What Is Partner Marketing?

What is partner marketing?

Partner marketing is how a company markets alongside the businesses it sells with. Those partners might resell your product, deliver services around it, build integrations with it, or simply recommend it to clients who trust them. Each is a channel partner or alliance partner with its own customers, and partner marketing is about reaching those customers together.

The term is most common in technology, software and professional services. You'll also hear co-marketing, partner co-marketing, partner-led marketing and, for resellers and service providers in particular, channel marketing. A partner marketing manager usually sits between the marketing team and the partner or channel sales team, and owns the campaigns, materials and funds partners use.

It isn't a one-off campaign. A partner marketing program is the ongoing set of campaigns, resources, funds, rules and reporting that keeps partners marketing your offer month after month.

What is the difference between joint marketing and partner-run marketing?

Joint marketing is planned and paid for by both companies together; partner-run marketing is carried out by the partner, using material you provide. Most programs do some of each, and they suit different partners.

Joint marketing is the co-marketing most people picture: a shared webinar, a joint announcement, a co-authored guide, a booth at an event, a campaign to a shared target market. It takes planning on both sides, so it's usually reserved for your largest or most strategic partners.

Partner-run marketing scales further. You build campaigns once (emails, landing pages, social posts, ads, print), and each partner personalizes and sends them to its own customers under its own name. That model is through-channel marketing, and we explain how it works in what is through-channel marketing? It's how a program reaches the long tail of partners who'll never get a joint plan.

What does partner marketing include?

Whatever helps a partner create demand for what you sell together. The usual activities:

• Co-branded campaigns: emails, landing pages, ads and social posts with both logos and the partner's details.
• Webinars and events, either joint or partner-hosted with your speakers and slides.
• Content partners can publish: guides, blog posts, videos and customer stories they can put their name on.
• Sales tools: pitch decks, solution briefs, demo scripts and pricing guidance for the partner's reps.
• Launch kits, so partners can announce a new product or feature the day you do.
• Listings: a partner directory or locator on your site, and joint listings in marketplaces.
• Lead sharing: routing leads from your marketing to the partner best placed to serve them, and leads from partners back into joint pipeline.

How does a partner marketing program work?

Most programs we've seen follow a similar shape:

1. Segment partners. Group them by type, size and partner tier, because a global integrator and a small reseller need different things.
2. Decide what each segment gets. Joint plans and a named contact for the top tier; ready-made campaigns, materials and funds for everyone.
3. Publish a calendar. Partners plan ahead, so tell them what campaigns are coming and when.
4. Make it easy to launch. Partners personalize a campaign with their own details and send it, rather than rebuilding it from a file.
5. Fund it. Help pay for partner marketing with market development funds, with clear rules for what qualifies.
6. Route and follow up leads. Agree who owns which leads, and how both sides see what happened to them.
7. Report back. Show partners what their campaigns produced, and use the same data to decide what to build next.

How are MDF and other funds used in partner marketing?

Many companies help pay for their partners' marketing, most often with market development funds (MDF): money set aside for partners to spend on approved activities, like events, campaigns, ads or content. Partners usually propose an activity, get it approved, run it, and claim the money back with proof of what they did.

Funds work when they're easy to use and tied to campaigns partners can actually run. They go unused when the proposal and claim process takes more effort than the money seems worth. If you also run co-op, which partners earn from what they buy, see MDF vs. co-op advertising for how the two differ.

How is partner marketing different from channel marketing?

Mostly in who uses the word and which partners it covers. Channel marketing is the older term, common with manufacturers, dealers, distributors and franchise systems, and it centers on partners who resell or represent your product.

Partner marketing is the term technology and services companies prefer, and it usually casts a wider net: resellers and managed service providers, yes, but also technology alliances, integration partners, consultancies and referral partners who never take an order. In practice, the playbook is the same: give partners reasons and materials to market your offer, and see what it produces.

How is partner marketing different from affiliate and influencer marketing?

Affiliates and influencers are paid to send you customers; partners help sell to, deliver for and support those customers. That difference shapes everything else.

• Affiliate marketing pays a commission for each referral or sale made through a tracked link. The affiliate doesn't usually sell, implement or support anything.
• Influencer marketing pays people with an audience to talk about your product. You're buying reach and credibility with that audience.
• Partner marketing works with businesses that have a long-term role in the customer relationship: they advise, sell, implement or service. That relationship brings training, tiers, deal registration, shared plans and joint funds that affiliate and influencer programs don't need.

The lines blur with referral partners, who are paid per introduction but also advise their clients. Treat them as partners if you want them recommending you for the long run.

What are examples of partner marketing?

• A software company and a managed service provider run a joint webinar for the provider's clients, then share the follow-up.
• A reseller sends the brand's product launch email to its own customer list, with its logo, contact details and offer added.
• Two technology companies announce an integration with a joint blog post, landing page and press release.
• A consultancy publishes a co-branded guide that positions its services around the brand's platform.
• A partner hosts a customer event, paid partly with MDF, using the brand's presentation and materials.
• The brand lists certified partners in a partner directory on its website, and routes enquiries to them.

What are the benefits of partner marketing?

• Borrowed trust. A recommendation from an adviser a customer already works with carries more weight than an ad.
• Reach. Partners open doors to industries, regions and company sizes your own team doesn't cover.
• Shared effort and cost. Both sides put in time, audience and budget.
• Partner-sourced pipeline. Marketing partners run creates opportunities your direct team wouldn't have found.
• Mindshare. Partners work with many vendors. Making their marketing easy gives them a reason to talk about yours.

What makes partner marketing hard?

The same few problems come up in almost every program:

• Most partners don't have a marketing team. They have salespeople and engineers, so marketing that needs building rarely gets built.
• Your content isn't partner-ready. Material written for your own website doesn't fit a partner's brand, services or customers without rework.
• Attention goes to the top partners. Joint plans take time, so the long tail gets a folder of files and little else.
• Funds go unspent because the claims process is a chore.
• Attribution is murky. Deals close in the partner's systems, so it's hard to tie a campaign to revenue.

Most of these come back to how much effort it takes a partner to use what you give them. More in why partners don't use your marketing.

How do you measure partner marketing?

Measure in layers, from participation to revenue. Participation tells you how many partners are marketing at all; activity tells you what they ran; response and pipeline tell you what it produced.

Separate partner-sourced pipeline (opportunities a partner found) from partner-influenced pipeline (deals a partner helped close), and track how much of your MDF gets used and what it paid for. Sharing results with partners matters as much as collecting them, because partners keep running what they can see working. The full method is in how to measure the ROI of partner marketing, and our page on channel partner marketing covers what this looks like for resellers and service providers.

Where does OnBrandify fit?

OnBrandify is the Marketing Hub for brands that sell through partner networks. For partner marketing, that means one place where every partner, not just the top tier, finds campaigns they can personalize and launch, materials they can order and funds they can use, while you set the rules and see the results. See the Partner Marketing Hub, or request a demo and we'll show you how it would work for your partners.