Using marketing development funds every quarter for isolated campaigns without a plan to move leads along the sales funnel or establishing clear KPIs is like crossing your fingers that you’ll get results. The same holds true if your IT channel marketing lacks personalization or content that builds trust in your expertise. You may secure “good meetings”, but you’re not likely to sustain lead engagement, have clarity on what happens following those meetings, or ROI you can measure and report.

B2B marketing is evolving rapidly, as are customer and vendor expectations of solution providers. Customers want personalization and relevant content when they’re exploring providers and new technology solutions. Vendors want proactive strategic partners committed to growth.

For IT solution providers, adopting a long-term, strategic marketing strategy built on high-value content, automation and meaningful metrics is critical to channel marketing that achieves these goals.

Here are 5 of the top reasons why long-term, metrics-powered MDF marketing is a winning strategy:

1. Your marketing will align with the needs and buying cycles of IT pros — which establishes trust. The typical enterprise IT purchase takes anywhere from 5 months to a year or more, depending on the complexity of the technology. A well thought out marketing automation plan will help you keep mindshare with prospects through the entire buying cycle of a solution. Blitzing them with pre-baked emails and a call script from whatever vendor happens to give you MDF this quarter will not.
2. You’ll create an arsenal of informative, helpful content assets for use by marketing and sales. Defining buyer personas, mapping their journeys and creating content accordingly takes a lot of time and resources. But once you make that investment in core content assets up front, you may be surprised how easy it is to repurpose it—in the form of PowerPoints, sales enablement tools, events and webinars, blog posts and more.
3. You will become a more efficient marketer. Planning quarterly, one-off MDF campaigns with all your vendors is time-consuming and leaves you in a constant state of reactionary marketing. A long-term automation strategy requires a lot of initial planning, but having this framework in place allows you to then plug in MDF spending in a more cohesive annual plan where all marketing efforts are part of a whole. The Channel Company Agency calls this flipping the MDF model. Ask us about it.
4. You will be able to measure performance and optimize your marketing strategy in response. IT channel marketing too often indulges in metrics for metrics sake. Opens, clicks and downloads are counted, but it rarely informs a larger, holistic strategy. Adopting a long-term automation strategy with the right toolset — automation platform, CRM, analytics, etc. — lets you systematically track marketing performance, A/B test and optimize tactics in a continuous cycle. This also makes your marketing ROI more quantifiable and provable to both your vendor partners and your internal stakeholders.
5. Your vendor partners will take notice (and often give you more MDF). We see this happen more and more with our clients. Vendor channel marketers are looking for partners that take initiative, have clear goals, and follow-through that gets results. When partners are more passive in their initiatives and strategic planning, vendors tend to invest less time and resources in developing the partnership for the long term. A partner that brings a proactive, strategic plan to the table will get more traction, and likely more funding to execute on that vision.