Partner Marketing - A Primer

How to highlight partners rather than spamming your customer's feed with ads on your own product.

This is a ghost outline of an upcoming post.

I haven't gotten to fleshing this one out yet, but if you'd like to get the download, DM me on LinkedIn.

A lot of B2B companies just spam their customer's feeds with new product releases. We just released X for Y. Check out our new feature. This feature means more efficiency for engineers, better insights for markets. And it's the same exact message over and over again. We have this feature. We have that feature now.

But the truth is, customers don't buy until they feel pain.

So when you post the same exact flavor of content on LinkedIn, prospects who are not in market for a solution are going to tune you out. And the algo is not going to deliver you results.

So what do you do?

Let's say you're a collaborative BI dashboarding tool. Most of the time, your customer is not going to buy, up until the point where they have an idea of a specific dashboard or a specific customer insight, from a specific data source. Maybe they've realized their existing solution isn't cloud native or lacks the securty. Or maybe whatever BI tool they're using now is too slow to query data.

But before they get to that point, you can't jam "faster querying faster querying" down their throats.

So what do you with your company LinkedIn when you're NOT extolling the benefits of dashboarding?

One way to engage your propsects is to provide educational content around the parts of the customer journey prior to them feeling that pain. You want to accelerate your customer to a business result.

Especially in the data world, there isn't really a verticalized one-size-fits all solution. You typically need at least 1 or 2 data vendors involved when it comes to solving a data use case.

A great way to create a win-win for customers and partners alike is to actually showcase and highlight the advantages, tips and tricks, of other vendor partners, especially those that are needed as a precursor to the customer using your software.

So if you're a colalborative BI tool, maybe talk about how to use Snowflake in conjunction with a data transformation tool. Or maybe share a cool github package on how to model metadata.

Since multiple software vendors can have the same customer, it's more useful and powerful to think about content as a multi-player game. And for the customer, it creates value because they understand all the pieces of the customer journey and you help them solve their problem faster.

I call this the Avenger effect in marketing.

Let's say you're Sigma