Spectra Logic increases digital marketing support

Spectra Logic has enhanced its partner programme SpectraEdge to provide the channel with more access to digital marketing tools.

The coronavirus pandemic has made it difficult for the channel to engage with customers physically or pitch for business at events, which have all moved online. That has left many looking at the prospect of digital marketing as a way to generate new business.

But for many in the channel, those digital marketing skills are not natural. In response to that, Spectra Logic has increased the support it can provide partners.

Betsy Doughty, vice-president of corporate marketing at Spectra Logic, said that 100% of the business went through the channel in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and it was important it gave partners the support they needed,

“We launched SpectraEdge about 15 years ago, and we’ve just been building on that ever since. We continue to build new programmes and sign new resellers, and it is a critical part of our business,” she said.

The vendor built a fresh partner portal less than a year ago to speed up the links with its own back-end systems to increase the speed of leads passing to the channel, and the latest enhanced programme continues to try to make processes more seamless.

There is also a focus on ransomware, helping customers to recover data, which has become something of a speciality of the firm after it was attacked itself in May last year.

“We’re looking at things such as how we message our products to really be targeted towards helping quickly recover from a ransomware attack,” said Doughty.

With its own experiences, the firm is sharing best practices, with Tony Mendoza, senior director of IT at Spectra Logic, talking with partners about how they can protect their customers.

“Our IT director has even been making himself available to do talks with our VARs [value-added resellers] and then with their customers...and we’re going to be doing a lot more with ransomware and ransomware protection for our channel,” said Doughty.

This is alongside the the increased support for digital marketing, which Doughty believes is more important than ever.

“We know that 80% of a customer’s research happens before they even talk to a person at a company. So if our channel isn’t providing the right tools and information, and we’re not ranking high in Google searches, we’re never even going to capture them,” she said.

“But once we capture them, what are the things that we’re doing to make sure we engage them and then ultimately they want to have that one on one conversation?

“We’re helping them build better web content that ties into what Spectra has done for search engine optimisation, we’re building those keywords into their content, pre-populating the content with links, and having images readily available.

“We’re also making all of our blogs, videos, case studies and whitepapers available for them to use on their website as just downloads, or they can get those to try to get leads,” she added.

The firm has also recently launched its StorCycle certification curriculum to get more partners to increase expertise around that technology.

Doughty said that, even with consolidation in the channel, the firm had seen its base grow annually and there is a hope that the latest enhancements to the programme will attract some fresh talent.

“We’ve seen our channel programme grow pretty steadily, about 10% every year in terms of the number of channel partners, especially as we hone our messaging into those data-intensive industries like media and entertainment, HPC, research and development or even financial and healthcare,” she said.

“We’re bringing in partners who have expertise in those kind of sub-vertical categories and I would say that’s where we’ve seen most of our growth,” she added.