How can vendors encourage the channel to use social media?

Here at Bright Digital, we are passionate about social media as an effective and quantifiable part of the marketing communications mix for our technology clients. Nowadays, social media has an important place in the vast majority of the marketing strategies we create. It has so many uses and can be extremely effective when used correctly. In terms of channel marketing, which makes up a large part of what we do, we help our clients, many of whom are major technology vendors, use social media to recruit channel members, to communicate with the channel, and for channel reward schemes to name but a few uses. But what about the channel, the IT resellers themselves - are they utilising social media to sell products to end customers? More importantly perhaps, how can vendors support the channel in their use of social media so they are using it effectively to sell more of their products?

We are asking IT resellers this question right now!

So interested are we in this area that we have put together a survey for IT resellers to fill in. A member of our team is calling IT businesses up to ask if they mind filling in the 1 page survey in return for a Guide to Using Twitter that is available to them once they submit the form. We want to know, from the group of people we collect data from, what percentage are using social media currently, if they are getting results – and if they would welcome support from vendors in this area.

Ways vendors could support the channel in their use of social media

Of course, we will wait for the results to analyse findings and then make proposals to our existing clients, as well as propose ideas here on the blog; however we already have some outline ideas for technology vendors that would help the channel to use social media effectively. Here are a few suggestions:

1.    Create How To guides – Create PDFs to be accessed at the Channel resource centre or provided by email. The PDFs would range from the very basic ‘How to get started on Twitter’, to more advanced ‘How to generate and nurture leads on Twitter’.

2.    Build a library of interactive content – Webinars, podcasts, blog posts – all content that could be created to help the channel get started, and run a successful social media project.

3.    Offer project templates – Provide templates for the channel that facilitate effective planning, execution and reporting on social media activity. For example, content planning templates, spreadsheets to track activity and so on.

4.    Provide vouchers to be redeemed via social media – Create reward programmes that use social media exclusively to distribute the goodies. This means the end customers would have to Like / Follow etc the IT reseller to claim the rewards. The vouchers could be tracked back to sale.

We want to help the vendors support their channel

So what’s in it for us? Obviously, we make our living from helping technology companies, so it’s natural that we want to help them to sell more products by utilising this effective sales channel. This fact finding mission will allow us to get feedback on the ways we can do that.

We’ll publish the results of our survey soon.