Jotform Sr. Partner Marketing Manager, Allie Schratzon Partner Marketing

Since tech partnerships require a lot of cross-functional teamwork, and often quite a bit of engineering time, brand alignment opportunities with non-partners are a great way to reach new audiences (and prospective new partners) with a lighter lift. Being a service rooted in forms and surveys, Jotform offers an easy, no-code option for data collection, which comes in handy for a variety of marketing needs. For example, we're working with two non-partner companies on a webinar where Jotform will capture all registrant details for the presentation, and will participate in its joint promotions, therefore leveraging these non-partners' audiences through their social and email marketing. Highlighting an aligned, non-partner's achievements on social media is a great way to start building a relationship with a prospective partner (who doesn't love free praise?), and joining forces with a non-partner company on a bundled deal for your services can also provide a strong introduction into a new partner vertical.

Being a very SEO-focused company, I'd say blog publishing opportunities are one of the strongest drivers of engagement and conversion for us. A well-developed, engaging, and informative post can help illustrate a particular use case for a partnership or an integration, and help a user better understand how they might better streamline their own projects by using it. Additionally, video is a fast-growing marketing lever that we've heavily invested in, and we're seeing terrific engagement from viewers through our email newsletters, social posts, blog posts, and directly from our YouTube channel. We publish a wide variety of how-to tutorials, customer stories, podcast interviews, and product ads (starring your favorite Jotform employees!) that help give context about a particular feature release, integration launch, or use case.

We maintain a robust partner directory that makes it easy to find a particular service or company, and to see how their technology communicates seamlessly with Jotform. Our integration partners are consistently featured in several of our marketing channels, including blog posts, email newsletters, case studies, demo videos, webinars, social posts, PR campaigns, and brand alignment opportunities.

This is completely dependent on the project, the partners, and the goals they agreed upon before launch. Be it webinar registration numbers, blog click-throughs, social engagements, integration adoption, or lead generation following an email campaign, the most critical success indicator comes down to what was agreed upon as the "north star" metric at the start of the project, and how the results stacked up to that particular metric.

Ah, this is the ultimate struggle: overcoming competing priorities and aligning everyone on your projects! My advice would be to focus on building a strong, foundational relationship with the stakeholders here (sales, engineering, marketing, etc.) Understand each of their priorities/KPIs, and then set up consistent check-ins with them to ensure you are timing your ask appropriately and tailoring your request to their priorities. Maybe your project requires quite a bit of resourcing that needs to be slotted into the overall marketing plan; having these ongoing conversations ensures that you maintain respect for your team members' time, and gives you the flexibility to pivot if needed. Perhaps your request requires a small initial lift that doesn't seem critical on its own, but will ultimately lead to a stronger overall outcome; communicating the long-term vision can help bump the project up on the list of priorities. Help them help you!

Relationship building skills This is a relations-focused role! Being a natural "people person" who is comfortable walking into a room full of strangers is not a dream scenario for most, but that's how the "good" partner marketers make their marks and grow their networks. They are unafraid to start a conversation, to proactively propose a partnership venture, or to simply initiate a connection between other marketers. Strong negotiation tactics It can take some clever compromising and bargaining to bring your partner project to life; understanding each sides' priorities and what they would consider a 'win' can help illustrate the best path forward, but the skill comes from knowing how to tactfully ask these questions and move forward with the best plan to meet your collective goals. Time and project management skills At any given time, there are a lot of competing projects going on (both within your own team, and cross-functionally.) Planning ahead, staying organized, maintaining communication, and anticipating needs are all tools exemplified by "good" partner marketers.