As a vendor, you want to make sure that your partners are given as many tools and support as possible to help them close leads and drive revenue. Content marketing can be a tremendous asset to those partners if done right—not to mention, it’s a worthwhile way for you to stand out from other vendors that the channel partner might be working with!
So, let’s talk about how to approach content marketing for your channel partners. In this post:
- We discuss the kinds of partner-friendly marketing content that your partners will find most useful.
- We also review the five best practices in content marketing that will help drive better results for your partner marketing program.
- And you can find out how Macro can help you with get your partner marketing program off the ground
What types of partner-friendly content can you offer?
The best content for your partners to leverage are those that either start conversations or answer burning customer questions. You’ll find that many of the different pieces of content we mention below can overlap with the kind of pieces that you will be giving to your sales people as content that can enable sales.
Here are some of the most valuable content assets you can offer to your partners:
Case studies
Case studies are very helpful for partners, as they can be an easy way to prove your product’s value to a prospect. Well-written case studies are a self-contained story with a problem to solve, the solution provided, and the beneficial effect to the customer’s business. Bonus points if the case study has hard numbers and statistics, as well as quotes from one of the customer’s executives.
Videos
Video content is arguably one of the most engaging marketing content formats available right now, and would be great for partners to share with their prospects. Product demos, video case studies, and explainer videos would be a compelling asset to share with leads.
Webinars
If your company is hosting a webinar on an important topic, be sure to ask partners to invite their prospects. Not only will the prospects be able to learn something valuable, you also can use the event to trigger a nurture campaign for that lead as well.
Ebooks and reports
Larger content assets like ebooks and research reports are tricky, because people don’t often like reading long documents for fun. But if you can come up with ebooks on hard-hitting and important industry topics, then your partners will be able to engage prospects with this content. You can nail down this type of content even further if you do your own research survey and publish statistics only you have.
Bite-sized content
When it comes to helping your partners stay connected with prospects over time, there’s nothing better than bite-sized content—blogs, infographics, and information-rich emails. With bite-sized content, they can feed the prospect the occasional blog post or infographic related to something they just talked about, or to some event that happened in the news or in the prospect’s company.
Reach out to your content marketing team and see if they have an existing library of content assets that you can tap, or work with them to develop a strategy for conceptualizing, creating, and distributing this content to your channel partners.
If you don’t have a content marketing team, or they don’t have the resources to assist you, then consider working with a partner like Macro to help create them for you. Third-party agencies are often used as an extension of the internal team to help create assets like blogs, ebooks, and infographics.
The five best practices in content marketing for partners
Now that we’ve covered the kinds of content you can offer to your partners, let’s review the top strategies that can help you and your partners get the most out of your content marketing.
1. Mix it up
As you saw above, there are many options for content, and different partners will have different preferences. Don’t rely on a single content asset to do the heavy lifting for you. Just because case studies work well, doesn’t mean they’ll work all the time. Produce different types of content and experiment!
2. Let partners customize the content
We’re not talking about creating content pieces entirely from scratch for each partner—that would be expensive and wasteful. But letting partners apply their company branding (even if it’s just a logo) and giving them space to communicate their own value proposition would be a powerful way to co-market.
3. Offer a campaign-in-a-box
Partners who have limited marketing resources can benefit from a content package with pre-selected content pieces depending on the product, industry, and customer persona they are going to pursue. You can opt to assemble this campaign-in-a-box from existing content pieces or build it from scratch, depending on your bandwidth.
4. Build a partner campaign playbook
In a similar vein to the campaign-in-a-box, you can give partners a pre-built campaign playbook. Instead of containing content assets, it would educate partners on campaign objectives and goals, target audience, campaign journey, and the ideal follow-up process.
5. Create a partner campaign folder
Do partners know where to get content assets? Instead of having them email you all the time, create a “Campaign2Go” folder and grant access to your partners. This helps your partners execute campaigns independently and at their own pace without having to constantly ask you for assets, making it efficient for both of you.
How Macro can help
Macro can assist you in creating engaging partner portals that are packed with useful content, which is tailored to your partner's needs. Register for a free consultation and let us know how we can get your partner marketing program off the ground!