The power of numbers: Why marketing evaluations are indispensable in sales partner marketing

The world of marketing is constantly changing and the ability to make data-based decisions is becoming increasingly important for a company's marketing success. Evaluations play a crucial role in sales partner marketing in particular. Not only do they offer insights into customer behavior and needs, but they also provide valuable information about the effectiveness of local marketing strategies and the marketing activities of sales partners. 

Use the quieter time of the year to review all marketing measures of the last few months and evaluate them in detail with your employees and partners. In this way, you can identify your optimization potential for upcoming marketing activities in the new year and get off to a good start in local marketing together with your sales partners.
 

Why marketing evaluation is so important

Marketing measures should generally serve to increase brand awareness and boost sales. After all, only if the content is actually seen by customers can it contribute to the company's success. For successful local marketing, it is not only important that the sales partners use the right marketing measures and serve as many communication channels as possible, but also that the marketing center can set a clear strategy and goals.  

However, in order to make the right decisions for the marketing strategy, it is important to make them on the basis of sufficient data. After the implementation of a specific marketing measure or campaign, it should therefore be analyzed and evaluated with regard to the defined goals in order to optimize the measure for the next time, discover new potential and gain insightful knowledge.
 

Target the services of your sales partners

For companies with distribution partners, it is crucial to closely examine not only the performance of the company, but also the activities and success of the individual distribution partners. Each sales partner may have different target groups, preferences and strategies. It is therefore essential to identify the specific marketing measures that are most worthwhile for both the sales partners and the company. By analyzing the activities of sales partners, companies can identify which marketing measures have the greatest impact. This enables the marketing center to better promote those activities that are effective for the sales partners and to use marketing resources in a more targeted manner.

For example, the marketing headquarters can analyze which measures are currently being used by the sales partners by using various approaches and tools, such as tracking links for marketing materials, marketing portals or CRM systems. Active communication with sales partners also helps to obtain direct feedback on the marketing materials used and to gain valuable insights into the preferences and needs of individual sales partners. Companies with a partner network can also create performance metrics that show, for example, sales figures, customer feedback, support requests or closing rates of their sales partners. This helps the head office to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of individual partnerships and identify opportunities for improvement. Among other things, this makes it possible to recognize which sales partners need better support with marketing measures, which may need to be motivated to carry out more marketing activities or which sales partners stand out due to their outstanding performance.

If you know which marketing measures are carried out the most by your sales partners, you can start to evaluate these measures in a targeted manner. Most marketing activities, especially online measures, offer many key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide information about the success of the measure carried out. All this data can be compared with other evaluations such as new customer figures or sales figures and analyzed to determine which sales partners are already marketing effectively or which sales partners may need further encouragement or support. In addition, these evaluations can be used for future marketing planning in order to work even more effectively and better with sales partners and get the most out of local marketing.

Here are some ways you can work with your sales partners to evaluate your joint marketing activities:
 

1. Web Analytics

Tools like Google Analytics allow you and your sales partners to track visitor behavior on your website. You can collect data on page views, dwell time, visitor demographics and conversions to help you understand the effectiveness of your online presence and optimize the website experience for visitors.
 

2. Campaign tracking

With the help of tracking codes and UTM parameters, you can track the success of your marketing campaigns and analyze which channels and campaigns deliver the best results. With social media campaigns, you also often have the option of gaining insights into the success of the campaign directly in the respective platform itself and viewing important parameters such as open rates or click-through rates (CTR).
 

3. Social Media Analytics 

On the most popular social media platforms Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, you can see and evaluate the engagement, reach and demographics of the target group of the respective social network at a glance in the analytics section of the platform. This allows you to deduce which content works best and how you can further improve your presence on the platforms.
 

4. E-mail marketing evaluations

If you and your marketing partners run a lot of email campaigns, metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates can help you understand how effective your messages are and what type of content or offers work best with recipients.
 

5. A/B tests 

A/B tests, also known as split tests, in which different versions of marketing materials or campaigns are compared with each other, allow you to find out which marketing measure works best under which conditions and has the greatest impact on customers. A/B tests are particularly suitable for testing new ideas and analyzing how strongly the behavior of the target group is influenced by the change of a certain variable.
 

Marketing evaluations with the Local Marketing Platform 

A software solution such as the Local Marketing Platform can support you in evaluating your marketing measures and provide you with all the important data you need for the future planning and implementation of marketing activities. Based on the evaluations of the measures carried out and the overview of the individual orders, your sales partners can analyze which forms of advertising are best suited to their own target group and the marketing headquarters can better decide which expenditure will be most effective in the future.  

To make the analysis as simple and intuitive as possible, the Local Marketing Platform offers a dashboard with the most important key figures. This provides an overview of which marketing materials have been ordered or downloaded in a freely selectable period of time. You can therefore see at a glance how high the turnover was, how many orders were placed and how these were distributed over the course of the period. 

If the first insight via the dashboard is not enough for you, you can call up even more data and overviews in the Analytics area of the Local Marketing Platform and generate various detailed reports. Here, for example, you can see exactly which sales partners have already ordered certain items or for which additional reminders may be necessary. Individual items or campaigns can also be analyzed to see how new materials are being received or which campaigns are working better than others. For example, take a look at the opening rate of the newsletter sent or the number of clicks on your advertisement in order to target and continuously optimize your marketing activities. This gives both you in marketing management and your sales partners the ideal basis for carrying out the best possible local marketing.