No matter what you call them, co-marketing, co-branding, MDF programs, or Co-op most vendors provide their partners with assistance to market the joint product and services value proposition. There is a fundamental shift in the types of resources your partners need and I haven't seen many vendors catching on. Are you? First let's talk about why co-marketing is so important.
Why should you participate in co-marketing if you don't already?
- While your corporate marketing teams are spending oodles of time and money getting your messages out to the masses your partners can increase that reach to their current and future prospects exponentially.
- Partners prefer to sell what's easy to sell. That means what they best understand technically AND which have resources committed to demand generation.
- We all know loyalty doesn't really exist anymore but you will certainly be at the top of a partners product list are investing in their business.
Okay, now that we've established it's better for your business and most certainly your partners' businesses to develop co-marketing programs, what's this shift? You've heard me talk about social media and how important it is for the channel here, here, and here mostly about communicating with partners and end-users. It's even more important to help your partners leverage these tools to drive demand. Here is how social media should shift your co-marketing campaigns:
- LinkedIn should play a huge part in any campaign you are funding. Do your partners know how to use it? Make sure you have the resources to hand them so they can post out events, promotions, email campaigns through LinkedIn. It can be a webinar or a "how-to" guide but it has to be something they can use over and over again.
- Twitter may not be for everyone but if some of your partners are using it, show them how to better use it to get the word out about an event, campaign, survey, webcast they are doing. It starts with building 2-way conversations so tell them about twitter early and often, not the day of launch.
- SEO plays a huge role when prospects are searching for a product, service, problem solver on Google or Bing which is well, just about all the time. 91% of IT decision makers will search for a product even if they know what they need before purchasing. So how can you help? Let your partners use MDF to pay for an SEO and/or social media consultant.
- Facebook, in my opinion is not a great B2B tool but if your partners are selling direct to customers they should absolutely have a guide similar to those on LinkedIn and Twitter to show them how to use it correctly.
- Training provides partners with tools they can continue to use for each and every campaign they do. There are a ton of programs and people out there who can teach your partners to leverage social media the RIGHT way.
That is just the tip of the iceberg but the bottom line is there are many tools out there your partners need to be accessing and ways in which your co-marketing mindset should shift. Are any vendors already engaging in some co-marketing programs that include social media? Would love to hear about them!
