Pax8 has offered marketing resources to its partner channel before, but has given them the ability to conduct campaigns on their own with this offering.
Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of Partner Solutions at Pax8
Denver-based cloud distributor Pax8 has announced Marketing on Demand, a new component within its Cloud Wingman partner program. It provides fully customizable templates, free of charge, for its SMB service provider partners to use in their marketing efforts.
“When we spoke with our partners at trade shows, we heard a common theme on pain points relating to marketing,” said Don Jeter, Director of Channel Marketing at Pax8. “SMB service providers typically lack the ability to market themselves. They tell us that marketing consistently gets in their way. They have to go to each vendor to get the resources to support what they are selling.”
Pax8 provided marketing resources to its partners before, but Marketing on Demand is a different type of enablement tool.
“We made collateral available previously, but this platform does a couple things different,” said Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of Partner Solutions at Pax8. “Partners now have the ability to execute a pre-built campaign on their own. Before, we curated the content and provided the videos, but the ability to execute a campaign was not something we enabled them to do before. They didn’t have the tools to execute and track a campaign.”
Marketing on Demand provides both collateral and email campaigns in one central location.
Don Jeter, Director of Channel Marketing at Pax8
“The collateral includes data sheets from our entire line card, and a click of a button adds their logo to the assets,” Jeter said. “There are also pre-written emails ready to send. We help them quantify the impact of their marketing as well. With some programs like this, they don’t have a way to track their success, but this one lets them see open rates and click-through rates.”
The campaigns themselves are fully customizable.
“We worked with 40 beta users to understand their pain points, and it became clear that some of them wanted to customize things,” Jeter noted. “Initially in the beta, there were limited customization features, but now they can fully customize the email campaigns.”
Marketing on Demand is also free to use.
“We considered charging for it, but ultimately decided not to,” Walsh said. “If you charge, you get into a chicken and egg situation, where the partner will want to test it to know if it’s worth the money. Time to evaluate just adds friction, so we took that away.”
Response to the new initiative has been strong, Jeter said.
“We had 30 people sign up on the first day [Thursday].”
