5 Strategies for Strengthening Dealer Marketing & Relationships
By Two Rivers Marketing
New products and solutions are the lifeblood of any company. In B2B, where the product development cycle can be years’ long and involve dozens of gates and checks, the moment when the new product is finally ready to go out into the world feels especially monumental. Here is the new product you’ve all been waiting for! Come and get it!
Except there’s rarely a crowd of B2B customers clamoring for the long-awaited solution you’re offering. Instead you must drum up interest, spread the word, and stoke desire. For B2B companies, that means first ensuring that your own corporate sales and marketing teams are ready to promote your new offering. And then setting your other partners up for success: dealers, field reps, and distributors (the channel), plus any vendors or agency partners you work with. Everyone needs to be fired up and ready to own their part in making this product launch a success. Only then can your company achieve its growth goals.
We’ve talked about how to equip your channel partners to successfully go to market, but what about the marketing agencies and vendors you work with? Are they holding up their end of the bargain? Or are they more focused on hustling tactics out the door?
Why a full-funnel growth strategy depends on your B2B marketing agency
A new product launch needs a full-funnel growth strategy to be successful. It’s not enough for marketing to deliver awareness at the top of the funnel and the channel to try to win sales at the bottom. These efforts must be connected in a purposeful way for you to achieve business growth.
The best way to do that is to establish clear expectations, with roles and responsibilities for each team, and connection points throughout to ensure that everyone is aligned. In other articles, we’ve shared how to operationally align your corporate sales and marketing teams with your channel partners. Now it’s time to look at another key part of the growth equation: your marketing agency.
This team can stimulate growth from end to end; they just have to be held to high standards.
Five things to expect from a full-funnel marketing agency
Audience insight is what turns a good product into a compelling launch. To get to that audience insight requires research and data. Your agency partner should seek access to both.
Some B2B companies are sitting on a wealth of customer data and market research, others not so much. A good agency partner will meet you where you are now and recommend ways to level up your insights game from there. In a best-case scenario, an agency partner has access to (or develops with your support):
- Market research and data: Brand surveys, NPS score, competitive analysis, market/industry trends (including market demand), and target audience demographics establish the market(s) you’re trying to reach and what you’re up against as you pursue your growth strategy.
- Customer research and data: Surveys, customer interviews, digital listening, and CRM data (including past purchase behavior) give the agency a baseline to understand customers’ potential interest in the new product, how much revenue they could generate, and which segments show the greatest promise.
- Your business objectives, goals, and growth strategy: The strategic roadmap for your short- and long-term growth initiatives, including timelines, target customer and/or market segment, regions, and goals for market share growth/penetration.
The goal is to establish a firm foundation for all go-to-market decisions your teams will make, well before any tactics are planned or ads are purchased.
This is your North Star: Establishing where you want to grow, with whom (which audiences), and how you’ll know you’re successful. A growth-focused agency partner will always recommend these steps.
B2B customers expect a seamless omnichannel buying experience. To do that, the corporate sales and marketing teams need a well-connected system on the back end that coordinates with their channel partners. Your agency partner should be held to the same standard.
An effective growth-focused agency is a master orchestrator, meeting the B2B buyer at each point of the buying journey — from discovery to evaluation to commitment to loyalty and beyond. Most importantly, a growth agency should align their go-to-market efforts with the roles corporate sales and marketing teams and their channel partners play in successfully driving customers from awareness to purchase.
See how 2RM drives a full-funnel growth strategy for clients.
In case it wasn’t clear from the section above, a growth-focused agency should understand the vital role that your channel partners play in the success of your company — there’s no growth without them. The agency should treat your dealers, field reps, and distributors as growth accelerators, not as an afterthought or just another line in a campaign plan.
A smart agency will equip your dealers/distributors to win, sell, and service customers effectively. And the best ones make it easy for channel partners to act, with packaged-up assets and mix-and-match offerings that give dealers/distributors professional, compelling materials in just a few clicks. Because good agencies know that for many B2B channel partners, marketing is the last thing they have the time for on any given day.
As CMOs face more pressure to prove ROI, there’s been a pushback on so-called vanity metrics. Instead of just impressions and clicks, B2B leaders demand a clearer link between their marketing efforts and their business results. As well they should, and that’s what you should expect out of a growth-focused agency partner.
Measurement and analytics should be mined for insights that optimize your efforts in-market, and they should be directly tied to business outcomes like leads generated and closed, growth in market share, and revenue gained.
In terms of measurement and analytics, your agency should provide:
- Multi-channel performance measurement planning: A strategic framework that translates high-level business objectives into quantifiable metrics and KPIs to gauge the success of your marketing efforts across the marketing channels you’re active in.
- Marketing ROI framework and attribution modeling: Answering what drove your customer to buy, identifying the marketing actions or events that contributed to a desired behavior (such as growing revenue), and assigning a value to each one.
- Ongoing campaign analysis and optimization: Providing a timely look at how campaigns are performing in-market and where improvements need to be made to achieve better results.
See how 2RM boosts B2B marketing ROI through measurement and optimization.
A growth-focused agency partner is just that: a partner, not an order-taker. Your business is trying to grow, whether that’s through the launch of a new product, by overtaking a competitor’s market share, by entering a new region, or something else; and each requires big, critical decisions.
In this environment, you need an agency that provides clarity, is deeply invested in what you’re trying to achieve, and brings their expertise and experience with those customers, markets, regions, and industries to fine-tune your approach and craft a winning growth strategy. A good agency partner brings a fresh perspective to those discussions, helping you test your assumptions and debate the best routes to take as you arrive at your decisions. They should ask a lot of questions before recommending anything; then their recommendations should be laser-focused on helping you grow.
See how 2RM helps clients develop a marketing playbook for agility in times of change.
How to vet a growth marketing agency: proof, not promises
A growth-focused agency partner should be able to provide case studies and examples of how they’ve prioritized strategy, orchestrated a full-funnel system, activated B2B dealers/distributors, delivered on ROI, and articulated a clear point of view.
Reflect on your current agency/vendor relationship(s): Are they helping drive meaningful growth for your B2B company? Have you asked them to? Have you shared access to key information about your business with them vs. gatekeeping key information? Or have you emphasized staying busy in-market over driving measurable business outcomes?
At Two Rivers Marketing, we specialize in full-funnel growth strategy, helping our B2B clients connect with target customers at all stages of the journey and achieving impactful business outcomes through their B2B channel partners. Contact our team today to see how we can help you take your next growth initiative or product launch to the next level.
