Okendo Partner Marketing Lead, Lindsay Kolinskyon Co-marketing

Finding lower-lift content is one of the easiest ways to get the marketing team onboard to promote your partners. Social media spotlights, newsletter spotlights, or having a partner provide a thought leadership quote in a blog that the marketing team is already writing, is a simple but effective way to drive awareness for your partners with your customers. Not everything has to be a huge campaign. As a partner marketer who lives under the partnerships team, it's my role to be the bridge between the marketing and partnerships teams. I work with my partner managers to understand their goals with each of their partners and find the right low-lift opportunities with the marketing team so that everyone accomplishes their goals.

I built a partner co-marketing pipeline in Hubspot, where my partner managers can submit their requests and it creates a deal in the pipeline for partner marketing evaluation. There are two different forms they can submit: 1) External co-marketing request: This is for requests that they receive from partners for us to participate in their co-marketing. For example, a tech partner asking us to participate in their webinar, write an ebook submission, or sponsor an in-person event. 2) Internal co-marketing request: This is the request where my partner managers ask for their partners to be included in upcoming Okendo content based on their goals around partner activation, nurture, or retention. I have a section where they can request a specific type of content they want that partner to be included in, or they can just request "any type of content". Once these requests come in, I start a discussion with the partner managers about the opportunity to get a better idea of what they want to accomplish and if this is the right format. I also review our current bandwidth and content pipeline to see if it's something we can even support. I've found that having the pipeline makes the partner managers feel heard but it also helps set boundaries around what we can and cannot commit to. It also gives us a way to keep things in our backlog so we don't lose track if something has to be deprioritized in the short-term, but could be a good opportunity to re-evaluate in the future. This has helped my team gain a lot of trust with the partner managers in this evaluation process and they respect that they cannot commit partner marketing resources without our review.

When we co-market with a tech partner, we know they have a sizable marketing database and can usually help drive leads together. We'll put a minimum lead threshold and if they make that, then we share the full lead list with them. This is pretty standard practice for co-marketing amongst tech partners. But for agency partners, it's often about giving and not just getting. They don't always have the same large database sizes as a tech partner, so we know co-marketing with them won't always drive us leads if we include them in a webinar, e-book, or even an in-person event. But including top partners in these campaigns gives us an opportunity to share the lead list with them, which is a value for top partners that have already driven a lot of value to our company with their referrals.

We have an Expert Tip series that's been great! I provide my partner managers a Google form with 1-2 questions on a designated content topic (check out our current BFCM Expert Tips blog on Okendo.io :) ) for them to send out to their selection of partners. Once we write the piece based on the partner's answers, we created a social asset that includes the author's agency logo, name, headshot, and quote in the piece. We ask them to promote the blog with us, and since we've provided everything they need and added a personal touch with their individual information on it, it's hard for them to say no! We find we have a "social takeover" whenever we release one of these pieces, which is really exciting to see.

For collaboration, remind your team that partners can boost the results of the campaigns they're already running! Yes, partners bring in referrals, but they can also be thought leaders, content distributors, and brand promoters. Is your marketing team already doing a webinar? Ask them to include a partner as a speaker and I bet you'll get more registrants then you would have otherwise. Are they writing a blog? Ask them if you can include a quote from a partner and then ask that partner to promote it on social once it's live. These types of campaigns can make your partner managers happy, but won't cause attribution conflicts since they are either non-lead driving, or they are partner-influenced and not directly partner-sourced leads through content.

1) The ability to collaborate across teams. This requires having a thorough understanding of both your partner and marketing teams, in terms of their goals, what their day-to-day looks like, and what they find valuable, so you can act as the bridge between the two of them. 2) Proactive. Sometimes you're going to have to create marketing opportunities for your partners before you can expect to receive marketing opportunities back, so being ahead of that will only help drive your success. 3) Story-telling. You're going to have to understand the ins and outs of your company's platform more thoroughly than the average marketer if you want to successfully create a "better together" story with your partners. 4) Relationship Building- partnerships are all about relationships. It's important to not only build strong relationships with your partner managers, but also your partner marketing counterparts and even partner managers at other organizations. Partnerships are a small world so don't be afraid to fully immerse yourself in your partner ecosystem.