MarketStar Blog

To succeed in channel sales, it’s essential to emphasize thought leadership as a way to enable existing partners and attract new ones. According to Forbes, thought leadership takes marketing to a new level. It increases the visibility of your organization by accelerating marketing efforts to accomplish goals and generate new leads.

Guest Blogger David O'Brien, with Partner Perspectives shares insight gained from living in the partner world (while operating a reseller business). He understands, firsthand, what works and what doesn't work with vendors and the relationship investment made to succeed with channel partners. MarketStar and Partner Perspectives have joined forces to create a Channel readiness program that provides Channel assessment, planning, implementation, and framework guidance to position vendor channel partners for maximum performance.

The world around us is constantly changing. Gartner predicts by 2021, 28% of all IT spending will be for cloud-based infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services. As the economy changes, so do the preferences and purchasing habits of users. This in and of itself creates a change in the delivery model to those same customers. Partners, too, are in the throes of transformation - thanks largely to the bold digital world that we're now living in. 

In today’s competitive landscape, customer expectations are reshaping how businesses operate. While product-centric companies focus on innovation and technical capabilities, customer-centric organizations prioritize solving real customer problems. This shift is driven by the realization that long-term success depends not just on selling products but on building relationships and delivering exceptional experiences. Companies that place the customer at the core of their strategy are outperforming their competitors, driving loyalty, and ensuring sustainable growth.

Moving goal posts: it’s what keeps CEOs up at night as they attempt to navigate the tide of this entirely disruptive, ever-changing digital economy. Consider Kodak. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012, failing to realize opportunities in digital photography, a technology that it invented. How did things go so wrong for Kodak? They had the data. They had the market intelligence to make the right decision, and yet they didn’t. Many businesses are on the verge of their own ‘Kodak moment’, this time at the behest of artificial intelligence (AI), the cognitive technology that has the potential to disrupt business as we know it.

Customer experience (CX) is the emerging competitive differentiator for brands. According to Dimension Data’s ‘2017 Global Customer Experience (CX) Benchmarking Report’,¹ 70.9% of boardrooms recognize CX as their most important strategic performance measure. CX can broadly be defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your brand.

The old saying, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” was never more wrong than it is today. Gone are the days when you could build a great product and hope to have customers flock to you by sheer word of mouth. In this crowded marketplace, you need to find ways to put your product into the hands of users; the more the merrier. Channel partners could play a vital role here. 

Look-alike modeling has become a game-changer in the marketing world. By identifying groups of people who resemble your most profitable customers, this strategy can significantly enhance your advertising efforts. In this article, we'll dive into three key pointers to help you leverage look-alike modeling effectively. 

In our previouspost , we had discussed the importance of focusing on a mobile email marketing strategy. In this post, we will look at how you can adopt a mobile email marketing strategy by looking at some of the best practices for optimizing email campaigns for the mobile user.

With mobile technology advancing at a disruptive pace, there’s no saying where mobile user expectations will go next. So how do large marketing enterprises protect and leverage their huge investments? 

MarketingProfs’ August 2017 summary1 of The State of Engagement, a recent Marketo research report2, is telling. The Marketo study was compiled from the responses of close to 1,200 marketers and 1,000-plus consumers surveyed in the US, the UK, France, and Germany. The report covered almost equal numbers of B2C and B2B consumers – 511 and 489, respectively. 

Among other findings were two that are pertinent to this post:  

Video marketing has become one of the most sought-after content marketing trends for brands today and it continues to grow at a rapid scale. Cisco’s research1 estimates that “Globally, 70% of all Internet traffic will cross CDNs by 2021”. Moreover, the exponential increase in mobile and tablet users, paired with sufficient availability of distribution platforms, have made it convenient for marketers to drive audience engagement through videos. However, it is imperative to get the technique right to obtain maximum engagement from it. 

Here are 3 things you must do to drive maximum audience engagement through video marketing: