offers best practices and tips you can use today to increase adoption and ongoing participation.

• Learn the crucial steps in designing and executing a successful recruitment campaign.
• Hear directly from Citrix as they highlight their initiatives and results.

Register now »

Featured Speakers

Dana Sell

Account Executive, Demand Generation, Everything Channel

Dana Sell is an Account Executive for Demand Generation at Everything Channel. In this role, Dana helps design integrated lead-generation programs for leading IT Vendors and their Partners. Prior to entering sales, Dana was a Project Manager who successfully coordinated lead-generation programs for companies such as Juniper, Nuance, and Dell. Dana has extensive experience delivering high-quality end-user audiences to live and virtual events. Dana is a Boston native and is currently pursuing his Master’s in Management at Emmanuel College.

Laurie Balcerak

Global Sales Director, Everything Channel

Laurie is the Global Sales Director for Everything Channel’s Field Sales and Marketing Services division, focused on scope definition to meet the outsourced services needs of clients like Motorola, IBM, Netgear, and Kensington among others. With over 20 years of experience in the IT channel, Laurie is responsible for leading customer sales engagement and providing project scope and resource allocation definition for all FSM engagements globally.

Prior to joining Everything Channel, Laurie spent more than a decade with ViewSonic Corporation where she held various sales and management positions supporting Enterprise, Solution Provider and Distributor partners. Her Channel expertise is rounded out with over 7 years in distribution having held marketing, inside sales management and vendor relations management positions with MicroAge.

Sheralyn Felix

Online Channel Marketing Coordinator, Citrix Systems

Sheralyn is the Online Channel Marketing Coordinator for Citrix’ Worldwide Channel Marketing team, focused on Citrix Syndication and partner recruitment. Sheralyn has been with Citrix for 3 years and prior to joining Channel Marketing, was a key player in eMarketing for the Americas Integrated Marketing team where she executed campaigns to the Demand Generation audience.

In this role, Sheralyn coordinates the Citrix Syndication content syndication program from SharedVue.

Josh Gibbs

Assistant Director of Marketing & Social Media, Everything Channel

Josh Gibbs is the Assistant Director of Marketing and Social Media for Everything Channel, focused on developing sales and marketing content strategies. He is proficient in search engine marketing and optimization, web and email marketing and marketing automation and lead generation.
Josh’s unique skillset of graphic design, strategic marketing solutions and informational heuristics has enabled him to produce compelling creative pieces and drive successful campaigns for companies like Cisco Systems, VMware, Hewlett-Packard, Skype and Salesforce.com.

Prior to Everything Channel’s acquisition of SharedVue in April 2010, Josh was their Director of Web Marketing, working primarily on the company’s marketing automation, content syndication and demand generation platform.

What You’ll Get

When the channel marketing team at Citrix hit a lull in their partner enablement program activity, they turned to Everything Channel to develop a turn-key partner recruitment plan that delivered. Everyone attending will receive an exclusive copy of Everything Channel’s eBook Case Study Motivating Partners, Surpassing Goals.

Register for Successfully Onboarding & Enabling Your Partners [Best Practices & Citrix Case Study Webinar] »

A big trend for 2011 has been the shift toward marketing automation. This is largely due to a rise in social media, SEO/SEM and inbound marketing. These nuances have allowed marketers to do more customer touches with less internal resources. However, marketers are now faced with new challenges as they find themselves completely rethinking their strategies.

So what do you do once you’ve started a marketing automation program? Mac McConnell, Managing Partner & Founder at BlueBird Strateties, wrote a great article for Marketing Automation Software Guide touching on the pain points marketers face after implementing an automation program. Through his experiences, Mac has identified 3 areas marketers struggle with after implementation:

1. Lead Sources
2. Good Content
3. Lead Scoring

Content Syndication and Rockstar Content

For channel marketers, implementing a marketing automation program such as content syndication can be great. But what if you don’t have a good source for content? In his article, Mac says that the biggest choke-point he sees organizations face is updating content, keeping it fresh and relevant for end users. Vendors running content syndication programs should plan ahead when creating content. Think about the different sources of content you have internally to create web content pushed to partner websites. Make sure those sources are able to update content often, perhaps quarterly or even monthly.

And you don’t always have to update all the content you’re syndicating. A quick win for vendors is to simply change out a few promotions each time they update partners’ syndicated showcases.

In the article, Mac shows just how successful great content can be. The example below shows the results of three separate emails sends:

The key here is writing fresh content that helps the buyer meet their goals, not your’s. The yield on any marketing initiative, be it automated or tradition, will ultimately increase with the right message.

Beyond Content — Demand Generation

Once you’ve set the stage with rockstar content and guaranteed you have a fresh source for updates, you can then start worrying about pushing leads to partner websites. Mac says that it is hard to know the full lifecycle of a lead if you have multiple touch points (i.e. tradeshows, content syndication, email campaigns, list rental). Thus, the most important factor for nurturing leads for partners is message consistency.

For channel vendors to truly understand the lead-to-sale process for their solution providers, they must enable partners to function with limited to no marketing resources. Everything Channel released research late last year showing an astounding 63% of solution providers don’t have a dedicated marketing resource. So, to further support Mac’s point, setting up a marketing automation pipeline for partners is simply not enough. Vendors can also help partners run automation programs through managed services and virtual marketing manager programs.

If you can’t provide this type of help to your partners, it may be time to seek some additional help.

Read the original article: You’ve Got Marketing Automation. Now What?