Once you’ve decided you’d like to move forward with co-marketing activities, there are best practices you should keep in mind to ensure your strategies are successful this year and beyond.
Emphasize Human Connection
In B2B SaaS companies, it can be easy to forget that you’re working with other humans! Being in a business setting does not mean you must forego all human interaction. Instead, explore ways you can connect on a personal level with your partners and users. In the B2B SaaS and channel industry, professionals frequently take on new roles at different organizations. By forging personal connections, you can ensure you’re kept in mind at their next role, too.
In 2023, we see in-person events coming back in full swing! Consider hosting intimate events with your partners. These could include simple dinners or fun outings like bowling.
Build and leverage micro-communities online. Connect with segments of your audience online through targeted messaging and tailored outreach. Work with your partners to participate organically in conversations online.
Discuss Shared Goals
Co-marketing shouldn’t be one-sided. Both partners should stand to benefit from the campaign, so discuss your goals ahead of time. If you look to collect email addresses and your partner just wants to generate new backlinks, you might not be able to achieve both objectives.
Prioritize Privacy
For years, consumers have traded their personal data online. Previously, you only needed a click-bait lead magnet to grab your audience’s name, email, and phone number. Now, you need to provide value upfront before users will consider trusting you.
Whenever possible, prioritize ungated content. Prospects are less likely to provide contact information for a simple download, so get rid of the form and make it easy to access.
Anytime you collect data, ensure anything you ask for is used to deliver value to your users. For example, if you ask how large their team is or where they’re located, use that information to personalize and improve the content you send them.
As cookies are on their way out, collecting information on your audience members is getting harder. First-party data is essential, so it’s imperative that your database is clean and you hold your partners to high data standards. Always discuss a plan for lead-sharing ahead of co-marketing campaigns so you can include the appropriate privacy disclosures.
Build a Co-Marketing Agreement
If you thought it was challenging to coordinate internal campaigns, wait until you start developing co-marketing campaigns. With so many stakeholders and contributors involved, it’s imperative that you establish an agreement for your co-marketing activities and define ownership early.
Develop a co-marketing agreement that details the timeline and expectations for each team. This includes the allocated budget, level of participation, targeted audiences, asset ownership and trademarks, deliverable deadlines, customer support, confidentiality, and other elements your legal team may deem necessary. Remember, the more specificity, the better; at no point should there be ambiguity about who should handle an unforeseen scenario (and how).
If it’s a long-term project, consider implementing regular check-in meetings to maintain progress and pivot strategies when necessary.
Establish a Joint Brand
Online platforms are increasingly expensive and you don’t own your audience on social media. You do, however, own your brand, which follows you everywhere. Remember, 60% of the buyers journey happens before a prospect talks to a sales representative. Prioritize building strong joint brands with partners this year. Your brand should be clear, engaging, and memorable.
Consider how you can leverage omni-channel messaging to establish your joint brand and elicit an emotional response from B2B decision-makers.
Create a Plan for Tracking & Assessing Co-Marketing Strategies & Campaigns
Like any strategy, you need to monitor co-marketing results over time. This way, you can determine if activities met (or exceeded) expectations and tweak future ideas accordingly. In order to measure your co-marketing campaigns, determine which KPIs to track and how you will track them in advance.
Common co-marketing KPIs include:
- [X] new leads
- Campaign reach of [X]
- [X]% social media audience growth
- [X]% website traffic increase
UTM codes are a popular strategy for tracking visitors from third-party digital properties, social, and email. Consider creating UTM codes for all of your campaigns to effectively track where your traffic comes from.
Additionally, by running co-marketing strategies from your PRM, you’ll have transparency into campaign metrics, activities, and more. In turn, you can funnel funding where you know it will have the most impact, determine which joint promotion techniques work well with whom, and ultimately improve with time.
Executing Co-Marketing Activities At Scale
In an established partner program, you should be well-poised to co-market with a growing number of companies. By leveraging your PRM and its through-channel marketing automation capabilities, you can scale co-marketing campaigns significantly to reach an extensive audience.
If your partner program is in a position to allocate marketing development funds (MDF), this can be a great opportunity to further fuel partners’ promotional efforts. By distributing MDF to partners, you reduce the resource requirements on your side of the equation. However, you’ll want to be conscious of your ROI for these efforts — the money you invest should result in significantly greater gains for your organization. Using a PRM, you can systemize MDF requests and approvals, as well as easily attribute leads to campaigns.
Additional Reading About Channel Partner Marketing
Co-marketing can be an incredibly effective tool when implemented well. To drive the best results, you need to identify a great-fit partner, with a little bit of audience overlap and a common goal. Share ideas, historical insights, and resources to jointly determine the optimal co-marketing ideas for your brands and customer bases.
Dive deeper into promotional strategies that can further strengthen your co-marketing with the following articles and templates:
- – This comprehensive eBook leads you through important marketing topics like strategic MDF utilization, measuring the ROI of promotions, automating co-branding, and more.
- Channel Partner Marketing Plan Checklist – Improve the likelihood of your joint promotion campaigns’ success with an airtight plan. We designed this checklist to assist with earning internal buy-in, coordinating with appropriate teams, and anticipating questions that will arise mid- or post-execution.
- Why Partner Co-Branding is Important + Best Practices – As discussed above, co-marketing is not synonymous with co-branding, though the two intertwine. Learn about best practices to enforce within your partner program to minimize risks and how to execute co-branding at scale.
- Strengthen Your Partner Program with Content Strategies for 2022 and Beyond – Content is the building block of any co-marketing campaign. This piece illuminates how to audit your existing library and pinpoint specific needs.
