Share Great Content
The best partner marketing programs rely heavily on content marketing. This is a great way to ensure your partners have the best resources and education. Plus, sharing helpful content regularly can gain the trust of consumers, helping your partners sell more—which in turn benefits your business.
But you can’t just market any content. You should make sure you’re producing truly useful content that answers the questions your readers have. The content needs to resonate well with both your partners and their readers, so consider their target audience first. So before you write any articles, eBooks, white papers, webinar content and so on, think about which target audience will be reading the content and what the goal of the piece is.
Once you write the content, make sure it’s easy for your partners to access it so they can quickly share it with their audience. Basically, you need to get quality content to your partners fast so they can share it with ease.
Make Sure Your Partners Are Familiar with Your Products
When you work with partners, it’s important to ensure they’re educated on your products. After all, in order to sell a product, you need to know what it does and what its benefits are. You can do this by sending your partners newsletters and sharing blog posts with them to ensure they know the latest news about your company.
You can also come up with tips on selling your products, as well as a few facts that they should know about your company. Those could include your mission statement, objectives, and any research you’ve conducted about your industry. The more your partners know about your products and business overall, the better equipped they are to sell.
Know How to Measure Results
It’s important to keep track of how your marketing efforts are going when you work with partners. So you need to know how to measure success. Start by making sure your partners are using the content you’ve given them. If they’re not, find out why and if there’s a way to make it easier for them to start. You can also simply ask your partners why they haven’t taken advantage of the content you’ve shared with them. You might find that they don’t understand it, or it’s too hard to access, which you can then fix.
In fact, you should consider holding quarterly meetings with your partners so you can discuss what’s working and what’s not. You might find out several ways you can help your partners reach their goals, which will help your business.
You can also find out better ways to communicate with your partners if you’re having trouble getting feedback from them now. You might find that some of your partners prefer to communicate through email, while others want regular phone calls or in-person meetings. Either way, it’s helpful to find out their preferences so you can better stay in contact with them. This will help you work together to track and improve results.
Know the Right Tool to Use for Partner Marketing
Everything is easier when you have the right tools for the job, and partner marketing is no exception. With this type of marketing, it’s best to use a high-quality PRM solution—which stands for Partner Relationship Management. You might be surprised to find that not all companies use this type of software. In fact, more than half do not, which may put them behind the competition.
If you’re wondering if a PRM tool would help your partner marketing efforts, the answer is yes if you have five or more partners—though most companies would benefit from such a tool even with fewer partners. Basically, if it’s taking a lot of time to communicate with your partners, and you just don’t have time to send individual emails on a regular basis, a PRM tool can help you manage this.
So which PRM tool do you need? You can go for one that does it all, or you can stick with one that you can add to your existing system. For example, Allbound acts as a cohesive layer you can add to your tech stack, which may make it easier for you to use. Just choose the type of PRM tool that meets your needs if you want to make partner marketing a seamless, efficient process that improves marketing success.
These are just a few ways you can improve your partner marketing efforts. If you want additional details, feel free to download Allbound’s eBook: Must-Have Marketing Strategies for Partner Relationship Development.
More sources on marketing:
Make Your Marketing & Sales Playbook a Powerful Alignment Tool
9 Tools for Effective Marketing Collaboration
Where Should You Spend Your Marketing Budget?
The original version of this article was first published on The Marketing Scope.
Eric Vidal, an industry expert with over 25 years of marketing and technology experience is passionate about providing insight and education on the latest martech trends and techniques. Eric speaks and writes for various publications like The Marketing Scope and Future Of Work to name a couple. He’s also a Principal Analyst at Futurum Research where he follows and writes about marketing technology. Eric has been a marketing leader for companies of all sizes. He has extensive experience working to achieve measurable business results for organizations like IBM, Cisco, WebEx, Canon USA, West Corp., Dynamic Signal, adidas, SAP and more. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.