If you’ve scrolled through almost any social media platform recently, you might’ve noticed an uptick in the number of co-branded campaigns. Or, maybe you’ve seen more referral programs for stores. These are both examples of channel partner marketing, which is exactly what it sounds like—a combination of strategic partnerships and marketing campaigns.
In this article, we’ll discuss the basics of forming a channel partner marketing strategy and how it can aid in helping your company grow. We’ll also throw in 5 of our top tactics for how to form a strong, effective partnership.
What Is Channel Partner Marketing?
Channel partner marketing is a collaborative, team-based approach to sales. With partner marketing, companies connect with third-party collaborators such as resellers, dealers, distributors, and more. The goal of these partnerships is to expand the reach of both companies through shared marketing strategies.
Depending on your company’s size, reach, and target audience, different forms of channel partner marketing can be utilized. These include, but certainly aren’t limited to:
- Collaborative content marketing/content creation: This is by far the most popular type of channel partner marketing strategies, especially for B2B organizations. This form of partner marketing includes channel partners working together to create blog posts, social media posts, or videos.
- Co-branded campaigns: Co-branded campaigns involve collaborating with one or more partners to create marketing campaigns that benefit all involved parties.
- Joint events: Brands may co-host in-person events or online webinars with one or more partners to increase reach and brand presence.
- Referral programs: Referral programs give channel partners an incentive to refer friends or family to a business, helping to produce sales-qualified leads, build brand awareness, and raise overall sales.
The key to a successful partner marketing campaign is choosing the right partner and the right marketing strategy for your company. If you’re not working with a well-aligned collaborator, your marketing initiatives likely won’t pay off in the way that you’re hoping for.
Channel Partner Marketing vs Partner Enablement
Channel partner marketing and partner enablement sound similar, and both are beneficial, but they focus on different aspects of business growth. While channel partner marketing mostly focuses on a marketing strategy to grow the reach of both organizations, partner enablement takes on more of a sales approach.
Partner enablement is when one company provides another with training, tools, and resources to resell its products. Companies may offer partners onboarding support, specific product training, or marketing materials and sales advice.
How Is A Channel Partner Marketing Strategy Helpful?
In a healthy and thriving partner relationship, both channel partners benefit from shared marketing materials. Here are a few ways channel partner marketing can support your company’s growth.
Expands your company’s reach.
Through the strengths of your collaborators, channel partner marketing is a great way to expand your company’s reach and achieve greater market penetration. Teaming up with another partner also allows you to build brand awareness and effectively market towards your target audience.
Helps your company access new markets and expand your customer base.
Partnering up with another company helps you generate new leads as well as access new customer markets that you may not have considered before. This is where finding the right partner comes into play––you want to choose a partner that’s able to help you achieve your overall marketing goals.
Quickly builds trust with untapped audiences.
When your company has a stamp of approval from another reputable organization, you both appear more credible. Even if your brand is completely new to a lead, if they recognize one of your partners, that can signal you’re a trustworthy provider who is equipped to meet their needs.
Boosts conversion rates and lead quality.
One of the foundational goals of most partnerships is to boost conversion rates for both your brand and your partner’s brand. Your company’s marketing campaigns alone may not be quite enough to push your leads all the way down the sales funnel. Teaming up with another company can give your customers different perspectives on your company’s offerings and may even boost overall lead quality.
5 Tactics For Forming Your Channel Partner Marketing Strategy
If you’ve decided channel partner marketing is something you’re interested in, the next step is coming up with a strategy to reach your company’s specific goals. Overall, the foundation to achieving success is choosing both the right goal and partner for your unique company.
Here are 5 of Predictiv’s best data-based tactics to strengthen your channel partner marketing.
- Establish clear goals: Before you even think about reaching out to potential partners, your company needs to have clear, achievable goals in mind. Are you looking to increase MQLs? Or are you more focused on finding ways to push MQLs further down your pipeline? Do you have a specific webinar or demo you want to push contacts to? The options are vast, and narrowing down your big-picture goals to specific targets helps you move into the next step of channel partner marketing, which is finding the right partner.
- Find the right partner(s): Not every vendor or influencer is going to be the right partner for your company, and quantity of partners doesn’t always equal quality of partners. It’s crucial to take time to choose the right partner, not just the first one who offers to team up with you. Your overall goals and objectives should line up with your partners for the highest chance of success.
- Focus on maintaining a healthy, symbiotic partnership: Collaborations likely won’t be successful unless both partners feel like their goals and objectives are being valued by everyone involved. It’s important to set expectations between all parties before any actual actions are taken towards the shared marketing plan. Taking a proactive approach to any possible issues down the road can help alleviate stress and build trust between collaborators.
- Utilize technographic insights and intent data: After you’ve come up with a basic strategy with your partner, it’s time to start using technographic and intent data to go even further. While you may see some results from looking at surface-level data, digging deeper into technographic insights will help improve the targeted marketing efforts of both partners. When you fully understand the behavior of your audiences, you can perfectly tailor efforts on both ends of the partnership to experience maximum success.
- Create a schedule to evaluate progress and adjust strategy if needed: In all aspects of business, you should regularly evaluate progress on your goals. Investing time in looking at the overall success of your partner campaign is no different. Work with your partner to come up with a set schedule where you’ll set aside time to evaluate your progress so far. If your strategy is working well for both of you, that’s great! If not, it may be time for you to use that data to adjust your plan.
Grow Your Channel Partner Marketing with Predictiv Data
Channel partner marketing is an excellent way to expand your company’s customer base and increase sales. That said, it can feel like a hurdle to actually create a strategy and get a partnership up and running. That’s where Predictiv steps in to help. By providing companies with in-depth data, technographic insights, and rapid deployment, our partner enablement solutions can help you choose the right marketing partner for your unique company.
Ready to build strong partner relationships based on data-driven tactics? Learn more about how Predictiv Data can help you harness the power of partner marketing and drive better results for your team.