Company A has the audience and Company B has the product. By collaborating, they sell more product and reach a broader market than either could alone.
That dynamic is especially clear when large organizations partner with one another: established teams understand the processes, the required online and offline collateral, and the urgency of bringing a message to market in a consistent voice that attracts the right buyers.
But what happens when a large company’s partners are not other large enterprises, but rather a long tail of midsize and small “mom-and-pop” businesses? Collectively, these smaller partners can represent as much value as a few big partners, but they introduce different logistical challenges.
Will the resources needed to support thousands of smaller partners multiply? How many languages must content be produced in to succeed globally? How can a company ensure these smaller partners publish content on schedule and apply updates promptly? Do these partners have webmasters or the capacity to make timely changes?
These were the exact challenges Siemens Enterprise Communications faced. With more than 2,000 active partners worldwide, the Director of Marketing needed a dependable way to distribute Siemens’s core messaging—new product announcements, promotions, and other sales collateral—to partners who were often understaffed and sometimes sold competing products. Partners frequently misused brand materials, producing mock-up graphics with missing elements. Technical materials were copied onto partner websites but quickly became outdated and offered little added value.
Ensuring consistent messaging through a partner sales channel is a common struggle, particularly when partners lack bandwidth. Siemens found it lacked control over which content partners used, how frequently it appeared, and whether the messaging remained on brand. Many partners—despite being key vendors—featured no Siemens content on their sites. Siemens needed a single source of truth that could be distributed easily to all partners in flexible formats that met both internal and partner requirements.
Siemens implemented a content syndication platform paired with a partner-centric subscription program that made it simple for partners to enroll and receive only the Siemens content they requested. Alongside this, an email marketing tool enabled Siemens to push dynamically co-branded campaigns through partners for distribution to their customers and contacts. Together, these tools provided the structure Siemens required to organize and unify its messaging across the channel.
For smaller partners within the Siemens global program, content syndication effectively served as an outsourced marketing function. Since launching the solution, the Siemens Digital Channel partner program has expanded to 33 countries and supports content in 11 languages. The company now reliably delivers product information and promotions across multiple channels and languages, ensuring consistent messaging while maximizing the efficiency of its marketing budget.