Channel marketing has become essential for B2B technology companies looking to increase their reach and awareness.  Playing an active role in the marketing initiatives of your channel partners is the best way to ensure consistent messaging and ROI on your market development funds.  Keeping an eye on the latest B2B marketing trends will help you to build and maintain an efficient and profitable channel partner community.

Increased Digital Budget

Marketers in the technology industry continue to funnel a larger portion of their budgets into digital campaigns and those numbers are about to see a big bump.  According to Marketing Charts, “CMOs forecast a 15.1% increase in digital marketing spending over the coming year. If there is something noteworthy to be found here, it’s that this is the largest expected increase in at least 6-and-a-half years.”  Strategies like inbound marketing rely heavily on digital channels and their effectiveness has encouraged companies to increase their investment.  As martech continues to evolve and the popularity of video increases budgets will need to continue to expand to accommodate the cost of software and services.

Multi-Channel Strategies

Finding ways to reach your ideal customer has become a bit of a challenge with so many different approaches to consider.  There are a seemingly infinite number of social media and video platforms where people gather their information.  This has brought about the need for multi-channel marketing.  This allows channel partners to reach prospects through their preferred channels, which helps to improve reach and conversions.  As noted by Business 2 Community, “Using a single channel to reach out to customers is practically an insufficient strategy – it is no longer enough.  Multi-channel digital marketing is the solution many business owners can rely on, utilizing various marketing platforms to get their branding and message across to targeted customers – how, when and where their audiences chose to be.”

Partner Support And Advocacy

Through-channel marketing and other strategies that encourage a more hands-on approach from channel managers and directors are perhaps the biggest trend in channel marketing today.  Referring channel partners to approved marketing vendors and even outlining specific campaigns has helped channel managers to better track the spending and ROI of market development and co-op funds.  A recent Forrester article states, “Enabling partners of all types to leverage vendor content, messaging, branding, and demand generation initiatives in their local markets is critical to driving a winning customer experience. Those brands that can balance their direct and indirect execution while ensuring consistent customer expectations through distributed and localized marketing will have outsized success in the market.”

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