Cisco’s Marketing Forum: There’s An End Customer Opportunity Here Too!

Cisco’s gathering of about 200 channel partners in Miami Beach is specifically aimed at helping channel partners strengthen their marketing skills, but I’m also seeing an interesting marketing opportunity for the end customers that they serve. The first-ever “Velocity Forum” is focused largely on Web 2.0; how to best leverage blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, and a host of other creative, “new media” forums, along with the old standby marketing tools that some of us graybeards grew up with. Channel partners – technically savvy though they may be – are not necessarily the best at marketing their services, so Cisco is trying to help them take the next step in communicating their value to customers. A number of best practices are under discussion this week, and the reviews from attendees are pretty good. For many channel partners, one of the missing links to fully leveraging the new media is about finding and developing content. In other words, the stories, themselves, need to be developed amid tight resources. These people are running around dealing with networks, security, and unified communications all day. They don’t have a lot of time to blog about their experiences. This situation gives customers an interesting opportunity to gain genuine marketing synergies. Let’s say you’re a marketer for a hospital administration that just installed the latest whiz-bang communications technology to help nurses monitor patients. You might develop text and a layout for a case study describing this new functionality designed to make your own customers feel good about your quality of heath care. You’ll obviously want to post this on your web site, run it in your newsletter, and also use it any of the new media that appeal to you. But don’t stop there. Add a few complimentary points about the channel partner that sold and installed it, and give them permission to use it in their own marketing outreach. Offer it to them proactively, regardless of whether the idea actually occurred to them. In this brave, new world of 2.0, that’s what viral marketing is all about; passing along your message to make it available to an exponentially growing number of eyes. The partners may ask you to punch up a particular point that they really want to communicate, but that’s not necessarily so bad. You’re still getting your marketing message out through new venues that you didn’t have before. It doesn’t cost anything. The channel partner will love you for it. And it’s never bad to be loved by the support people you’re going to call when something bad happens. Such a move would also make sense in a lot of other verticals, too. This new wave of marketing clearly requires resources, but it is no longer based on huge budgets. It’s a race that can be won by the nimble, and by the people who can spot the opportunities that are sometimes hidden in plain view.