Clarity: How to Get Real-time Insight into Channel Marketing Performance
If you go to market through an indirect Channel, the very nature of your marketing and sales strategy means you are working with a large distributed network of Partners. Depending on the size of your program, this could be hundreds or thousands of Partners each executing multiple marketing tactics during the course of a week. This decentralization has always been one of the primary reasons why pulling insights out of your Channel programs is so complicated. According to a recent Gleanster Research report, 83 percent of Brands put little to no effort into measuring performance because it is so hard.
There are a lot of challenges with measuring the performance of Channel Marketing.
To be successful in today’s incredibly fragmented marketing atmosphere, you have to execute a lot of tactics. Customers are bombarded daily with advertising messages on every website they visit, every road they drive and every app they use. Cutting through this noise means employing both digital tactics (such as Dynamic Digital Display, Reputation Management and Pay-Per-Click Ads) and traditional tactics (like Newspaper, Radio and TV Ads). The only way a Brand can get this type of comprehensive strategy launched is by signing vendors for each marketing tactic and offering those services to the Partner community. The more vendors you use, the more distinct sources you have for performance analytics.
Your Channel Partners are independent. This means that they take your Brand funds and execute a variety of campaigns with local vendors. This not only adds to the number of information sources but it also puts key data behind a gate that can only be opened by the Partner. If your Brand funded a Direct Mail campaign and the Partner used a local vendor to execute it, the performance metrics on how that campaign performed have to be provided by the Partner. Partners need to focus on selling to customers, so even asking them to stop what they are doing and get you a performance report is taking away valuable time from helping drive sales growth. Local execution means you not only have a lot of individual data sources, but there will be some big holes that you have to try to fill.
Even if you could get your hands on all the data you needed, aggregation and analysis becomes really bandwidth intensive. While most organizations have analytics associated with internal metrics, plugging in third-party data becomes really difficult. Plus, across vendors the metrics may be measured in different ways. Calculating ROI can be really difficult in Channel Marketing.
Too many data sources, data that is unreachable and challenging analysis are the reasons that more Brands focus on determining whether their funding is being used rather than learning how the tactics they funded are performing.
That is why we have put so much effort into developing SproutLoud Analytics. By centralizing your campaign execution in a single platform, SproutLoud can give you previously unreachable insight into the performance of your Channel Marketing spend.
First, SproutLoud offers performance analytics on every tactic launched through the platform. Your Brand and your Partners can see simple, easy-to-digest reporting on the success of every campaign. These individual reports help Partners see if they are investing in the right tactics for their local market.
Since all executions run through the SproutLoud platform, the Brand can get consolidated views of performance across all your Partners. So, say you launched a List Management program for 1,500 Partners. Instead of sifting through tons of individual reports, SproutLoud can give you one clear overview of how many Partners participated, what funds were invested and how many customer responses were generated through the program. This allows the Brand to start making informed decisions on which tactics are working and which are not.
SproutLoud can also connect performance metrics to media that was previously hard to measure. We have integrated Call-Tracking technology into our platform which attaches a local-exchange or toll-free phone number as the Call to Action (CTA) for almost any type of campaign. This allows the Brand and the Partner to see detailed analysis on what messages and tactics are driving the most response. Brands can use this to compare the performance of marketing spend across tactics. Brands can even A/B test different messages within the same tactic, providing even more insight about which stories resonate with their Partners.
With the ability to centralize the data sources, measure the impact of every dollar spent and get more insight into what drives customer response, SproutLoud Analytics gives you the clarity you need to make better, more informed decisions about every Channel Marketing dollar you spend.
