What is the difference between marketing and selling your products or services on the internet and using the internet just to market but not sell your products or services? A sales and distribution channel that must be maintained when not selling over the internet.
Maintaining such channels means that marketing groups must develop and manage an additional layer of communications that resonates between them and ultimately the customer. This is seemingly a straight forward management task. However in this age of fast moving internet marketing, the additional channel has evolved into a potential source for many risks of miscommunication and incorrect positioning.
The next time a new piece of collateral is posted on your web site ask the question, was the piece reviewed by the channel partners and were they trained before the piece was posted? This is one of many potential disasters. Here are some of the issues that now exist with channel management that are a direct result of the outbound internet based marketing revolution:
These risks cause the development costs for a product or service launch to rise significantly as internet outbound marketing activities ramp. These extra costs, in time and money, are almost always underestimated during the launch planning cycle. Sometimes it is because the dynamics are not really predictable until the team launches the product or service and executes a first training with the channel.
So how can these escalating costs become manageable once again? Here are some suggestions:
The cost of not watching the details of channel marketing is ultimately a lost customer opportunity. It is almost certain that potential target customers will review in detail the web information of both the vendor and the channel. Any misalignments in positioning and messaging creates confusion and loss of interest. These actions result in extra stress on the selling process and can cause sales cycles to lengthen.
Taking the proper steps to manage this correctly however can result in shorter sales cycles because the distribution channel is properly moving through the sales cycle with consistent positioning and messaging, The customer acquisition scaling factor that attract vendors to use the channels in the first place really works!
Getting Marketing Smarter
Businesses small or large need to continue to increase their return on marketing investments. However, in economic downturns such as the one we are currently experiencing, staying on track is a big challenge. Expenses have to be moderated, which means classical solutions to increasing returns are not available. You can’t add lots of employees, and you can’t launch huge ad campaigns. So how does a company reach its goals? Many point to outbound marketing over the internet. But is that all it really takes?Making the Right Marketing Calls
Marketing departments are often asked to make judgment calls around product or service features. But many products and services have become so complex that making the call is not so easy.