The VAR Guy

As a channel and marketing professional I’ve worked with a bunch of different software tools for (1) marketing automation or (2) content syndication OR (3) social media monitoring.  But I’ve never seen a single tool that does all three things really well. Until now. Here’s the story.

I was recently introduced to Marketing Advocate. Until now, I had never seen one tool that does all three of those items above so well.  Not only that, the Marketing Advocate team has a true understanding of channel vendors’ and partners’ needs and caters to them by customizing, you heard me, customizing their solution.

You’re probably thinking the same thing I was when I first heard about Marketing Advocate, “why have I never heard of these guys?” I was even more surprised when I saw some of their clients include Dell, IBM, and Xerox.

How does it work? The Marketing Advocate professional services team helps vendors and partners ramp-up with their customized set of tools including:

• Resource Center and Lead Nurturing System: syndicates information to the partners website while keeping the same look and feel.  Makes the partners’ website the key location for content and information while tracking all clicks, registrations, and downloads.
• Automated Marketing and Campaigns: An intuitive and flexible system for building user-action triggered email marketing campaigns continues to nurture leads and drive opportunities automatically for your partners.  They don’t have the time, resources, and, in some cases know-how, to do it, so you can do it for them.
• Partner/Reseller Marketing System: co-branded marketing system for partners that provides frequent easy-to-use campaigns including new media and organic and paid search campaigns, with nightly delivery of nurture and request-a-sales call leads to partners.

There really is no one solution that’s right for everyone. Other portal, syndication, and marketing automation suggestions I have made are very appropriate for many organizations.  Like those, Marketing Advocate is well worth a close look.

Have others heard of similar solutions?  Is this something that would make your life easier?  How about your partners?

*Disclaimer:  I had the pleasure of being taken to lunch by the Marketing Advocate guys to learn more about their product and give them some social media pointers.

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