Top 5 Partnership Marketing Must-Haves

August 1, 2022 - Ben Wright

It's no secret that content is king when it comes to partner marketing. But what kind of content should your team be focused on producing?

In a world where marketing resources are scare, it's important to focus on the resources that are going to deliver the most impact, in the shortest period of time.

Luckily, at Partner Fuel we have some experience working with partner marketing teams and therefore we can hopefully refine your focus and teach you some of the top resources you should be focussing on.

Here's a list of 5 types of content that are essential for any partnership marketing team.

1. Blog Posts:

Blogs are a great way to attract attention to your new partner. Especially if you have a large customer base or a blog that is visited often by both customers and prospects, a blog post on your partners can go a long way to both promoting them, and oftentimes easily generating new business.

Blog posts can be used to announce a new integration partner (see this great example by Help Scout here). This will create some hype and excitement and if written well, can get customers downloading your partner's tool on the day the integration is launched.

Other ideas for blog posts include topical or value add blogs which teach your customer base how they could fundamentally improve what they are doing through your partner's services.

A good example of this is Aircalls blog which shows how with their partner HubSpot.

Make sure to post new blogs regularly and promote them through social media and email marketing in addition to posting them on your website.

2. Battlecards

Unlike blog posts whose audience is external, the next critical resource to create for your partnership team is the battlecard.

A battlecard should be a short, to the point resource which teaches your internal teams about a partner.

Critical information that should be included on a battlecard include:

  • The joint value statement ( You + the partner = better overall experience for you customer)

  • Who is the partner, and where do they stand out

  • Two or three questions or cues for the sales team to ask to warm up a conversation about the partner.

Without this type of resource you are going to be left with uneducated sales teams that do not understand your ecosystem.

This lack of education will lead to confusion, and apathy from your sellers towards partners.

A well resourced knowledge base for sales teams to refer to, and a battlecard that is associated with each partnership you create will go a long way to making your sales team more confident in cross selling your partners solutions.

3. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are in-depth reports that cover a specific topic in detail. They can be used to showcase your company's expertise and generate leads.

From a partnership perspective, creating a joint whitepaper on a specific topic you are both passionate about cements you both as subject matter experts.

It is also highly collaborative, meaning that it helps grow the partnership from a relationship building perspective.

It is also a "value add" resource meaning that customers and prospects will interact because they want to know more about a particular topic, without feeling like they are being sold to.

Here is a great example of a joint whitepaper from RedRoute, in collaboration with their partner Thankful.

These whitepapers are often long form content so will need a fair amount of effort from your marketing teams, so ensure you have a clear call to action, and benefit you want to drive from this type of content.

4. Videos

Videos are proven to be the best medium to draw attention and increase learning.

Oftentimes your best bet at either promoting a new partner or explaining what a new partner does is a quick 30-60 second video.

Here is a good example that we produced for Help Scout and their integration partner Aircall.

Having a high quality video resource is far more engaging and succinct than a two page document.

Most people do not have the attention span or interest to read.

However a quick video clip, is the easiest, fastest way to deliver pertinent information.

As mentioned above Partner Fuel offers this as one of our service offerings, and we can usually turn the content around within days.

Partner marketing teams are oftentimes under-resourced and might not even have the capability to produce video content, so outsourcing this task to someone that knows how to do this, and can produce high quality content can alleviate that burden for your team.

**5. Case Studies **

Case studies are stories that show how your product or service has helped a customer solve a problem or achieve their goals. They're a great way to build trust and show potential customers the value of your offering.

Through tools like Crossbeam, you can easily see account overlap, that is customers who are using both you and your partner.

Reach out to these joint customers and create a case study, which really shows off the power of your partnership.

Segment have a whole section entitled "Recipes", that really dive into the joint value offered by them and their partners.

Conclusion

As you can see above, partner marketing can encapsulate several different mediums.

The ideas above also need to be executed to a very high standard.

For many partnership marketing teams they simply do not have time to produce all of this content at a high level.

That is where we at PartnerFuel can help.

Through our partner marketing services you can plug the gaps, ensure partners are launched correctly and that all resources are of the highest quality.

Asking your partner marketing teams to do all of the above, can lead to slow turnaround around times, overworked employees and poor quality content.

Partner Fuel can help lift this burden, check out our services above.