Out with the Old! – Partner Portal Spring Cleaning

The new year is well underway and hopefully your channel program is already hitting some of the goals you set. But do you know if outdated content is lurking in the corners of your partner portal and getting in the way of things?

Spring is just around the corner and now is a great time clean up your partner portal:

• The webinar you had last year? It’s time to pull the registration link down.
• The promotion that ended on December 31^st? That must go as well.
• The datasheet that references that product that went end of life in Q3? Get rid of it!

Outdated content is bad. It creates clutter that makes it difficult to find information and tells partners that your portal is being neglected. So make sure you have a plan to get rid of the old stuff.

Here are 3 steps for clean up:

1. Audit the Content – Go through your partner portal page by page and pull down everything that is old or isn’t being used. Look for promotional material for promos that have ended, webinar invites or details for dates in the past, content that is no longer relevant, old versions of content or files that are not needed.
2. Ongoing Content Management – Create a plan to manage the ongoing clean-up of content so that it gets removed before it gets stale or outdated. Knowing when content needs to be pulled down is just as important as knowing when it should be added. Clean up should not be an annual event. A good rule of thumb is to pull content whenever content is added.
3. Long Term Content Strategy – Work with content owners to develop a content expiration strategy. You could consider categorizing content by types and setting time limits by content type. For example, webinars might be retired after 6 months, marketing briefs might have a 1-year life span. Exceptions can be requested by the business owners. Channeltivity’s partner portal allows setting expiration dates on content to have it disappear automatically, so make use of it.

If increased utilization of your partner portal is a goal for the year, ensuring that your portal is clear of old, outdated content will be a step in the right direction. Your partners will thank you for it.