When you decide that you would like to have a career in marketing you don’t immediately say to yourself “I know, I think I would really prefer the discipline of B2B marketing compared to B2C marketing.” Those B2B brands, which no-one knows, have so much more appeal than highly-recognisable consumer brands like Coca Cola and McDonalds.
If you need a career with glamour and pizazz, then channel marketing is the right one for you. Of course I am going to say this, as I have forged a pretty decent marketing career these past 17 years focusing on the channel. Channel marketing is challenging, rewarding, frustrating and absolutely brilliant fun all at the same time. But sadly, it is quite a misunderstood form of B2B marketing, as many people think you are talking about channels of communication when you refer to channel marketing, not two-tiered distribution models.
Luckily, I am here to resolve these misunderstandings. Channel marketing is a very highly sought after skillset for global companies expanding their geographic footprint and markets usually from the US across Europe. It isn’t just in IT and Telecommunications, but across the broad spectrum of services and manufacturers that require a channel to sell, install and maintain their solutions or services. These global vendors would really like their partners to help them create awareness and consideration and to help build their brand through the channel network.
This is what makes channel marketing such an appealing marketing discipline, because it is multi-layered. As marketers, we need to be both highly skilled marketers and trusted advisors. Why both? Because we need to work with partners to create working relationships and also help them to understand the benefits of the vendor solutions and marketing assets. And only then can we work together to develop the appropriate messages to illicit a response from the end users that we are targeting together. It sounds like hard work, but the results make it all worth it.
Channel partners are changing as the demand for their goods and services changes. Therefore, as channel marketers, we need to stay on top of our game and understand the new approaches to marketing and apply them to the channel model, plus learn along the way. These new challenges help us manage our channel communications framework effectively and influence partners funding models such as market development funding and deal registration programmes.
B2B Marketing’s Channel Marketing course on 19 May is designed for experienced marketing professionals that are expanding their marketing skillset, have an opportunity to move roles within their existing business or maybe the business is expanding or has made an acquisition which includes new channels to market. Whatever your marketing challenge, I am here to advise and to offer my many years of practical experience to answer any channel marketing related question or scenarios. By the end of the course you will have a solid understanding of many aspects of channel marketing.
Interested? Sign up now: www.b2bmarketing.net/training/channel-marketing