Channel
Partner Marketing

CISCO PARTNER MARKETING • SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS AMERICA

Using Physical Experiences To Bring Brand Stories To Life

For Cisco, a leader in IT, the partner ecosystem accounts for more than 80% of its annual revenue. Managing the content and communications to more than one million partners while maintaining brand and voice consistency is no easy feat.

To tackle this challenge, the company implemented a program — internally referred to as “Always-On Persona Experiences” — which was designed to deliver curated content through a news aggregator-style content track focused on each of the major partner personas and their needs.

In addition to the weekly content curation by audience managers, the company used PathFactory, a B2B insight and activation platform, to enable a dynamic web experience that changes how content is served to visitors by surfacing content with the highest engagement to the top and sorting content already they’ve already consumed to the bottom.

The team leveraged a multi-channel approach to drive traffic to the experience sites including email, social, websites and communities, as well as awareness campaigns to internal account managers for personal outreach opportunities. Once a partner arrives at the site, they have the option to opt in to receive email updates at the cadence of their choice.

These efforts have resulted in a surge of engagement and subscription rates to the sites. The Always-On Persona Experiences also offer a new delivery mechanism for important news and information to partners and is projected to result in a 25% decrease in overall email touches over the course of FY20.

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Reducing friction with channel partners is critical, especially when that channel is a key business driver.

How Content Can Help Change Perceptions And Land Deals

Traditionally perceived by both the channel and end-users as a hardware provider, Samsung made the strategic decision to focus on selling solutions (rather than just products) with the aim of capitalizing on the growth of mobile device-based business solutions and growing market share.

To change perceptions and gain channel and end-user buy-in, the company developed compelling content addressing the key challenges that businesses face and the tailored solutions Samsung offers to overcome these challenges.

The team was tasked with creating sector-specific content for partners that would convince partners of the revenue-generating opportunities and equip them with everything they needed to take prospects on the buyer journey and implement successful, insight-led multichannel campaigns. The solution was to create informative, compelling and easily actionable content presented in industry-specific Campaigns in a Box for partners. With a focus on the transport sector, messaging was delivered through content that included a white paper, case study and infographic as well as articles and product collateral.

Enablement assets equipped the sales team with everything they need to initiate and close sales. These included scripts, use cases, battle cards and a playbook explaining the campaign.