Partner Co-Marketing for B2Bs

The fact is, there is a co-marketing opportunity available for most marketing campaigns. Consider how you can optimize your partner site pages, build co-op marketing and advertising strategies, and enhance channel partner sales enablement.

Partner Content Optimization

Your page on a channel partner’s website can be as valuable or more valuable than the homepage on your website. This is especially true if your channel partner has significantly more visibility and name recognition than you. Knowing this, it’s worth making the extra effort to be sure the page is exactly the way you want it—your branding, your messaging, maybe a case study and even a couple customer references. Take advantage of every opportunity to incorporate links to your website into your channel partner pages. All this is assuming these elements fall within your partner’s guidelines. Then keep a list of URLs to partner pages and incorporate them into social posts wherever it makes sense. Remember that a page on a partner site also means one or more very valuable backlinks for you.

Co-Op Marketing and Advertising

Cooperative marketing (co-op) campaigns are ideal for driving maximum impact co-branding initiatives.

Begin by outlining your co-marketing campaign plans with each partner. Align products and services that support each other, and work with your channel partners to strategize shared goals, audience targeting, and messaging. Then build activity plans that create mutual value by sharing a common message to your collective audience.

Every channel partner will have its own requirements for campaign proposals and proof-of-performance. As you choose activities, favor those that you are sure will deliver measurable results that are visible in a report (i.e., email metrics, media release impressions/pick-ups).

A good way to ensure that new campaigns will be approved by partners quarter after quarter is to religiously follow the requirements, be easy to work with, and deliver results. Remember that your channel partners don’t need (or want) you to directly sell their products—they want you to sell your own solutions featuring their products.

Enhanced Sales Enablement

As you plan out your internal sales enablement program, consider how you can expand those efforts to include reaching your channel partner sales teams. These groups are an extension of your own sales team, but they have far more brands on their line cards that they need to keep in mind. Build out account-based marketing (ABM) email campaigns or nurture programs to stay top of mind and help inform your channel partner representatives. Provide collateral that aligns your product marketing with your channel partners’ initiatives. Diagrams, white papers, and case studies in the hands of your sales reps and channel partners allow them to tell the story of your brand and the benefits of your products or services clearly and specifically.

For a no cost discussion of your situation and how we leverage metrics-based marketing strategy to grow businesses, call 630-363-8081 or email jeanna@smartprcommunications.com.

Much of the above is from an excellent Trew Marketing article by Morgan Norris The full article may be available at: https://bit.ly/3CnMi3r