What co-partner marketing activities are generating the best results in your opinion?

Take a step back and focus on activities that Put Customers First! B2B SaaS buyers want to learn from their peers, not just from another vendor or a bunch of vendors. Preferably, lead with customers' examples of how they use it. Then, you can decide which channels are good/beneficial for both partners. Make sure, though, that you are using partners for their advantages rather than focusing them on activities where they don't have strengths. If you ask a partner without a strong online demand engine to drive an online motion, they will fail. Before considering the activities, another thing that helps is strong messaging together. This can be a short form document. Sometimes, a slide on better together with 3 - 4 core pillars of advantages is all you need. Sometimes, the best messaging is the simplest messaging.

Co-partner marketing material, like any partnering activity, only really works when it delivers or has the opportunity to deliver net new leads to both parties. That may seem obvious to state, but I have seen plenty of examples where this isn't the case - particularly around events where partners bring in very different people that do not overlap. To overcome this, I advise being deliberate about setting the goal of the co-partner activity early and communicating it to all parties involved (internal stakeholders and externally with the partner(s)). This will ensure that things aren’t done just for the sake of producing content but with a real purpose behind it. For events, the focus must be on curating the guest list in collaboration with the partner way in advance. Who must you both bring to make this an ROI-positive event? There is nothing worse than swinging out invites a few days before just to ensure that it isn’t empty.

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.

Quick marketing wins at the start of an ecosystem build are combining a mutual customer success story with an internal and external enablement session catered to specific department (e.g. CSMs or AMs instead of multiple groups).

Integrated campaigns around categories of technology that includes partners is a successful way to market tech partnerships. Being practitioner focused and aligned on the outcomes that customers will see from using two products together is the basis behind successful co-marketing. There seems to be less interested in higher-level content focused on industry trends. Ultimately, the marketers will know best and having a good understanding of your marketing org's goals is crucial.

I like to rely on something that gated because your performance will rely on generated leads / pipeline / revenue, so in terms of co-marketing it's usually # of captured leads. In 2020, when the first wave of covid hit, we've had a full event strategy for the year ahead, and we needed to quickly come up with something for the loss of leads. I think plenty of us made the same exact decision, and we've seen webinar popping up every minute. For us it was successful, but I also found that the results deteriorated over time. At the time, we came up with topics like 'how to utilize these two software and their integration to reach your goals' but after a while, no one wanted to listen to those. So after that, we changed the topics a bit, and focused on thought leadership type of content and honest, open discussions rather than product pitches and features. Long winded answer there, but shortly, I think a webinar is usually a safe bet, but need to experiment with other formats and channels.