Building materials manufacturers often struggle to engage partners and increase indirect sales revenues from their distribution channel. To bridge the gap between yourself and end consumers created by incomplete product positioning by one-step and two-step distributors, manufacturers need to take the reins and implement distributor marketing tactics the reduce the effort requires of your distributors.
One type of distributor marketing tactics is TCMA, which stands for through channel marketing automation. When you are implementing TCMA, you will recruit, engage, guide, and grow your partners into indirect sales powerhouses for your materials and construction products. A way to grow your partners indirect sales is to craft end user focused digital marketing content, then house that content on your partner optimized PRM or TCMA platform, and following through by holding partners accountable to utilize the content.
But what kind of "campaign-in-a-box" content is best?
Digital Campaign in a Box Ideas
To truly leverage the audience in your partner networks, you, the manufacturer must take on the workload of crafting marketing messages that position your building materials towards end users like property owners, facilities managers, builders and contractors, and DIYers.
Start by creating the following through channel content that addresses end user's goals and pain points:
Social Media Posts
Each social media platform requires a slightly different kind of social media post. You can capitalize on your partner’s audiences by doing the heavy lifting for them.
Social media posts should be highly educational rather than promotional, so craft social media posts that are directly tied to your information based website content marketing strategy, curate a list of local events relevant to your partner's audiences, and above all else, find ways to share use cases and stories from real life end users.
Using the best practices for each platform, prepare a document or spreadsheet where you write the post message, include hashtags when relevant, note links to include, and attach properly sized imagery.
Most social channels are largely “pay-to-play” these days, so consider requiring your partners set aside a certain amount per month to spend on boosting or sponsoring posts.
Email Copy
Manual emails are another avenue of promotion that you can provide content directly for your partners. Perhaps you are raising awareness for a specific use case for your building product. Who better to say it than you?
Write up the copy for the email(s), provide any relevant imagery, and upload it to your PRM or TCMA platform. That way your partners can simply copy, paste, and send.
Lead Nurture Workflows
Prepare a document that outlines the purpose/goal of the nurture workflow and which types of leads are relevant to be enrolled in the workflow. Then, write up the specific plan for the nurture email cadence, subject lines, and email messages. This way, all your partner has to do is copy and paste the script into their system and let it fly!
Co-Branded Premium Content Offer
To support your partner’s lead generation efforts, provide them with co-branded gated content like eBooks or White Papers. Consider developing a pricing fact sheet or product comparison checklist that will capture new leads and that your indirect sales partners can refer to during their sales process as well.
Alternatively, you can gate the content offer on your website and generate demand for the content on your website, then automatically route those leads to the most relevant distributor who would then work the lead and close the deal.
Landing & Thank You Page Templates
It’s one thing to provide your partners with the content you would like them to gate on their website. It’s another thing for them to actually do it. So, again, you can opt to do the heavy lifting for them and create the landing pages and thank you pages for them in so much as you can without having direct access to their website.
Associated Imagery and Graphics
Avoid cookie-cutter campaigns from all your partners by giving them associated images and graphics for the campaign, but letting partners choose where to use them. It would be a wise investment to hire a photographer and/or videographer to shoot brand specific footage that you provide for partners to use.
THrough Channel Marketing focuses on End Users
When implementing a distributor marketing strategy, your marketing messaging is aimed at answering questions and provide solutions to your product's end users. Learn more in our building materials end user buyer personas' guide.
