Top 5 Channel Marketing Trends: Increase Marketing Intelligence

Earlier this year, we hosted Jay McBain from Forrester and Jason Tabeling, Executive Vice President of Product Management at BrandMuscle. They discussed 5 emerging trends impacting channel marketing and how channel marketers can prepare for these changes. This is the third in a 5-part series.

1 How closed-loop analytics will unlock business knowledge, and the ways technology and learning will accelerate measurement across the channel.

2 The ways conversational user interfaces (i.e. chatbots) will be applied across the channel and the benefit to partners and brands.

3 The impact increased marketing knowledge can have on channel partner revenue growth.

4 The ways digital is evolving traditional marketing channels and creating new opportunities for targeting, personalization, and optimization.

5 How historical data and trends will empower intelligent marketing fund allocation and improve channel partner participation.

A Discussion on How to Boost Marketing Intelligence

Jason: So trend three – increased Marketing Intelligence – this was one of the most important findings that we had and it makes sense based on what Jay and I have been talking about for the first 20 minutes or so but in our local marketing maturity matrix we took a look at these five buckets of maturity and we said how fast are these businesses growing year-over-year and as you can see we talked earlier 89% of businesses are in these bottom two buckets disengaged or developing and their businesses grew at 4.8% last year, still good but as you go from left to right and will increase your maturity you’re seeing it go all the way up to 10% in that optimizing bucket of maturity. So literally double the growth, the more mature knowledgeable sophisticated these channel partners are in marketing and so this starts real revenue by increasing their marketing intelligence.

Jay: Yeah the good news now is it’s very rare to find somebody who doesn’t buy into the power of marking and if you’re to show them this, I don’t think anybody would disagree with these numbers even in that column that I said that they do it for me and do it on behalf of me type of people, I think they know in their gut that it works and they’re probably competitively getting challenged with companies who do it better than them but the fact of the matter is you don’t have to do it yourself. You don’t have to commit the resources, the time, the skills, the money. You don’t have to start building out a marketing department.

The thing is outsourcing is a real option here. There are concierge services, there are creative white-glove type of services. Your brand’s very much want to work with you and get the power of that that local search as well as obviously that local trusted relationships so the fact of the matter is you don’t have to completely transform your business as a partner to go and reap some of these 2x revenue growth type of results and that’s I think the message that that we really need to get out and that’s probably the over the next couple of years going to really determine a lot of the winners and losers in the marketplace.

Jason: Great point Jay. It doesn’t have to be done on the backs of themselves specifically.

So we also thought we would share a little bit more behind the scenes of our Local Marketing Maturity Matrix , this is the sophistication we try to put behind it, there are seven dimensions across multiple competencies and we can talk through more of this at a later date or with any of our clients explain it in more detail but essentially we go uncovered is that each individual area of maturity, there are certain things that brands or marketers do, it accelerates them at a different rate. So I just try to highlight real quick some of those that are executing and optimizing and you can see some of those enablers of marketing spend doesn’t really evolve somebody as much as it does on the content side. So those that are creating content that resonates with them and then moves up to personalize, is really what helps jump people from executing to optimizing. So these are very detailed nuances but there’s a lot of thought behind this and as we work together and expose those things to our clients and potential clients there’s ways to unlock these things and accelerate them a little bit more quickly.

So the other thing I thought that was really interesting Jay, we asked people if they could ask one question of a world-class marketer, what would they ask and these are the top 10 questions that we got. What I think is really interesting is nine of these top ten include the word “How”. People have moved beyond “what” and “why”. Right, “What should I be doing in marketing?”, “Why should I be doing it?” They understand that to your point you made earlier Jay. They understand that they should join. Now it’s “How do I address a negative review?” , “How do I get smarter with SEO?”, “How do I use loyalty to drive business?”. These are the things that the local channel partners are interested in doing and I think it really demonstrates the point Jay just made as he spoke and shows where they are and maturing what they are trying to do.

Jay: Yeah, I think this is really interesting that we kind of turned or may be cross the chasm to use a cliché but we are moving into a new world now of almost execution and asking these questions is a curiosity now and you can do a Google search on I guess on every single one of these but the fact of the matter is that this is a great time to engage, this is a great time for brands for example to go start answering some of these questions & start building content, start building messaging & start engaging with your partner in this type of format and I think going to answer first really drive some attention & get the, for example the usage or the adoption of some of the tools up higher & obviously in the previous chart may be driving some 2X revenue results immediately.

Jason: Yeah, so quick plug I guess on this Jay, you kind if heated up nicely on Brandmuscle.com, we have our experts on the team including myself and other key members do a quick 1-2 minute video on how we would answer some of these questions at a very high level, so those that are listening in can go and check those out & see what our point of view is but these it’s really it’s a really great point. So in general, you supposed to want to know how to do things being creating a smarter channel partner network for your brand would directly accelerate revenue growth & when you talk about combining the closed loop, the metrics we have on increasing marketing intelligence, you can see ways to drive revenue, It’s not always run an extra Facebook ad. Right? There are others ways to grow revenue beyond just media pushes in the market.