The top 4 considerations for Partner Distributed Marketing

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for this webinar, The Top 4 Considerations for Partner Distributed Marketing. I'm Tim Harmon, the VP of Product Marketing for Fielo, and I've asked as a special guest to join me here today Gary Hanna, who's Fielo's Chief Revenue Officer. Now, I asked Gary to join because not of his role at Fielo, but because in his experience, he has got a treasure trove of experience with respect to partner programs, channel partners, um, enabling them, making them successful, making them productive. And what it takes to do so. So when we get into some of the details here, I'm actually going to turn it over to Gary to share some of his experience. Let's— before I jump into the agenda, what we're going to cover, let me first say a word, a short word on partner distributed marketing, because that may be a term that's not familiar to everyone, right? It's also known as sometimes as through-channel marketing or through-channel marketing automation or local marketing or local marketing automation. Really what it is, is the ability to give your partners the ability to carry your brand messages along with their own value-added messages to customers, right? It's extending your marketing voice by enabling your channel partners to have a part in that marketing voice, voice, so they can tell their part of the story along with the core part of the story, which comes from you, the brand. And it's been shown in various research studies that when you do this, when you give your partners the power of marketing voice to extend your own brand message and value proposition is proven to be a major driver of revenue production, you know, and, you know, as high as, you know, 27% impact on partners' revenue performance. So this is, this is really an important area to think about. In terms of your own partner programs. And when I say partners, you know, I realize that depending on the industry that you're in, you probably use different terminology to refer to your partners or channel partners, right? In the tech industry, they really refer to their channel partners as resellers and distributors and sometimes MSPs, managed service providers. If you're in the manufacturing industry, it's all about dealers and distributors, sometimes manufacturers' reps. If you're in travel and hospitality, it's oftentimes travel agents that represent your partners, your channel. And in financial services, they may be known as brokers or financial advisors, right? But they're all essentially the same thing. They're third parties with which you have some sort of relationship agreement to represent your products or services to customers. And as we're going to talk about here today, to carry your message to customers and hopefully to do that in their own voice. Another way to think about this is graphically. So if you start at the top, I have your organization, i.e., the brand, the manufacturer, or the hotel, or the tech vendor, or what have you. And partner distributed marketing does nothing to obviate or discredit what you're currently doing in your marketing efforts, right? That brand messaging, That overall messaging to the market still needs to continue, your corporate marketing function. Absolutely. What partner distributed marketing does is adds to that, right? Extends it. So if you go from the top, your organization, to the lower left, that's where you're extending to your partners the marketing assets and materials and campaign structures to them so that they can also execute marketing campaigns and messaging to the customers. So you're reinforcing now what you do from a corporate or brand perspective. Your partners are actually reinforcing that by an order of magnitude to your customers. And oftentimes, if you do it right, in a localized voice. Right, in a voice that the customer recognizes. And in a situation where the channel partner actually knows what the customer's context is. We'll get into that in a little bit more detail. Again, when I— when we hear from Gary. So the agenda today, I want to talk about first why, you know, why is important. I'm going to give you some of the numbers that back that up, some of the industry research that backs up the value that you get. We'll get into the top 4 considerations, which in the thumbnail are omnichannel support, digital asset management, personalization control, and last but certainly not least, partner experience. I'll let Gary get into the details in those things and then we'll do a short demo for you at the end. So why partner distributed marketing? Well, number 1, customer acquisition is hard, right? It's hard and it's expensive and it's getting harder and more expensive every year, right? You have more and more competitors. The customers are developing a sense of tone deafness, right? So you try to find new ways to talk to them, new ways to get your message across, new channels, you know, to reach them, new media formats that will capture their attention. And it gets harder and harder every year, right? Because you know, the number of media formats and channels that you can use doesn't always expand. And it's already quite a few, right? When you talk about not just the old school direct mail or necessarily email, but social channels, videos, podcasts, content syndication, digital advertising, paid search, You know, it's a finite number of ways that you can reach customers, right? And again, customers are getting overwhelmed now, I think, as more and more brands get ahold of those channels and utilize those channels to reach those customers. Secondly, I would challenge you that what you're able to say in your own marketing communications is generic. Or maybe spotted with industry terminology at best, right? There's just no way you can personalize your marketing communications for each customer situation. You just don't know what their situation is, right? Um, maybe they, uh, had a, you know, a death in the family, or they had a you know, new birth in the family, or they decided to start a new business, or they— their business and they decided to change markets, or their business and they got acquired or merged, or they opened a new— or they're planning to open a new franchise. There's just— can't know everything about every customer. As good as, um, customer data management databases are and AI and all these other things, there's— the best way to know about what a customer does is through your partners, right? Because they are actually talking with them and meeting with them on a personal basis and know their particular personal circumstances, right? And third, yes, you can lean on your partners to do marketing, right, and ask them to do more marketing. You can incentivize them, give them rewards for doing more marketing. But if that's all you do, there's a very good chance that they are going to go off on some sort of wild tangent, misrepresent your message. And, you know, in the worst scenario, really, really negatively, negatively impact your brand image. So let me give you a couple of industry examples here of what's going on. I'll pick travel and hospitality as the first example. So, you know, we're now in, I guess, in the post-COVID era, and there's a lot of companies that are recovering from what they went through during the COVID era. And it's good for most companies, but in travel hospitality, that recovery is pretty uneven, right? So the airlines pretty much have full capacity seating every time, and hotels are at their pre-COVID or close to their pre-COVID numbers too in terms of in terms of capacity. But the thing that hotels are suffering from is that that capacity is down in terms of the ratio of business travelers to, you know, consumer-based travelers, right? And business travelers represent a much bigger margin for hotels than what consumer or independent travelers do. And so they're not at their pre-COVID numbers either. Cruise lines, obviously, still suffering. I think it's going to take a while yet before they're fully recovered. And now you have the inflation bugaboo, I think, which is biting a lot of companies. So where travel was really taking off in terms of post-COVID, now it's being dampened somewhat or projected to be dampened. Somewhat by, you know, the inflationary economics that are, that are hitting us. So as an example of what some of our customers in the travel and hospitality industry are doing, they worked very hard, uh, and we give them a lot of credit for coming up with safety measures and protocols and systems and technology to make it safe to travel again, right? And invested a lot of money, a lot of work, a lot of time, and really I think have done overall a very good job of it, right? But the— that message is not getting to every customer, right? So this is one way again that our customers are using partner distributed marketing. They're leaning on their travel agents to get that message out. And it's so critical in the travel hospitality industry. I mean, look at the statistics in terms of travel personalization. 90% of customers expect some sort of personalization when they are communicated to in a marketing voice. And, you know, again, wanting to know more about what these safety protocols are, and they're giving— so they're giving their partners, they're giving their travel agencies training, online training and incentives for getting this message out about their safety protocols and everything they've done to mitigate the risks of COVID and, and other infectious diseases. Financial services. So financial services, obviously, if you follow the stock market, it's been a little volatile. Right, for a couple of months now. Again, the inflation bug has bitten, mortgage interest rates are rising. And we find that, you know, a lot of customers of financial services products are also suffering because of policy and technological changes, you know, And what they wind up doing a lot of times is reactive selling, right? And I think a lot of people know this is that, well, the market goes down, everybody sells, right? Well, reactive selling is not a good thing. It's probably not a good thing for the customer, and it's not a good thing for the market overall. And so we have, you know, users of our product that are using partner distributed marketing to to get their financial advisors to steer clients about how to revise their portfolios. Don't just sell, I mean, sell and buy. You're kind of rebalancing your portfolio and providing them that sort of advice. And again, look at the personalization aspects in even the financial services industry. 72% here of customers expect what is being communicated to them to be communicated to them in a very personalized manner. So let me run you through the numbers, some industry research statistics that I think you'll find as fascinating as what I do. So first, this one: 72% of customers will only engage with personalized message. That's almost three-quarters. They won't engage with any marketing messaging unless it's personalized to them. And when I— when we talk about personalized here, we don't mean personalized by recognizing their birthday, right? They mean personalized by recognizing their circumstances and situation. So that's a huge part of the market that won't even engage, won't even respond to your marketing efforts. So look at this one: consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by as much as 23%. Remember what I said at the start about you can ask your partners again, whether they be resellers or travel agents or brokers or dealers, that you could ask them to do more marketing and but leave them to their own devices and what that could do to your messaging and your brand value? Not very good. Right? Because oftentimes they're just not going to get it right. With a partner distributed marketing program and technology solution, you can ensure that consistent brand presentation, right? And it's again been shown that that could impact revenue positively by a pretty significant amount. How about this? So almost 70% of consumers make buying decisions without first speaking to a sales rep after seeing a co-branded campaign. Wow, a co-branded campaign, meaning a campaign that's branded by both you and your partner. So contrast that with kind of the first statistic of 72% of customers won't engage unless it's personalized. Now with 69% of consumers will not only engage, they make buying decisions, you know, when they are spoken to in a co-branded, you know, voice. That's phenomenal. So let's look at some of the problem areas though. Over half of channel partners remain in the lowest level of marketing maturity. They're just not very good at it. Right. They don't have the right tools or technology. They don't know what to do or how to do it or what best practices are or what the metrics they should be gauging their level of success against. And it's a big issue. And because they don't know, again, if you just lean on them without the training and technology, there's a big number that don't know what to do if asked to be carry that, carry that water. And last but certainly not least, over 90% of companies that have not mastered partner distributed marketing are really concerned about sharing company assets and intellectual property. That's so the ones that don't do it, haven't done it, haven't done it, have not engaged their partners in a partner partner distributed marketing program have not done it because they're worried, really worried about security, right? And again, with the right technology solution that has those security, uh, shells built in to allay that concern, well, those companies are really taking full advantage and really turning their, their, uh, their partners on and doing it in a, in a co-branded way. So remember I said that Gary has a wealth of experience in running partner programs. I'm going to ask Gary to jump in here and share some of that experience with us in terms of what he's seen are the key success factors.

Okay, thanks, Tim, and thank you everyone who's viewing and listening to this webinar. We appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. So as Tim, you know, mentioned, we've heard why partner distributed marketing is so very important, particularly with respect to getting what you want to say out to the customers effectively. So I'd like to talk about what customers say when they come and ask us for advice. Or when they send us an RFP and what the requirements are for a partner distributed marketing solution. The solution requests in terms of requirements have some common threads, and I'll talk about 4 of those. The first is omnichannel support. You know, partners, their brands are looking for ways their partners can take advantage of and deliver their suppliers' and vendors' marketing assets via a multitude of digital and print marketing channels. Lots of different channels to express their voice. The second is personalization. Having the control capability to provide the right assets templates, level of communication— of customization to partners based on their marketing needs and abilities. So we'll talk a little bit more about each of these, but that one's very, very important in terms of being able to deliver according to the unique situation each customer's in. Digital asset management, so that partners can find and create the marketing materials they need that are most effective from a library of— And then finally, what, which I think is really the linchpin of success to a distributed marketing program is a rich partner experience. You know, we talk a lot about customer experience, but we don't talk much about partner experience. And in fact, if most of your revenue or the majority of your revenue, up 60, 80% of your revenue is coming through your partners, then really your partners become your customers in one sense. So if you don't give them an experience that they find engaging, well, they have a choice and they'll exercise that choice. So let's look at each 3 of these— I mean, each of these 4 in detail. Um, again, first one is omnichannel support. So for marketing campaigns to be effective, we know that you have to utilize a number of marketing channels to reach your customers, and your partners have to do the same thing. So it makes sense then that you would provide them a large menu of marketing assets, things like print flyers and brochures, emails, social post capability in terms of templates, branded merchandise, which could be co-branded, along with videos, digital ads, landing pages, you know, Zoom or Google Meet backgrounds. I mean, all kinds of different channels and and avenues to express their voice. That way, once you provide that, then partners can choose which assets work best for them. And they can experiment and learn with a templated guidance and e-learning solution, let's say, with the new assets and marketing channels. So do some testing and, and figure out which work best for them in their unique situation. The second is personalization. So like I said earlier, all 4 of these points that, that we were talking about are very, very important. But if I were to pick the one that would be the most important, it would be personalization. You heard from Tim some industry statistics that make it pretty clear how important personalization is. And you want to take advantage of your partner's context, their knowledge of their customers and their needs and issues, to deliver that personalization through your partner to the end customer. They do this by adding their own brand, their own value-add, their own understanding of the customer's context and situation. That's what we mean by personalization. And so the, the, the brands want to provide the personalization customization capabilities on a gradual, on a very granular basis so that the partners can be provided, uh, with capability to deliver a high degree of customization and value-add. And then there's some that where you want to set limits on, on certain brand guidelines so that they cannot be personalized. So the combination of personalization and lots of latitude, but with the control over the things that are most critical to the brand compliance. The third— well, before I go on to that, let me make one more point regarding personalization. The partner-provided personalization companies that do that, companies that deliver that partner-provided personalization strategies, they see value results across the spectrum. Improved market efficiency, higher digital sales, and longer-lasting customer relationships. And all that adds up to— they see growth rates increase 6 to 10%. Pretty impressive, uh, over, you know, doing some things that really make sense, uh, in terms of delivering to the in customers' unique experience and, and requirements. Okay, so let's talk about digital asset management. What do we, what do we mean by digital asset management? So digital or distributed marketing automation involves equipping hundreds or thousands of channel partner dealers, travel agencies, brand brokers, advisors, franchisees with marketing assets that can be then co-branded and customized— and customized, excuse me— which means you have hundreds or thousands of assets that you need to control. So how do you control all that? How do you make it easy to search, uh, for your partners to search and find, assemble, and visualize the digital assets in the context of all the marketing materials, you know, you're providing them, make it easy for them to then customize those and create those into a realistic approach. Well, it combined the digital asset management capabilities. So keeping track of all that, that's That's super important, but then it requires what we call the fourth key consideration, and that is a very enriching and inviting partner experience. So remember when I said that— I said personalization was the most important capability of a partner distributed marketing solution or capability in your business. That's true, but the partner experience that you deliver is a very close second, almost a tie. They're almost a tie. The personalization might win by a nose in a race. The partner experience is very important because regardless of how much power and value you put in the hands of the partner, that power and value potential will not be fully fulfilled if your partners don't get a great experience in, in marketing and working with you. The partner experience involves a lot of things. Ease in finding digital assets and assembling and visualizing marketing materials, a logical way to navigate the app according to a process that makes sense to them, and learnings for new marketing activities and campaigns. And of course, personalization. Remember when Tim and I said how important it was for marketing communications to customers be personalized to them according to their context? Well, it's important too that the distributed marketing capabilities you extend to your partners are personalized for them as well. So again, I, I want to re-emphasize this partner experience, um, is so important. It's just as important as the customer experience in our opinion. And for companies who drive or obtain the majority of their revenue through their partners, I would argue that the partner experience is perhaps more important than the customer experience. Or said another way, the partner is really the customer in delivering a beautiful and engaging and enriched partner experience. So all told, if your distributed marketing program includes the 4 value considerations we've just talked about, you'll be a long, long way toward a very successful program— great customer engagement, new customer acquisition, and customer satisfaction. So you say, well, that's great, Gary, that all sounds super, but that's hard. It's hard to do all those things— the digital asset management, creating personal, personalization, giving a great partner experience, doing it across multiple channels. Well, it used to be hard, and it can be hard if you don't have the right tools that are, that are being put to work by you. And, um, so marketing doesn't have to be hard. We have a capability, we have a distributed marketing solution called Fialo Market, and with our solution, your marketing can be more effective, more effective by an order of magnitude, as Tim talked about. But how do we do that? Well, in a nutshell, Fjällräven Market enables you to split and share marketing activities and campaigns between you and your partners. You create the raw materials, the core digital assets, and your partners customize them. They take care of that last mile, so to speak. It's proven not only that partners' customized personalization makes a huge difference, and customer engagement and customer acquisition, but so does the fact that those communications are going to the customer from your partner. Said another way, your partner's voice to their customer is louder and more easily heard than your voice to that same customer. So let's take a look then at how all this can happen. How do we make it easy? How can marketing not be so hard? And for that, I'll give it back to Tim.

Thanks, Gary. So I'm going to do a very short demo. Okay. For a longer demo, I'm going to ask you or invite you to actually take advantage of the, uh, our website. Go to the Contact Us, uh, and let us know how we can help you, or see a schedule a demo also on our website. Or you can email marketing@fielo.com, or if you want to email me personally at tim.harmon@fielo.com, we'll make sure and address your questions, your issues, give you a deeper demo, etc. But I wanted to show some of the— a few things, uh, of how— give you a visual idea of how they are instantiated in the partner experience that Gary talked about, right? So let's go to, uh, let's go to, uh, you know, marketing here. First thing you should see, so I'm a partner, right? And my brand, my vendor, my manufacturer, my travel, my hotel, or my, my financial services company has provided me with a lot of different marketing asset types, right? So this should immediately think, this is omnichannel support, right? There's lots of different marketing channels that should be supported you know, uh, in a partner distributed marketing solution, right? So we have business cards, flyers, social posts, videos, uh, Zoom backgrounds, email, uh, landing pages. This is just a few, um, that we have out of the box that, uh, that I can show you. I'm not going to show you them all because we don't have time for that, but let me show you a couple. So Let's pick a flyer. Let's say that you wanted to create flyers or some piece of collateral for your customers, but you wanted your partners to be able to add their own voice to that collateral before they actually reach customers, right? So you can see here's kind of the core collateral piece on the left. You can see a thumbnail image of it, and you can see a couple of places for customization, right? So the Your logo here is— I'm the partner, I can download my own logo and put it on the collateral. So now I have a co-branded piece of collateral. And then I can put my contact information here in the lower left, right? So, and then we provide all the fields. It's pretty easy to do. So my name's already there. I'm gonna add my title. I can add my phone and, uh, let me then just do a, um, update the preview of what that's going to look like. Let's make sure that those customizations took. And now if I scroll down, I look at the lower left I can see that, yes, Tim Harmon, VP of Product Marketing, phone number. So all the contact information. Like I said, I could have also added my, my own logo as well. How about a landing page? Let's look at something a little bit more involved. So here's a landing page. Again, the thumbnail that you can preview. Over on the left, and you decide which fields or which sections of the landing page that the partner can customize. And that's what shows up here on the right, right? So I can put in a new header image, for example, right here. I can add my company name, contact name, phone number. I can add a custom thank you message, right? That sort of thing. And then, you know, so I'm giving the partner the ability to do all those things. And again, I'll just— a couple of quick ones. So, Fialo, and I'll just put my name for right now. And let's just update that preview. Take a look, make sure that my customizations took and that this is now ready to be deployed on my website as a microsite. You know, so there it is. For more information, contact yellow@timharmon. And now I'm giving the partner the ability— they have the ability of when and how this is executed, right? So they can set the launch date for it and how many days it's going to run for, and, um, you know, give the names and the— and then the, the follow-up contact information. Okay, one more. So I wanted to give you an idea of, you know, here's an email template again. So you want your partners to do an email campaign, you want them to carry out, you know, the, again, your brand image, uh, and you might lock down some of this copy. Um, here's one that's totally free form, but you could lock down any parts of this. So for example, If you wanted them to not change Heading 1, it would not appear over here on the right, but they could add their own copy to Paragraph 1. Right. So here's an example, though, of just how much you can extend the customization capability. And last but not least, I wanted to show you, like Gary said, a partner experience, a very rich partner experience. So this is a customer of ours. Tourism New Zealand. And you know, you can see what they've done. This is essentially the same sort of thing. They've put it in their own kind of experience format using the Fielo, the Fielo Market CMS content management system to do that. But moreover, I wanted to show you too, they have used the digital asset management capability to be able to only view certain types of digital assets according to what they may want to see. So if they only want to see the social posts, you know, then they're going to see all the social posts that show up. So that's a part of the digital asset management. They've been able to use digital asset management tagging to be able to tag digital assets according to the campaigns that they are associated with. So you can see here they are all aligned by campaigns and so on and so forth. But I hope that gives you a quick idea again of the capabilities of Fiala Market and how our customers in manufacturing, in tech, in financial service and in travel and hospitality are taking advantage to empower their partners to really extend their own brand voice. And let me turn it back to Gary to talk about, you know, maybe one or two examples of customers and how they are garnering value from the Fjällräven solution.

Okay, thanks for the demo, Tim. Great job. You know, the, the interesting thing about our customer base for the Fieldo distributed marketing capability is it's very diverse. It's really an industry agnostic application. You can see that from tech and manufacturing, and in manufacturing, we've got companies that make dental equipment, companies that make lawn mowers, companies that, that make large complex phone systems, all the way to companies that sell financial services products and mortgage products, and companies that are in the learning business. So there's just lots and lots of use cases. And just to To give you a couple, you look at Norwegian Cruise Lines. Norwegian Cruise Lines uses Fjällräven Market to— as a base for working with not only their third-party agents, but their employee agents. So it's not just for necessarily a partner use. It could be for employee use as well. RECO uses Fielo Market for their internal digital asset management solution. So if you need any kind of marketing capability, whether that is printed locally or it's delivered digitally, RECO employees do that through the Fielo distributed marketing application. And then I think it's the greatest example of diversity is with Rocket. Rocket actually can, as Tim demonstrated, provide, you know, capability to customize a business card, but they also have the ability to allow their brokers, other third-party brokers, to customize and provision a billboard. So from a business card to a billboard and every kind of either digital or print asset in between, pretty amazing flexibility and very creative use cases for the Market solution. Well, I want to take an opportunity and thank everyone for giving you— giving us a little bit of your valuable time. We really appreciate the investment that you've made. And I hope that we did a good job of maybe answering some questions you have, but also giving you an overview of not just about Fielo's capability, but more important, the considerations for taking on a journey around distributed marketing and also the benefits and the reasons why to do so. So we really appreciate and are honored by your presence and attention. And I, I'm going to give it back to Tim now because I think we have some questions that we might have some time to answer. So, Tim.

Thanks, Gary. And like Gary, I will thank all of you too. We had a number of questions that came in over the chat while you and I were talking, Gary. I think we have limited time, so we will answer everybody's questions. We'll get to you personally by email. And I want to, again, wanted to encourage you, if you had a question that you didn't submit in the chat, you can submit it on our website at Contact Us or email at marketing@fielo.com. I will take, I'm gonna take one question, Gary. This is from Chad. It's a question directed specifically at you. So this is your question. It goes, Gary, Tim said that you had a lot of experience in partner marketing programs. How long does it take to actually start to see real value when you put a program like this in place?

Well, I think, you know, the, the answer is it's immediate. The value comes when you put this program in place generally speaking, someone in your organization is already doing it. And so it, it is literally a matter of a few days to enable the solution and to stand up the content. A lot of it, the length of time, I mean, is just based on the amount of content that you have. And, but you can begin within, I would say within the first month of deploying the solution, you will start seeing benefits, not only in benefits that your partners are seeing in terms of increased revenues and so forth through better execution, but you'll see value in the fact that your employees are doing higher-value work. Than managing all these little bits and pieces of content.

Thanks, Gary. And again, another thank you to you guys for your attention and your questions. Again, we'll be getting back to you on all your questions on an individual basis. Also publish some of the questions when we, when we distribute the recording as well next week. So again, thank you very much. Feel free to reach out, marketing@fielo.com. Www.fielo.com, and we hope to, uh, to hear from you again and to, uh, to help you out in any way that we can. Thank you very much.