To succeed with co-branding, you will need to find a solution that will scale. If you only have one or two partners, you may be able to begin with manually created co-branded materials, but that should only be a temporary solution.
Manually created co-branded documents will entail things like constructing a brand standards guide that includes permitted colors, fonts, and sizes, along with any other branding details and requirements you may have. This guide should be provided to your partners. It is important that your branding expectations are clear and easy to understand for all of your partners, be they small individual vendors or other large corporations.
Manually created co-branded documents are really unsustainable as the channel grows. For example, if a channel manager adds logos on request, they may hold up a partner's sales conversation as they try to manage a growing number of demands. If partners handle this on their own, they may add their emblem to the wrong documents or produce sloppy visuals.
Automated co-branded collateral is especially effective for partners who do not have marketing teams of their own. Partners are empowered to utilize your published content with their logo and contact information. This is a very important element of running a successful channel partner ecosystem because most partners lack experience with marketing or have very limited marketing expertise. They are comfortable making phone calls and walking through product demos. Many partners may be very uncomfortable in the social media and digital marketing realms and do little to market using those channels. Automated solutions make it significantly more likely that partners will successfully extend and broaden their marketing efforts.
Finding an automated solution such as a partner management software that provides a portal where your partners can log in and customize materials based on your requirements is crucial. Most of these software solutions allow you to customize access levels based on differing partner groups or experience levels. Partners with established track records can be automatically accorded more co-branding options than newly onboarded partners with no or less experience.
The automated co-branding platform you choose needs to be robust. It should provide content in local languages and make it super simple for materials and campaigns to be customized, co-branded, and downloaded for execution. The platform should also offer native execution capability so that partners who want to launch a campaign can do so themselves directly from the platform. There is a consistent pattern in which, once a robust platform has been adopted, the pick-up rate for market development funds (MDF) goes up substantially.
This type of automation allows you to scale as your ecosystem grows and provides the greatest level of consistency and ease of use for your partners without your direct oversight, so even small companies with little or no marketing resources can take advantage of co-branded materials and promotions.
