Digium Drives Partner Leadership With Content Syndication

Vendors and OEMs are feeling the pressure to optimize content marketing strategies and stand apart from competitors in a crowded marketplace. While developing memorable and compelling thought leadership via white papers, E-books, webinars, and even infographics and blogs, is a daunting task in itself, distributing content to partners efficiently is a whole other struggle for organizations.

To ensure speedy content delivery and updating process among its partners worldwide, Digium — the provider of Asterisk custom communications and Switchvox Unified Communications (UC) business phone systems — partnered with TIE Kinetix, a content syndication solution provider.
Due to Digium’s extensive network of authorized reseller partners, the company sought a solution to share customizable content with partners, as well as track the overall usage and success of collateral.

“Content syndication makes it easy for us to update our content on the spreadsheet, which ensures our partners always have fresh content,” Shannon Clemons, Director of Marketing at Digium told Channel Marketer Report. “Our partners also have the option to customize content so they don’t all look the same across our network.”

The ability to offer co-branded PDFs, according to Clemons, “is always a channel request for organizations,” she said. “Partners want the content’s call-to-action to include their information, so the leads go back to them. That want and need is completely understandable. Before it was hard to do that, because all our content was customer and one-off. Now, when a partner establishes their account, every time a site visitor downloads a piece, it will have the partner’s information integrated.” 

With Digium’s partner network expanding rapidly worldwide, the company needed a solution to not only automate content distribution, but also track the impact of specific content. Previously, partners would access a portal to upload content, and Digium channel account managers would follow up to make sure they updated recent promotions and other information, “which was overall a bit cumbersome and would not scale,” Clemons explained.

“We needed something that was easy to manage, supported multiple products and would help us get our partners to market more quickly,” Clemons added. “Any form of technology or platform has to be easy for partners to use it. However, a key mistake vendors make is they put all of their content in a portal and expect their partners to use it.”

Cashing In On Content Marketing
To boost overall usage of the TIE Kinetix platform, Digium held a series of webinars to show partners how to optimize the branded syndication program titled: MarketSource Content Syndication.

“When our partners saw all they had to do was download a string of code the feedback was tremendous,” Clemons reported. “The fact that it’s easy for our partners to utilize [the solution] definitely had an impact on our adoption rate.” 

With instant access to in-depth content analytics, Digium also can view what content partners are using most frequently, as well as what forms of content gain the most traction from web site visitors.

“Without that information, companies won’t be able to have an efficient decision-making process for future content,” Clemons explained. “For example, we can see out of all the assets published, that videos are the most popular. So if I have an extra eight hours to develop a new project, I’ll probably work on a video, rather than a white paper.”

As the partnership between Digium and TIE Kinetix continues to develop, the companies will work towards creating more localized content for key regions of expected growth. This will including translating top-performing content pieces into two or three key languages, Clemons reported. Additoinally, Digium is furthering its content development strategy by repurposing content and promoting it via more interactive channels, such as infographics, Pinterest and even Instragram.

“I think every marketer today is becoming concerned about creating more content,” Clemons said. “It’s a huge task for our group, because it’s how we repurpose content for more, smaller formats. We try to get ahead of trends and publish content through our blogs, white papers, webinars and infographics, which fit together in an integrated campaign, so it’s not just one piece of information.”

Tapping into these content development and sharing best practices, however, will not solely exist within Digiums internal marketing team. The company consistently offers webinars and educational seminars to spotlight marketing best practices required for partners to thrive. 

“We try to offer partners an array of webinars on marketing topics to help our partners understand the opportunities available to help them grow their business,” Clemons said. “Whether it’s through advice, third-party recommendations, or more training on products and offerings. In the end, it’s all about partner enablement.”

• b2b
• branding
• collateral
• content
• content for demand
• content marketing
• E-books
• education
• end-users
• Instagram
• marketing
• partners
• Pinterest
• thought leadership
• TIE Kinetix
• webinars
• White Papers