You’ve spent months building a new campaign, producing collateral for your channel partners and ensuring resources are available for support as needed. Everything rolls out smoothly and you wait for feedback.

But nothing – or very little – comes back.

For most brand managers, this is a familiar situation. Whether due to a lack of coordination or limited resources, distributors and dealers often fail to provide the reporting needed to measure return on investment.

Did the local campaigns leverage and benefit from national brand-building efforts?

How did they spend the co-op marketing dollars you allocated and what was the ROI of those efforts?

You have a lot of questions and very few answers. This is all the more frustrating when your job performance is measured based on those answers.

These obstacles aren’t new, but with the right combination of technology and communication, they can be addressed. Let’s take a look at how.

The Reason ROI Is So Hard to Track

From the brand’s side, ROI tracking depends on three things:

1. Collecting data from hundreds of dealers, which can be prohibitively time consuming.
2. Getting data in a common format so you can measure the impact of national campaigns on local efforts.
3. Organizing and analyzing data once collected so the current campaign can be adjusted.

Even when working with a large marketing agency to support these efforts, it’s difficult to find the bandwidth. Money goes out with clear instructions, and you may not get back what you need to measure its effectiveness.

Despite these complications only 40% of brands are using some form of automation to help manage their efforts. With an average co-op fund of $7.6 million and insufficient technology to manage it, many national brands are unable to capture the key data they need to run an effective campaign.

Why Partners Struggle

On the local distributor side, there are challenges as well. Most local marketers do their best to meet requirements, but struggle because of:

• A lack of internal staff and resources to track and manage campaigns.
• Shared marketing resources for multiple product lines they carry.
• Insufficient or slow support when there is a problem or question with a campaign.
• Strict reimbursement requirements and unclear expectations from brands.

Co-op dollars might go to the wrong product line – possibly even a competitor. They might fall behind on the timing of a campaign because they are short staffed internally. They may not record the results or track performance on individual efforts in a way that allows for detailed reporting.

There are several reasons reporting falls apart and ROI calculations become impossible. But there are also ways to address it. Template-based websites that can be built via a form, on/off AdWords campaigns to quickly activate a new campaign, and centralized distribution of marketing assets can simplify much of the heavy lifting for local marketers. With fewer requirements, partners can focus on what they do best and are better able to provide the reporting brands need to measure success.

How to Improve ROI Reporting with a Centralized Platform

A marketing agency is slow and may not have the bandwidth to support dozens of local marketers. And without third-party support, brands likely don’t have the internal resources needed to oversee campaign reporting.

So, things get messy.

A centralized platform allows small businesses to flip a switch and start promoting the brand’s newest campaign without the headache of coordinating with dozens of local dealers.

In our eBook, How to Simplify Channel Partner Marketing and Improve ROI, GoBoost looks at the ways in which channel partner marketing is currently over complicated and how a few small changes can help to simplify things, improve participation and boost ROI across the board. Download a copy of the eBook today to learn more about the next step in smarter, more efficient co-op channel marketing.