How does your marketing team usually work with your partner team to promote partners to customers?

There are multiple teams and an org structure laid out here, so I’ll try to answer it best according to how our team is currently organized at Aircall. For reference, I sit under—and always have—the demand generation org which is essentially our entire marketing team concerning revenue. Customer marketing has been under operations or product marketing for us. I work with our North American-based tech partner managers on their individual partner plans. This includes, but isn’t limited to: partner business development (new contacts and strengthening GTM relationship with existing partnerships), integration GTM launches (major integration updates), and generating new business through referrals, partner marketplaces and comarketing campaigns. When customers come into play, it’s generally for integration GTM plays or comarketing campaigns. For example, a joint offer for your partner’s customers and their offer for Aircall customers is a great demand gen play for partners reaching new audiences. We promote these via customer marketing through emails or our monthly customer newsletter. If you’re on Crossbeam, even better. You can identify specific populations of your prospects that might be a customer of your partner, shared open opportunities for co-selling etc. If we’re launching new integration updates from a partner that may meet our customer’s needs, we’ll segment out those customers and promote the update to them via marketing or even our CSMs. For comarketing campaigns like webinars, both partners have to be upfront if they’re willing to promote to their customer bases and that the content is relevant. I’ve found with bigger partners, their customer marketing is often controlled by a different team, so it may not be as streamlined to promote to them as one thinks.

I think partner managers are worthless without great teammates from marketing, sales and product. The marketing team specifically helps you deliver on co-marketing campaigns, create case studies, launch ebooks, events, webinars, tc. In Hygraph, there’s a dedicated partner marketing person who owns any partner-related marketing activity, but we also work with product marketing because integration announcements fall more into their expertise. I think an important, but often overlooked part of “marketing” your tech partnerships is writing good documentation, so your tech writers will help you greatly too. So most of the time, the partner manager brings the idea, the opportunity to do something with a valued partner, and then the marketing team will help you make that happen. Most of the time the marketing team will have a backlog with tons of competing priorities, and it’s your job as a partner manager to help them evaluate the opportunity and assign a priority to it. Most probably you’ll also need design resources (sometimes it’s a different department, sometimes it sits with marketing). In that case, the best approach is to ask for some templates, something that you can work from when you need something quickly that’s relatively easy, but when you need some custom for a bigger campaign, you need to let them know well in advance.

I'm still new here at Celigo, but in my previous role I would have a regular cadence scheduled with the Marketing team to highlight new and existing partners in our Partner Newsletter as well as choose a specific Partner to spotlight that week. We also had a "Featured Partner" section on our directory which would be customized quarterly to highlight key partners that stood out.

Case studies are an obvious go-to for promoting a partner to your customer base. Whilst there’s no denying that case studies offer great promotional value, they’re not always quick wins. They can take time, patience, and you need buy-in from numerous stakeholders. Furthermore, they’re not a scalable co-marketing activity. Partner marketers aren’t able to create case studies with every partner in their ecosystem - it just wouldn’t be possible and you also need to prioritize the right stories. It doesn’t always have to be a huge campaign to drive value to partners. At LoyaltyLion, we identify or create low-lift opportunities to showcase how a partner has driven great results for a mutual customer (e.g. social media spotlights, newsletter spotlights, featuring short partner testimonials/quotes in blogs or ebooks). We have recently created a partner spotlight social tile that is a trial of “self-serve” content. Our Partnerships Managers can make a copy of the tile, add the logo of the partner they want to celebrate for achieving a particular milestone, and share it across their network. I’m really excited to see how our audience engages with it!

The partner team works with marketing to decide which partners to have create a closer 1:1 marketing GTM together. Within that plan your marketing person works to help promote the collective value prop - this could be in many ways - social and exposure on social, customer newsletters, case studies, and incentives of our partners solutions or incentive to our IT partners to sell our solution (solely or with another integration partner). You can also invest in a partner “directory” connected to your website so prospects can see who your top partners are and what they specialize in as it relates to your product.

Signifyd has an incredible marketing team that works in tandem with our partnerships org. We actually nest partnerships into a greater “marketing & alliances” department so that we’re always working together when it comes to marketing initiatives. This allows us to seamlessly integrate partners into the planning and design of many of our marketing campaigns. For example, our monthly customer newsletter has a ‘partner’ section where we feature the cool and interesting projects led by our partners. We also tend to have a partner component, whether it’s a sponsor for one of our ‘Crimes & Cocktails’ webinars, a partner that’s selected as part of Signifyd’s 30 Most Influential in Ecommerce, or a speaker at Signifyd’s annual FLOW Summit, partners are part of our go-to-market strategy when it comes to marketing initiatives.

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.

How we promote our partners to customers depends on the type and tier that the partner falls into within our partner program. Here is an overview of the different activities that we focus on; 1. Co-marketing - Events, whitepapers, sponsorship, joint case studies 2. Identify signals for each partner to help identify when their solution is relevant to our customers - Marketing creates content for CSMs and Sales, such as 1-pagers or short videos, for CSMs and Sales team to include in their QBRs or throughout the sales cycle 3. Enable the sales & CS team so they are familiar with and trust our partners and are happy to make introductions - Marketing helps with the enablement content 4. Partner Spotlight -every month we feature a partner and push content to our customer base, through social, email and events 5. Partner updates and promotions in our monthly newsletter Promotion of our integration partners within our platform to create more awareness 6. Optimisation of our partner directory (through partnerpage.io) 7. ABM strategy for Enterprise 8.Spiffs

When working with partner marketing, it's important to prioritize which partners you want to promote to customers. You'll need to consider what partnerships will be most beneficial to your company and then create a plan of action for how you'll promote them. Often, co-marketing can be a very effective way to promote partners. This involves working together with your partner marketing team to create joint marketing campaigns that will reach your customers. It's also important to keep in mind that partner marketing is a two-way street. Your partner team will likely want access to your customer data in order to better understand how to market to them. Be sure to establish clear lines of communication so that both teams can work effectively together. For example, Pendo created a joint customer case study with Calendly on a mutual customer, Credly, and detailed how they used both products for quicker, deeper user research. By using a joint mutual customer, and showcasing how that mutual customer used both products effectively to grow their business, we were able to continue to grow trust in all 3 companies, show examples to current and prospective customers what our product can be used for, and strengthen our relationship with a key partner. I hope this helps! https://www.pendo.io/customers/how-credly-combined-pendo-and-calendly-for-quicker-deeper-user-research/

At Caspio, we're fortunate to have a Marketing team that believes strongly in supporting Partners, and we do that through running joint webinars (one a month), press releases, social media posts, blog posts, and an actively maintained partner directory - besides call outs in our newsletters. We also actively support partners who want to run co-branded campaigns with marketing collateral and assets. Our guidance to partners is bring us any idea you have and we will be open to listening and implementing it as long as it can add value to our customers.

The key underpin to successful partnerships/marketing collaboration is buy-in and support from Marketing so that the work you pitch and request gets done and that they see value in it. This is a whole other conversation I'm happy to dive into to build. Once you have that... Before I brought on a Partner Marketing Manager: We have a shared slack channel where we'd put all requests/ideas for co-marketing initiatives. We'd put project plans in place for each project, loop the partner in accordingly, and execute on that project with weekly check-ins to monitor progress. You have to be highly involved to make sure things are being handled properly and on-plan/meet expectations. This is a lot of work for a partner manager but important to the success of your partnership/ Now with a Partner Marketing Manager I am less involved in the day-to-day and our PMs give him our ideas/requests and he owns and manages the full execution with our guidance. He leans on Marketing for resources around copy/design/ads but we trust him with leading and owning the vision and overall execution and checks in with us to make sure it's going in the right direction and will help us accomplish our goals.