B2B SEO: How to Drive Traffic to Channel Partners
Although corporate brands are vitally important in driving B2B sales, B2B brands are often reliant on channel partners to sell products and services to end users. And while manufacturers and others offer traditional co-branding marketing tools, they often fail miserably at driving traffic to distributors, dealers, and other channel partners through B2B search marketing.
Channel partners often face the heat of companies whose lines they represent. Why aren’t you selling more of our stuff? What did you do with all the leads we gave you? What’s our return on the co-op dollars we gave you? What are you doing to market our products?
Channel partners, on the other hand, often complain about the lack of support. We need more co-op dollars. Why don’t you give us more leads? The leads you give us aren’t qualified. What are you doing to help promote us?
Both sides are generally justified in their stance. The root issue, however, lies not in the money spent promoting channel partners, but in the effectiveness of channel partner initiatives. With all the evidence that search plays a huge role in B2B purchases, few B2B brands have made the investment to properly optimize their own sites for search, let alone optimize their sites to promote channel partners or help channel partners with search marketing. Yet B2B search marketing can be one of the most effective, cost-efficient ways to drive traffic to channel partners and generate leads and sales.