How To Revamp Your Channel Program & Measure ROI
When it comes to revamping your channel program, you need to make sure you're getting the biggest bang for your buck. You need your channel marketing to be effective, but also with a close eye on the bottom line.
Striking the right balance between effectiveness and ROI should be an absolute priority.
Channel Program Revamp
When you take the highly sensible decision to revamp you marketing channels it's important to make sure you're heading in the right direction, which can only be done through an in depth understanding of your customers and your market.
What have your competitors been bringing to the table in previous years? Note that it's important not to simply look at recent activity but to go further back and assess what they may have missed or done wrong or right and which path that led them down. Competitive analysis and research are the way to make sure you learn from competitors' successes and failures.
You also need to be listening to your customers' voices and actively soliciting feedback and integrating what you learn back into processes and decision making to ensure your delivery is to the best possible standard. Getting customers to participate in programs can be challenging but will allow you to figure out which marketing efforts are/aren't working as you desire and make the necessary changes to improve things.
Getting to Know ROI
There is little point pursuing a channel marketing strategy which isn't delivering a decent return on your investment. You need to know the cost of the programs you're putting out, the cost of serving customers, and the drive viability of those programs on an ongoing basis.
Don't position all marketing materials based on how you market and deliver programs, but rather adopt a customer centric position which allows you to focus on how to best deliver rather than simply what needs to be delivered. By doing this, you can boost ROI by trimming the fat from your channel marketing efforts.
Integrate all programs together with pricing with everything done on a customer-by-customer basis to get direct line of sight to how much it is to serve with regards to viability, profitable vs non-profitable, and measuring the customer journey.
Controlling Costs
Customers these days are looking for differentiated pricing which makes the job of measuring and controlling using general models more difficult and often impractical. Instead you need to understand the competitive marketplace by gathering data and using it to build a more personalized service with costs calculated on a customer by customer basis.
The goal is to drive efficiency balanced against effectiveness and make sure you're constantly measuring and remeasuring cost versus benefit analysis and changing things up when the pendulum swings too far one way or the other.
Final Thoughts
Controlling the ROI of your channel marketing can mean the difference between success and failure for any business. When you get the balance right however, you will have a channel marketing machine which drives revenue, profit, and a greater understanding of your market and the customers operating within it.
Channel revamp and cost/ROI management is set to be a hot topic at B2B Online 2019, being held in November, at the JW Marriott Marquis Miami, FL.
Please download the agenda today for more information and insights.