Leading co-marketing efforts with partners or integrations

They say two heads are better than one, and that's undoubtedly true when it comes to marketing. Partner marketing or co-marketing is a way to share the burden of a particular marketing effort, reach new customers, and gain expertise from outside your business.

When done well it can amplify your brand and help you gain credibility. Conversely, there can be challenges with competing priorities, data sharing, and managing timelines.

To be successful, you need to pick the right partners to collaborate with, be flexible as things may be done differently than you’re used to, and make sure everyone is aligned with the goals of the joint campaign.

These efforts won’t always be led by product marketing. In bigger organizations, partner marketing will be a separate team.

However, the importance of technical integrations and strategic partnerships for a SaaS company’s growth means the usual messaging, competitive analysis, and promotion strategies require marketing to get involved.

Product marketers have a role to play in ensuring messaging resonates and educating internal teams, no matter the size of your company.

What is partner marketing?

Collaborating on marketing campaigns

Partner marketing or co-marketing is where two or more businesses with a similar goal collaborate on marketing campaigns. Both companies should be aligned on who they’re targeting and the campaign's outcome.

Collaborating makes it easier to reach a larger audience, as you’ll be able to access each company’s existing audience lists, user base, and sales targets via email or social campaigns.

Promoting technical integrations

Whether it's a simple Slack integration or a more complex joint solution with a cloud provider like GCP, highlighting technical integrations can demonstrate the versatility of your product.

This can be done through technical product marketing campaigns, with video demos or web copy that emphasizes the ease of setup and the benefits of the combined solution. This approach doesn’t necessarily require the partner to get involved.

Furthering your brand or industry story

Collaborating with partners can also involve brand marketing, telling a story of an industry evolving, and providing added weight to the new world. At Duro, our partners share the same philosophy: hardware engineers require modern SaaS that's fast to deploy and easily integrated through APIs.

The manufacturing industry has been slow to implement agile practices and cloud-based software, providing an opportunity for new software tools. Duro’s partners all prioritize data sharing across departments and between applications. Telling the story together helps amplify the market shift and demand.

Why take on partner marketing?

The most obvious reason to consider partner marketing is to expand your audience reach. By working with another company, you’ll gain access to their lists and user base and vice versa as well as the opportunity to:

Create unique content: A collaborative story can provide you with new content angles, videos, and additional creative brain power from your partner’s marketing team.
Set yourself apart from the competition: Being first to market promoting new partnerships or telling a different story helps you stand out.
Drive leads: You can share your brand story and solutions with a much bigger audience. By accessing partner email lists and social networks, you’ll have access to a wider network to deliver fresh interest in the company.
Learn new skills: External team members may have additional skills, ideas and resources to share. In marketing, there’s always something new to learn!
Gain credibility: Partnering with other brands can enhance your credibility and establish your company as a serious player in the market. This is especially important for startups to help alleviate concerns about your longevity.
Save on marketing spend: If you’re splitting a booth or running an event together, you can cut some of the budget.
Expand your network: From a personal point of view, collaborating with people outside your company helps broaden your network and gain visibility within the industry.

Whose responsibility is partner marketing? And when does product marketing get involved?

At a larger company, partner marketing will be a distinct team responsible for building and maintaining strategic relationships.

Their role includes partner identification, marketing programs, sales initiatives, partner enablement, and measuring performance. However, this function will likely be a cross-functional effort in a smaller organization.

Senior leadership decides which partners to prioritize, the product team is responsible for developing and maintaining integrations, and marketing helps with content creation and joint campaigns.

As with any product or go-to-market plan, product marketing plays a role in audience research, positioning, messaging, collateral creation, and showcasing technical capabilities.

Which type of partners make the best marketing collaborators?

When deciding which partners to run marketing campaigns with, look for companies with a similar culture, complementary products, and target markets. You also want to prioritize strategic partnerships to further your brand and tech companies whose products provide added value when integrated with yours.

Other considerations when selecting partners include:

Brands who’ll strengthen your positioning

Bigger brand names can significantly improve your credibility and reach if you’re a smaller company. On the flip side, partnering with cool young startups can help more prominent brands seem current and innovative. Make sure the partner has a good reputation and is known for delivering high-quality products or services.

Non-competing solutions

Ideally, your strategic partners aren't selling competitive products. Although you may have an alliance with a different side of the business, it's best to prioritize partners with compatible solutions that won’t enter your space or put more effort into promoting your competitors.

Willing collaborators

As with any marketing campaign, you require data and success metrics. Find partners willing to share data sets and discuss the results afterward. Additionally, consider those with marketing teams that will share the work for promotion and content creation.

Similar target markets

Select companies with overlapping or adjacent audiences in the same industries. If you’re targeting completely different personas, the messaging may end up being confusing. However, an unlikely partnership can invite intrigue and attention.

Shared goals

Ensure you have the same objective. Determine and agree on goals beforehand, whether they're related to adopting a new integration, generating leads, improving brand awareness, or even promoting your company to the partner. Align on experimentation versus tried and tested methodologies.

5 partner marketing strategies to try from easy to advanced

The easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to aid your fellow partners is by engaging with their social posts or reposting them on your own feed. This can be a one-off post for a big announcement or a continued effort over a set period.

For example, you may have an upcoming product announcement and want to gain additional reach. At Duro, one partner told us they were launching a new AI feature on a particular date and asked us to help share the post.

There’s no shame in sending some suggested copy to your partners to help them promote a news story or product. Similarly, when Duro wanted to spread the word about our latest funding announcement, we got partners involved in the conversation on LinkedIn.

By amplifying each other's content, you’ll build engagement, drive traffic to both pages, and kick-start the foundations for a successful partnership.

Website content

Next is content creation, which can be done in a few days or weeks. Before starting messaging and writing copy, take the time to understand the partnership and how technical integrations work.

Web content includes web pages, technical videos, case studies, or blogs discussing the partnership or integration. It's ok to start small with a single webpage and then build on the content as you bring on new joint customers.

Having partner web pages linked to your site and vice versa helps you gain extra backlinks to improve your domain rating and search rankings.

Don't forget to coordinate content distribution and repeat the social amplification described above.

Webinars and live demos

Webinars are a great way to get expert speakers from both companies in the same room to showcase an integration, talk about industry trends, or launch a brand-new product. The caveat is that they take time to plan and require an agreed talk track, slides, and speaker availability.

If you can get customers to participate, you'll make the story much more relatable. The webinar may take the form of thought leadership with a panel discussion, which is excellent for turning into shorter videos and quotes later. Alternatively, you might demonstrate an integration live.

One company needs to take responsibility for hosting the webinar and creating a registration page. Preferably, the company with the bigger team and more resources will take this on.

For example, at Duro, we ran a webinar with our partner Altium 365, who kindly agreed to host the webinar. The webinar was highly successful in driving leads to Duro because we were able to connect with Altium's vast user base.

A lot of work goes into webinars, so don't run it and then forget about it. Continue promoting the webinar after the live recording via email, social, or ads, share key takeaways or quotes on social, write a blog post based on the findings, and create short video clips.

In-person events

Sponsoring or setting up events requires a considerable amount of work. From getting your team there, ensuring the right people show up, and gathering all the assets and booth materials to make your company stand out.

Splitting the cost or effort of this with a partner makes your life far easier. Events can be anything from splitting a booth at a trade show, inviting select prospects to an exclusive dinner, setting up a casual happy hour for customers and prospects, or launching a new event together. Consider which approach makes sense for your target markets.

At Duro, we’ve participated in partner happy hours for aerospace engineers. Most recently, we attended one of the largest manufacturing shows in the US, the International Manufacturing Technology Show, alongside the Google Cloud Platform team.

Our goals were to promote our brand, tell the story of how connected tools help with traceability in manufacturing, and gain some leads along the way.

Large-scale marketing campaigns

When you want to announce an important new strategic partnership or collaborative product innovation, you can build a more extensive marketing campaign.

This will take careful planning plus additional resources. You’ll want to pick a launch date and budget and develop a compelling narrative highlighting the partnership's value.

Then, jointly build assets and promotion plans. Consider paid advertising, press releases, sales training, and a joint launch event or presentation at a big tech show. Running exclusive press and analyst briefings will help build hype before the event.

Considerations and tips for successful co-marketing

Of course, the more people in the marketing mix, the more complex projects can become. Working with partners can slow things down as more people are involved, plus there are more approval layers and different approaches to factor in.

That’s why it’s vital to consider the type of partners you collaborate with and pick those willing to put in the same effort. There’ll be a few challenges to address early on.

Give yourself extra time to manage everyone’s schedule and input

As you’ll have an added layer of approvals and input from the partner, co-marketing projects can take longer than if you were setting up a campaign yourself. Scheduling meetings with external stakeholders, getting the right people on the call, and balancing different viewpoints means you should kick off these projects as early as possible and schedule regular check-ins.

One of the biggest challenges when collaborating with partners is data ownership, particularly when there are regulatory concerns, such as GDPR or CCPA. You may need to gain express permission to share data externally with another company.

Typically, when running a joint webinar or event, one partner will own the registration form and have access to the sign-ups. You should agree on which partner will take this on and ensure the other partner benefits from the campaign by getting visibility into that data. Tools like Crossbeam can help you safely share your audiences with a partner to uncover relevant customers or prospects.

Understand sales incentives

The most motivated partners will be those that have an incentive for referrals. This is outside the remit of product marketing but worth looking into so that you can make the best decisions when looking for collaborators.

Don’t worry too much about the competition

Your partners might also be running marketing campaigns with your direct competitors. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with them, especially if they meet all the criteria for a suitable co-marketing partner.

Present your business in the best light so they’ll think of you before competitors when developing new campaigns. Offer something unique, such as a new angle on a story or expertise in a relevant field, to position yourself as the preferential partner.

Reevaluate partnerships regularly

Sometimes, partnerships or campaigns don't work out. Plus, your own company's strategy or marketing goals may change.

New competitive alliances, a change in product, resource constraints, or acquisitions will impact partner marketing. Continually reevaluate where you're putting your resources and determine when to stop working with specific partners and when to invest more in others.

Partner marketing: A strategic approach to growth

Overall, partner marketing can be effective for expanding your reach, building credibility, and generating leads. But be sure to select partners with complementary solutions who align with your goals and determine resources and data-sharing policies.

Don't be afraid to start with small campaigns like social media and content and scale up as you grow. While partner marketing requires additional effort and coordination, the potential benefits make it a worthwhile strategy for many businesses.