Channel Marketing Simplified

Many tech companies establish alliance partnerships with complementary products, but they fail to monetize these alliances to their full potential because they focus on joint activities rather than the bigger opportunity – activating their joint channel.

While discussing plans for the year ahead with a channel-focused tech company, their global channel marketing leader talked about how their team was incredibly focused on using their channel marketing platform as the destination for all their programs and initiatives. That’s not an uncommon goal that I hear when talking to channel marketing leaders. What was uncommon is that this leader referred to their company’s use of the platform as a key piece of their noise-reduction strategy.

Unless you have no contact with the outside world, you’ve at least heard of Fortnite. The online phenomenon is a “free-to-play battle royale game where up to 100 players fight to be the last person standing.” The game has gained “more than 125 million players in less than a year and (it’s) earning hundreds of millions of dollars per month” for its creator, Epic Games.

As a father of a 12-year-old boy who plays Fortnite daily with his friends and as a Fortnite player and channel marketer, I think there are many ways we can use Fortnite to inspire our work with partners since we often struggle with how to capture interest and inspire action among partners.