Over the past couple of years, I’ve heard a growing drumbeat of complaints about marketing in the IT channel. I’ve heard it from channel managers, field marketers, partner marketing and sales teams. I’ve heard it phrased a dozen different ways. I’ve heard it applied to email, digital, events and telesales. But the message is always the same: “We’re not getting the traction from marketing programs we’ve always counted on.”
Today, SocialRep is launching a new chapter. After years of engineering and product development on social data systems, analytics and curation, we’re bringing all the pieces together in a single platform focused on enabling social marketing for the B2B channel.
As we’ve previewed our solution with analysts over the past few weeks, we’ve heard it called Inbound Channel Marketing, Through-Partner Social Marketing, and Social Channel Marketing. Whatever label you put on it, we’re proud to deliver the first end-to-end platform that enables businesses to empower their partners to engage customers authentically through social media.
Successful social marketers offer links to objective content that is relevant to their customers, they offer their own insights on articles they read and share with the community, and they respond to the discussions that are driving engagement without relying on automatic responders.
The key to enabling your partners for social marketing is to provide a stream of relevant content that makes it easy for partners to select, personalize and share in a way that helps them authentically build their own voice and brand.