When you create partnerships with other organizations, you increase your ability to sell your products to a wider audience. A key factor of success for your channel is a cohesive marketing strategy. The challenge is that each of your partners will have a unique set of customers with an equally unique collection of needs and preferences.
Let’s face it, your partners know their prospects better than you. At the same time, they need to understand your products and offerings. In order to effectively market through your channel partners, you’ll have to create a cooperative marketing strategy. Keep reading for tips on how to build that strategy for you and your partners.
Determine the Nature of Your Partnership
Partnerships can take on many forms. These include:
- – An independent sales rep partnering with you to sell your products.
- – A company bundling your product in with theirs.
- – A company using your product as a base, and customizing it to meet the needs of their audience.
- – A dual effort to reach audience members that you engage in with another business.
- – Creating a new product or product line in partnership with another business.
Work with your partner to create customer personas
One of the key reasons to work with partners is to access a different audience than you normally do. This might be audiences in previously unreachable geographic locations, niche audiences, or simply members of demographic groups that you are not able to reach on your own.
Before you and your partner begin creating content, you should know as much as possible about their audience. Once you’ve established who your partner is targeting, you should construct a plan for how to best reach them.
Turn your partner into a thought leader
Even if you decide to write the majority of the marketing content for your partners, it is your partner who will be doing most of the outreach. If they take on some or all of the content creation themselves, they’ll need an even deeper and broader knowledge of your products and services. Be prepared to dedicate some time to getting them up to speed so that they can provide knowledgeable answers to potential questions coming from prospects.
Map the customer journey with your partner
The customer journey is another area in which you and your partner must collaborate to combine your knowledge and come up with a cohesive strategy. The best approach for you is to share your customer journey maps with your partner. Then, you can work with them to identify new and different paths that their audience might take as they discover your products.
Create shared marketing goals
Every successful marketing initiative should begin with some clearly stated goals. In partnerships, this is more complex because the goals of both parties must be taken into consideration.
With channel marketing, some common goals might be generating shared leads, increased referrals, and opening new revenue streams for both partners. You may find that you’ll need to hold some pretty intensive strategy meetings before the ideal set of goals emerges.
Work on co-branded content
A crucial part of partner marketing success is co-branded content. This content enables you and your partners to create powerful marketing collateral that speaks to customers through all channels.
Examples of co-branded content include:
- – White Paper
- – eBook
- – Blog Posts
- – Shared Landing Pages
- – Co-Presented Webinars
About the author: Daniela McVicker is a blogger with rich experience in writing about UX design, content planning, and digital marketing. Currently, she is the chief contributor at Top Writers Review where she helps individuals and organizations improve their web content writing, design, and planning skills.
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