Making the most of your Marketing Development Fund
Resellers can create cut-through campaigns that make the most of your MDF spend by partnering with Forum Group Events & Marketing.
The Challenge
Our client needed things to happen fast: campaign execution needed to occur in-quarter to ensure compliancy. Marketing collateral such as email templates and brochures was available from the vendor, but were highly product centric. Our client wanted the messaging to be a more solutions-focused approach to the campaign to better address their customer pain points. On the flipside, Microsoft placed strict requirements that needed to be followed in order for MDF claims to be successfully processed.
“I have limited understanding and expertise of how to register for and process MDF claims”
“I don’t have time to process the claims or create and manage campaigns”
“Strict vendor requirements for MDF mean that the claims we submit are often not approved”
“MDF executions limit the messaging I want to communicate to my customers”
The solution
- An end-to-end campaign managed by specialist IT marketing experts
- Strategic messaging and creative that understand IT customers
- Messaging and content is localised for your organisation – on brand. True win-win collaboration between client and MDF partner
- Account management of full MDF process; we get involved from the start to ensure pre-approvals through to final Proof of Execution
- We set ROI targets for all MDF activities to maximise the value of their spend
How we made it happen
- Ensure messaging resonates with the campaign target market with the required cut-through while remaining on-brand with the client’s marketing guidelines.
- Ensure the creative complies with the strict requirements of the MDF vendor partner.
This campaign execution adopted a 365-day connected communication approach and included telemarketing, lead generation events, email communications, sales engagement and cheat sheets, as well as post campaign follow-up communications, leads submission to Salesforce, and a methodological sales follow-up process to capitalise on the leads generated.
Throughout all milestones of the campaign delivery, it was imperative that MDF requirements and Proof of Execution (POE) was considered and correctly executed:
- Pre-approvals for all communications needed to be submitted and approved prior to in-market release. Appropriate logos and graphics usages, call-outs, messaging content and brand requirements needed to be considered and applied to all email communications, telemarketing scripts, and other customer-facing materials.
- Event POE photos needed to comply with the exacting standards of MDF vendor such as time and date stamp.
- Campaign metrics and reporting to ensure core POE requirements were executed while balancing the regulations stipulated by Australian Privacy laws.
To ensure optimal outcomes for client and MDF vendor partner alike, a closed loop sales and marketing strategy was also adopted. True win-win outcome happens when the leads generated from the campaign are converted into pipeline and ultimately sales revenue.
In this case, Forum Group Events & Marketing helped bridge the sales and marketing gap by working closely with sales leaders to define and support a campaign specific lead follow-up process. Training and interlocks with our client’s sales team where held to ensure all stakeholders were informed about the details of the campaign, and how to best use the information (such as cheat sheets and call-scripts) available to them to maximise opportunities. In addition, Forum Group Events & Marketing worked directly with the client’s CRM teams to provide data that was not only ready for easy upload to Salesforce – but structured in a way so that sales team could best use this information to make informed follow-up calls to the leads generated.