Promotion Ideas for the Channel
Posted in Channel Marketing on December 18, 2008
December 18 is Free Shipping Day
Thursday, December 18, has officially been deemed Free Shipping Day. Retailers from Apple to Toys R Us are offering online shoppers free shipping by Christmas Eve on all purchases. What’s the catch? You have to order today.
From what I can tell, there are no restrictions as to what types of businesses can join in on this Holiday camaraderie. To be honest, this type of promotion would probably work just as well, if not better, with smaller businesses such as channel partners. Think about it. Smaller channel partners have with fewer marketing resources (and even smaller budgets with the current economy).
Large companies with resellers (VARs) could create promotional microsites for partners in different geographic locations, allowing for a more focused target audience. Those channel partners could then use the marketing promotion expertise of the large company to sell more products and generate more leads by banding together and using marketing funds to promote the entertprise’s products in their local market.
For example, a computer hardware manufacturer could create several microsites, one for each designated marketing region, and cross-promote all channel partners in that region. Some of these partners may only sell routers; others only sell servers. But the microsites could offer customers combo-packages for purchasing a router from one partner and a server from the other. All the partners in a DMR could join the resources together to create an advertising campaign to get the promotion in front of customers. This is better than the manufacturer developing a generic campaign for all partners to use because:
- Overall promotional costs will be lower while spread across several partner’s funds
- Partners will be able to sell more products with cross-promotion without stepping on each other’s customer bases
- Messaging will be localized, making the overall relevance of the promotion more appealing to customers
Promotions like this are becoming particularly prevelant as our economy takes a turn for the worse. Businesses are focusing less on how to combat the competition and more on shuffling to keep sales up. It’s times like these that individual people come together for a common cause, but now even businesses are helping each other just to stay afloat. I expect that in the coming months we will be seeing a lot more co-branded promotions from large companies. But will channel marketers leverage this type of promotion for the channel?
