Nichole Gunn

In an era when every brand fights for consumer attention, the key to success often lies in the channels connecting you to your audience. A smart through-channel marketing strategy can engage channel partners and help them market to their customers while creating a collaborative environment where it’s mutually beneficial for brands and partners to have customer data. Brands can boost their visibility by equipping partners with everything they need to engage with end customers in a meaningful way.

Understanding Through-Channel Marketing

At its core, through-channel marketing, or TCM, is about tapping into your network of resellers to get your products into consumers’ hands. Depending on the industry, the terminology may change (you might hear “dealer” or “distributor”), but the idea is the same: brands rely on their resellers to bridge the gap between production and the end-user.

This can be a win-win. Good TCM solutions — combining software and services — enable brands to save time, scale marketing efforts, and gain insights into which campaigns perform best across different partners, making it easier to fine-tune strategies. For resellers, these solutions take a lot of the guesswork out of creating effective sales materials, saving them time and energy.

However, this arrangement is not without its drawbacks. Brands can struggle with limited visibility into customer preferences and sales data, while resellers can run into inventory and competition issues. This is why alignment is everything — – when brands and resellers work closely, they’re both more likely to thrive.

The Role of Through-Channel Marketing Automation

To make TCM more efficient, brands are increasingly turning to through-channel marketing automation (TCMA). This tech-driven approach can streamline marketing efforts, save time, and provide deeper insights into customer behavior.

While TCMA can help make things run smoother, it’s not a one-and-done solution. It’s a powerful tool, yes, but it works best when it’s part of a bigger TCM strategy. For example, TCMA can automate email campaigns and analyze engagement, but it can’t replace the human insight that creates the creative concepts that hook the consumer. Even with automation, you still need people to make sure everything’s on track.

Making Marketing and Sales Enablement Easy

One of the best things TCMA can do is help with marketing and sales enablement. Many brands work with smaller resellers who don’t have dedicated marketing teams. TCMA makes it easy to distribute ready-made sales content across the reseller network, making everyone’s lives easier.

Still, if you want to truly support your resellers, it’s worth going the extra mile to create sales materials tailored to their needs. This means working with experts and getting feedback from resellers to make sure the content is relevant. TCMA helps get that content out quickly, but developing effective content still takes a smart TCM strategy.

Personalization in Channel Marketing

Personalization is a big part of what makes TCM work, and while TCMA can help, it can’t do it all. Using segmentation and dynamic content, brands can create campaigns that resonate with different groups of resellers, driving up engagement and sales.

However, to nail personalization, brands need to understand what makes each reseller tick. This means gathering data and building relationships to create offers that feel personal and relevant. A key policy within our company is maintaining a human-centered approach, ensuring that every piece of content keeps that human touch — it’s this element that makes automated content feel natural.

Content is Queen

No matter how you look at it, content is the backbone of a successful TCM strategy. Great content grabs attention, builds relationships, and strengthens the connection between resellers and end users. While TCMA makes content distribution easier, actually creating that content is up to the brands. Relevant, quality content is what will make you stand out.

Putting it all Together

Through-channel marketing automation is a powerful tool that can make a huge difference in your TCM strategy. It streamlines communications, helps you segment your audience, and makes data collection easier. But remember, TCMA is just one part of the puzzle.

By combining TCMA with strategic insights and a collaborative mindset, brands can build unique marketing solutions that drive growth, strengthen customer relationships, and give resellers what they need to succeed in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace.

About the author:

Nichole Gunn is the global chief marketing officer at Extu, a marketing services company serving such clients as Adobe, FW Webb, Dell and Toyo Tires. She has over 20 years of B2B marketing experience.

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