What is Channel Marketing?

Channel Marketing

Channel Marketing usually means the communication of your company with sales channels to promote your products to a broader audience. Let us first explain what channels are before we go into what channel marketing is.

What is Channel Marketing?

Channels are companies or people outside of your organization that influence sales of your products to the end-users. They could be distributors, retailers, agents, alliance partners, or numerous other types of 3rd party companies. Channel partners are sales or trade partners that move services or products from suppliers to end users.

Wholesalers and distributors are partners that buy and resell products. Brokers and agents are also partners.

Almost all these companies have similar types of problems like not enough time, people, or motivation to promote your products. All business partners share the same common thread: needing motivation to move your products throughout the supply chain to ultimate end users.

Channel marketing covers the communication activities to the network of channel partners to promote the product, any sales incentives, and training programs.

Channel marketing is the process of inspiring trade partners to resell your products.

How Does Channel Marketing Work?

How does channel marketing work and where does Channel Loyalty programs fit in this process?

Channel marketing is aimed at conveying the value of your services and products to and for distribution partners. Consequently, it is important to contemplate the value you offer to those partners. Regardless of what service or product your company offers, with regards to your channel partners, you should ask and answer two very important questions ;

What are you offering them & why should they care?

Simply, of all of the similar brands out in the market whose products they can sell, why should they choose yours?

Your channel partners may not know what is in it for them or why they should care.

Having the answer to these questions can shape your approach to channel marketing. Comprehending the different ways to support your partners is the key to identifying your channel’s marketing strategy. Earning true loyalty today requires brands to adopt multichannel loyalty and engagement solutions as part of their larger loyalty initiatives.

Enterprises should also change their approach to loyalty and concentrate on building client relationships across channels, rewarding members for the many ways by which they engage with a brand and not just sales transaction.

It’s not enough to simply offer members a loyalty program that consists only of rewards based on transactional points. To gain real and emotional loyalty, brands should strive to understand their members’ distinctive needs, desires and urges to constantly deliver extremely customized experiences and relevant offers.

By integrating customer segmented strategy in their loyalty programs, brands can increase customer retention, keep members involved with their brand and gain valuable customer insight that may be incorporated in any cross channel marketing program.

A channel loyalty software like Apex Loyalty not only helps you to manage such communication and engagements with your channel partners; additionally it gives you real time data to make changes immediately.

You can read our previous post on https://www.apexloyalty.com/salesforce-com-and-apex-loyalty/