Online channel marketing facility launches

An online toolkit to help resellers create, manage and report on marketing campaigns has been launched locally.

Campaign[X] is the brainchild of Sydney-based creative agency, Bang Australia. The company has worked with IT vendors, distributors and resellers for the past nine years and is one of IBM’s preferred marketing partners.

Campaign[X] sales and marketing director, Martin Mason, said the idea stemmed from IBM’s push for more business partners to take advantage of its marketing development funds to run successful, measurable campaigns.

“IBM ended up moving across to a model where you still had marketing development funds, but they’d have a creative agency driving it,” he said.

The issue Bang and vendors faced was manually managing and tracking simultaneous campaigns. At the same time, some campaigns could have up to 15 stakeholders, making it difficult to keep everyone updated through emails and spreadsheets.

“This year, the world changed and marketing budgets are stretched. Vendors want to see instantly how a campaign is performing because it’s extremely important,” Mason claimed. “It’s also important for partners to see the value of the leads coming through. That need stimulated us to put something together.”

Campaign[X] consists of an online dashboard, which provides vendors and resellers with a list of their current campaigns. Features include a campaign overview, the various campaign elements involved and actions required, stages and tasks to be completed, a calendar and real-time customer response updates.

“When a campaign goes live, Campaign[X] generates all the calls to action, a registration page, can automate in-bound calls and outbound telemarketing, and provides real-time reporting,” Mason said. “This is based on the vendor’s terminology. Partners can then take and manage those leads or qualify them.

“It also manages distribution of emails, and provides an ROI on those campaigns.”

The ROI is based on weightings set to various elements of the campaign (the pipeline value), divided by the marketing cost. Users can also allocate tasks and collaborate through its WIP functionality and ongoing status reports.

Vendors already signed up to Campaign[X] include Trend Micro, IBM, VMware and Microsoft’s Dynamics division. Resellers using the system include Data#3 and Frontline Systems. Mason said vendors paid for a “head licence”, depending on the number of partners accessing the system. Vendors and partners then paid a fixed service fee per campaign of $500, which was usually split equally.

Campaign[X] took 18 months to develop. While targeted at the Australian market, Mason said it was already getting expressions of interest from vendors in Singapore, EMEA and the US.

He claimed the biggest challenge was not selling the system, but in pulling together all essential elements for successful campaigns. Mason estimated it took about six weeks to collate marketing assets, create a campaign brief and the value proposition.

“This gives the vendors visibility on campaigns, but the beauty of it for partners is they can use one dashboard to view multiple campaigns they are running,” he said.

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