A message for B2B marketers: Get to know your channel partners—and the power they have—as marketing pals.

While business-to-business marketers are “beginning to grasp the power potential” of amplifying their marketing efforts through  automated marketing systems shared online with distributors, resellers and other channel partners, marketers must find the right formula for managing such systems and the resulting marketing campaigns, Forrester Research says in a new study.

“Channel partners represent a huge, impactful marketing resource,” Forrester says in the study, “but they are hard to marshal given the diversity in their business models and skills, and their tendency to be inattentive and impatient.”

Marketers must find the right balance of working with channel partners, Forrester says. Provide them with too little marketing material and lose out on branding, customer acquisition and sales; provide them with too much, too fast, and marketers risk confusing their end-customers and disrupting organized marketing campaigns.

The study, “Four Best Practices for Applying Through-Channel Marketing Automation,” by Forrester marketing analyst Tim Harmon, provides four approaches it says B2B marketers should take to get the most results from online automated marketing systems—known as “through-channel marketing automation” systems, or TCMA—that share marketing campaign materials with distributors, resellers and others involved with marketing and selling their company’s products. Forrester generated its suggested practices after interviews with more than 30 marketing professionals at 14 companies across several industries including health care, franchise, insurance and technology, involved in B2B marketing as either suppliers or channel partners.

Forrester’s suggested approaches include:

Develop a road map for rolling out marketing campaigns with channel partners. TCMA systems typically support a wide range of marketing tools and tactics—including email, social media, mobile marketing, banner ads, pay-per-click search marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) for natural search results, banner ads, printed materials, radio, TV and billboards.

Marketers in the study said they struggle in two general areas: deciding the order in which they should deploy marketing plans with partners—say, running three blasts of an email marketing campaign complemented by exposure in social media, followed by SEO—and whether they should bundle marketing tools and plans into prescribed marketing packages or let channel partners choose among them individually from an online marketing store.

Harmon says marketers should first determine what a channel partner is willing and able to do, and then work with each company accordingly. “Most partners, while champing at the bit to get into the digital marketing sphere, are still in their marketing infancy and often lack resources,” he says. “You should spoon-feed them one tool or tactic at a time. Let them fully consumer the first before rolling out the second.”

He also suggests that that marketers conduct research to determine how a channel partner’s customers engage with marketing content through their product research-and-purchase journey, and then work with channel partners accordingly.

Start with the most cooperative resellers. “Channel partners come in all marketing stripes and sizes, so don’t try to roll out a new TCMA capability to all partners at the same time,” Harmon says. He suggests it can best to start working with what he calls marketing neophytes, or newcomers with willing to work with new multichannel marketing methods.

Neophytes are typically most willing to work through the initial challenges in proving the concept of a new marketing campaign. By helping to produce early results and validate the concept they can smooth the way to participation by more experienced “power marketers” who will help to maximize returns on marketing campaigns. In turn, marketers can then work on building interest and cooperation among other groups, including corporate marketing teams who prefer their own methods, and “Luddites” who resist new marketing techniques.

Forrester also suggests that marketers provide their channel partners with marketing agency support services—provider either from the marketer’s own in-house resources or from a third-party service—to help them coordinate run and coordinate marketing campaigns. In addition, it suggests marketers assist their channel partners in managing their digital assets—such as product images and videos—along with their TCMA systems.

Among the vendors of web-based TCMA systems that Forrester has cited in other reports are: Averetek Inc., Balihoo, BrandMaker Inc., BrandMuscle Inc., Bridgeline Digital, Distribion Inc., EarthIntegrate, Partnermarketing.com, Revenew, SproutLoud Media Networks LLC, Standard Register, StructuredWeb Inc., TIE Kinetix N.V. and Zift Solutions Inc.

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