You have just arrived in a new city without a plan or idea of what to do. Who you gonna call? No, not Ghostbusters, but the concierge at your hotel of course. You trust your time and experience to the hands of a person who doesn’t know you, whom you have just met, and whom you know nothing about. Why? Because concierges are professionals and helping people during their visit is what they do every day.
So did you know that there are concierges available to support your own and your partner’s marketing departments too? Introducing the service that you knew you needed, but didn’t know what to call - the marketing concierge. So, if your marketing department is not able to reach the levels that you aspire to here are a few examples of what a good concierge can do to ensure you achieve the maximum results from your next campaign.
Digital becomes the new marketing
During the course of 2016 expenditure on digital marketing is forecast to increase to around 35% of total marketing expenditure. With more and more marketing departments receiving an increased budget, realizing demand generation objectives theoretically becomes easier. However, in reality we work in a world where many companies only have small marketing teams. These groups typically have a limited set of skills and often don’t have the time or knowledge to craft effective strategies, create engaging messaging, author great content, develop a presence on social media, AND effectively utilize marketing automation tools.
Just like a concierge in a luxurious hotel, the marketing concierge takes a holistic approach to your experience. Helping you out with everything from on-boarding to reporting, they always strive for total customer satisfaction. For those companies that don’t have the time and resources to plan and execute marketing programs, they are on hand and ready to help out at a moment’s notice.
Using pre-packaged campaign offerings is helpful and can be a good starting place, but it is essentially just that - a starting place. Working with a marketing concierge service, you start to learn for yourself and gain experience from the expert. You have someone to discuss and develop your strategy with, instead of putting all of your time into blindly executing. Your concierge is there to provide knowledge and insights so that you can make decisions based on their wealth of experience.
A concierge for your partners
As a prime vendor with a strong channel you will know the importance of ensuring that your partners are able to create and effectively deliver their own campaigns to support your solution. The marketing concierge is also available to support your business. Acting like your own doorman, the concierge will invite partners into the programme, onboarding them and helping them to understand the opportunities and benefits offered by your company. Having spent time to learn about your company, the concierge supports your partners and helps them to understand how to build and deploy better marketing campaigns using the material that your company provides, taking packaged campaigns and turning them into offerings tailored around each partner’s individual strengths. They will also keep track of goals like: partner participation, pipeline created, and leads generated.
Make better use of Market Development Funds (MDFs)
With many partners not taking full advantage of MDF programmes, the concierge is also there to help guide them through the process of generating campaign ideas, formulating a strategy, and putting together the all-important funding request. By aligning in this way it’s win-win; with effective campaigns developed and delivered by a professional, both the prime vendor and partner gain new leads and an increased pipeline.
Increase effectiveness through automation
Just like your hotel concierge knows the best restaurants in town, your marketing concierge will be able to advise on the most appropriate and effective technologies to support your business. The better the concierge the more knowledge they bring.
With the shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing, if marketing automation is not part of the demand generation services your concierge provides then you should find а company that has the expertise to help you with it. Marketing automation can radically improve your marketing and without a concierge to help you develop the business case, choose the right tools, and develop a strategy it’s highly likely that you will miss important stages and fail in the process.
Marketing and partner concierge services are still a relatively new concept, and different companies use the same term but offer varying services. That aside, one thing remains essential: a good concierge should take away your immediate problems and enlighten you about things you didn’t know before. Be it at a hotel or in support of your marketing, it’s all about a positive experience and successfully achieving your desired result.
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If you think a concierge might be of use to your own marketing situation then allow us to introduce you to our marketing concierge service. Why not contact us now to learn more?
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