The madmen of MDF

Focused marketing

This is where the new breed of IT channel marketing solutions can come into play, helping to create appropriate marketing plans for resellers and, in turn, making sure MDF from vendors gets sweated as hard as possible. It’s no different to the advertising industry. Large companies will have an in-house advertising department and bring in agencies where appropriate, but the rest needs to rely heavily on agency support. 

Joel Montgomery, founder of digital marketing agency Affiniti, agrees that more needs to be done, especially for tier two resellers. But the end solution has to realise a number of important factors. 

“It is more about the program,” says Montgomery. “Is it simple and almost hands off? Can it deliver measurable results? If so, it can work. No matter how that is done, this is what’s needed to get it to work. A lot of the template campaigns that are produced for partners to pick up and run with don’t produce much traction. You need to get involved in clicking the send button on the email for it to be successful.”

But not everyone is convinced that the new distributor offerings will necessarily reshape the way marketing is attacked in the IT channel. Rather, it is seen by some as another option that the smaller resellers will likely have a look at, but it won’t change the environment for the rest. The benefit will come for those who need additional marketing support, but as for marketing tactics, everyone, no matter how big or small, needs to put their thinking cap on. 

“I don’t think this will change the environment,” says Robin Marchant, national marketing manager for Brennan IT. “Marketing needs to focus on who the customer is because every company has a different customer base. Messages can be ‘fill in the blank’ and off you go, but it doesn’t benefit everyone. 

“This is where you need to be very specific. I think targeting to small numbers – 37 as opposed to 1,037 – gets a much better response and ROI. By using the agency element, some will win, such as those without marketing support. But if you do have in-house resources, you can benefit from being a bit more strategic.”

No matter what side of the fence you sit on – distributor, vendor, reseller – or what your marketing experience has been thus far, one thing is agreed upon by the majority of the IT channel in Australia: marketing, especially in this new social and digital world, needs far more thorough attention. Lessons learnt in the broader marketing industry in Australia should not be ignored. Most of the core principles of marketing are relevant no matter what industry you are in. The two share a lot more than was once thought.

“It’s not like we are working with vendors to try and recruit thousands of partners,” Caulfield says. “Particularly the type of business we have and the product we have – we help retailers deliver or generate demand. It is mainstream marketing. The challenges are exactly the same. It’s born out of infrastructure. Organisations don’t have great databases most of the time. That is really hard to do. It’s a challenge for everyone. Marketing is not beyond our industry and you have to start somewhere.”