Pax8 Mounts Marketing Offensive: Free Automated Campaigns, Co-Branded Materials for Partners

Pax8 has rolled out free automated email campaigns and co-branded data sheets and white papers to its channel partners as part of a marketing push.

The Greenwood Village, Colo.-based cloud distributor said more than 20 solution providers have already signed up for Pax8's new Marketing on Demand program, which was formally launched Thursday.

The program was launched in response to feedback from many small and mid-sized solution providers indicating that they lack the time, resources and budget to devote to marketing, according to Don Jeter, Pax8's director of channel marketing. Pax8 has found that SMB partners are relatively underserved from a marketing standpoint today, Jeter said.

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Pax8's initial marketing collateral and campaigns will focus on specific vendors and products since that's the greatest area of channel need, according to Jeremy Yoder, Pax8's vice president of marketing. From there, Yoder said Pax8 hopes to build a regular newsletter and campaigns focused on areas such as social media marketing.

LinkSource IT tested a Veritas-focused email drip marketing campaign with Pax8 during the pilot phase of their Marketing on Demand program, according to Lincoln Christiansen, founder and CEO of the Eugene, Ore.-based Pax8 partner.

Some 100 prospects were contacted as part of the campaign, Christiansen said, and 14 of them engaged with the content that Pax8 provided. A handful of those 14 expressed interest in the product after being contacted by LinkSource, Christiansen said, and the company is currently negotiating with those clients.

The drip marketing effort was a major time-savings over cold-calling, Christiansen said, since LinkSource could focus its energy on those who had engaged with the campaign. Going forward, Christiansen said he plans to have a new LinkSource employee use Pax8's tools to carry out weekly drip marketing campaigns focused on a mix of 50 to 100 new and existing clients.

"Everything I've put in, I get back tenfold," Christiansen told CRN.

The success of this program will be measured by the extent to which it allows channel partners to build a pipeline of prospects, Yoder said, as well as the volume of activity being experienced by Pax8's sales assistance program.

By focusing their marketing-related efforts at the distributor level, partners can oversee one centralized campaign rather than separate initiatives with each vendor, Yoder said.

"We're not doing marketing at a vendor level," Yoder told CRN. "We're doing it across all vendors."

Although other, larger distributors also have marketing programs, Yoder said they often suffer from low adoption due to a complicated implementation process and a lack of attention to the details.

Conversely, Yoder said the people tasked with developing Pax8's marketing campaigns actually have past experience helping MSPs market themselves. Yoder himself had founded an MSP 14 years ago, had to gain sales and marketing knowledge on the fly, and wishes he could have been able to turn to someone like Pax8 to help him out.

In the coming months, Pax8 plans to expand its brand by building a more formal partner community and participating in more industry shows, according to Walsh and Yoder.