How to Activate Your Dealer or Channel Partner Network to Create Content

What's up, everyone? This is Hunter Lopaten, director community here at MarketScale. And today, this is one of my favorite topics to talk about, which is how do you activate the crowds outside of your business to create content for you. Those crowds outside of your business are actually your most important marketers. You can think of it like when you go to a Dallas cowboys game. Obviously, we're here in Dallas, so had to bring up the cowboys. But when you walk into a stadium on Sunday, they have a hundred thousand marketers in the stands pulling out their phone and recording. And that's what we need to do in business as well. In business, you're not a marketing team of ten or fifteen or twenty or thirty. You're actually a marketing team of thousands, because you have your customers, you have your partners, you have your dealers, your distributors, your integrators, all of those folks are the marketers for your brand. And so I wanna talk about how are we actually going to get our dealers and our channel partners creating content with us and for us. So you'll see here this first bullet point I have written down is your dealers are at every install and every customer site. You guys have an army of dealers and distributors outside of just your headquarters or just your offices because you have people on-site putting your products in, getting them to use, talking to the customers, and they have these experiences right in front of them. A lot of them, most times, are already taking out their phone and recording, whether it's pictures or videos, and us as the manufacturers are not getting that content to share. And so that's gonna be our goal is activating those folks that are already there, gathering that footage, gathering that content so that you guys can have marketing for yourselves to share with your other dealers, also to share with end users so that your entire YouTube and LinkedIn and TikTok and whatnot is fully filled with content out in the field because that's what people resonate with. When I'm scrolling through LinkedIn, I know the first thing that I look for is, are they actually out in the field? Are they showing me their products? Are they talking through it? Showing the install? Because that's the most interesting stuff to see. And I know you guys are probably the same way. A great piece to this to make it really easy to do with MarketScale is you don't actually have to have them to log into the platform. They don't have to get into another system. They can just record on their phone from a request link that you sent them. All you have to do is hop into MarketScale Studio, create a request, create a survey, send them the link, whether it's through text or email. All they have do is click the link, they record right there, they talk through it a little bit, and boom, you now have ten pieces of content in your inbox from one install that we can create something great from. Where a lot of marketers go wrong here is they ask it in the right in the wrong way. So we gotta make sure we're asking it in the right way because this content isn't just about us. This content is about our dealers. We wanna create a better bond, more loyalty to the dealers that we work with because overall, that helps our business, that helps us grow and creates a better community. And the way that we're gonna ask them is gonna be about them is, hey, we would love to shout you guys out as a great partner of ours here at XYZ Manufacturing Company. I'd love to get some content and show the success that you guys have had installing our products and installing what we do because we wanna share the wins you have with our community, our crowd. Right? That sounds a lot better than saying, hey. Can you grab some content while you're there? Because now you're making it about them. You're doing the marketing for them and with them in this case and vice versa. Right? As you see here, we could start with one dealer. Maybe one who already trusts you, you have a close relationship with, and use their finished video as the model. Here's what we built for them. We'd love to do the same for you. Look at the marketing that we've done for x y z dealer out of Idaho. Now we're talking to somebody in Boston, and we want them to have the same experience. It becomes that one champion. And as you start posting them out, they're gonna see it and they're gonna be like, wow. A manufacturer is actually sharing us, sharing our story, sharing what we're doing. You create that bond, you create that loyalty and that brand together. And that's what we do overall, especially in dealer marketing is we wanna make sure that we're building that bond together. You can also co brand the output. And to even show the dealers that you go in an extra step, you can create a separate brand book within your brand books on MarketScale Studio where you put co branded assets in there, where you have the dealer or slash distributor slash integrator with your logo and any piece of content that goes in. We edit it with that co branded with those co branded assets. So now it's two way system, and now the dealer's posting out, you're posting out, and you're growing already through them. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Your best marketers are the people outside your business, whether that's your clients, your dealers, your integrators, your partners, anybody. So we gotta get them creating. And so in order to do that, market scale makes it easy. You just send them a request link. They record as well as make sure you ask them the right way. Make sure they know it's about it's for them and about them, not about you. And let's go the extra mile. Let's create a brand book. Let's do some co branded assets. Let's let's make some awesome content. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us here at MarketScale. We'd love to walk you through how we can do this. We can even help train your dealers and distributors on how to create that content, but I look forward to seeing what you guys all create.