Enabling access to marketing assets through a partner portal
Opportunity
Symantec partners need content and assets based on their specific partnership level, but building a robust resource through Adobe Experience Manager was complex, requiring the IT organization’s help
Solution
BKJ built the Partner Toolkit, a portal built thru an open source CMS and in parallel with the AEM platform, that allowed for the kind of personalization and user experience that partners, and Symantec channel marketers, needed.
Impact
Symantec’s channel marketers needed to get the right content and assets into the right partners’ hands frictionlessly. From logos and photo assets, to data sheets, videos, and pitch decks, the Symantec channel marketers and their partners orchestrate a huge variety of moving parts. Building out a massive account management organization to service these needs directly was too costly to consider. An automated, personalized, and intuitive digital solution was needed.
Symantec’s enterprise platform Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), while robust, presented a challenge to Marketing quickly spinning up a digital solution. Building software in AEM demanded the skills and expertise of Symantec’s internal IT organization. An IT organization that was already in chronically high demand.
Marketing could choose to take their spot in the IT queue and build a solution in AEM, but the drawback would be the time and effort invested in serving partners’ needs -- one request at a time -- until the solution was built out.
Luckily BKJ Digital was able to offer an alternative.
Building the partner portal outside of AEM, in an open source CMS, ensured that the Marketing organization was able to self-serve and keep the huge inventory of marketing assets current and up-to-date without help from an outside organization. Marketing could extend and evolve the portal with minimal effort, within their own team. The IT organization would no longer need to worry about building the portal within AEM. More importantly, the IT organization was also freed from endlessly supporting any and all future changes to the portal within AEM as well. BKJ was able to dial up Marketing’s autonomous control of the portal, while reducing IT waste by eliminating exposure to endless support tickets.
Within the CMS, BKJ crafted a user experience that thoughtfully organized content and assets for partners. The content and assets were significantly more accessible and operable when intuitively organized to meet users’ expectations.
Each partner required a unique set of content and assets based on their level of access, geographic location, and other credentials. The challenge remained to precisely identify user needs, automatically, so every user found exactly the content they needed, without having to wade through the content they didn’t need.
The solution was apparent to BKJ.
Thanks to BKJ’s experience within Symantec’s technical infrastructure, the team was aware of how the database within Symantec’s Salesforce integration was structured. All of the user information BKJ needed in order to build software that automated the diagnosis of distinct users’ needs, lived on the other end of Symantec’s existing Salesforce API. By connecting the Salesforce API to the user login process, the portal was able to diagnose a partner’s needs and specific credentials instantly, upon login.
A hallmark of a successful BKJ project is a win-win solution for a client’s IT and Marketing organizations. The Symantec partner portal is no exception to that rule. BKJ’s work resulted in a partner portal that not only decreased the technical debt within the IT organization as planned, but also reduced the active administration of partner needs within the channel marketing team, improving efficiency in both areas.