How to Create Great Content for Better Partnership Marketing (Part II)
To create great content for partnership marketing (or partner marketing), you must know what your audience wants. In this case, your audience is your partners. Make content that fits their needs to help them amplify and sell more of your products or services. The right partners are an extension of your sales and marketing team–a win-win!
Working closely with your partners can help you create better content. These partner relationships provide helpful information about affiliate marketing strategies and trends. Partnership marketing can be a great way to reach more people, reach new markets, and grow your business. And content? Content is an essential tool for that.
Read How to Create Great Content for Better Partnership Marketing (Part I)
The success of any partnership marketing plan depends on the quality of the content you create. Your partners can double up as content partners. Great content will engage your partner's audience, showcase the value of your collaboration, and drive conversion rates.
In this detailed guide, we'll discuss everything you need to know about creating great content for partnership marketing. From writing to building a more robust partnership marketing pipeline, we have your back. Make your marketing efforts count. Let’s get to creating.
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Why Content is Important for Partnership Marketing
At its core, partnership marketing is about leveraging relationships to reach new audiences. But just getting in front of a partner's audience isn't enough. You must give your partners and their audiences a good reason to interact with your brand. That's where great content comes in.
Content should be a big part of your marketing program. A content marketing strategy that prioritizes high-quality, valuable content allows you to:
1. Showcase your expertise and establish credibility
Content lets you share in-depth industry knowledge, trends, challenges, unique insights, case studies, success stories, and research findings. If you want to be a thought leader, content can help you become one. It can also increase your company and personal brand visibility, especially if respected publications recognize your thought leadership content.
2. Provide real value to your partner's audience
How can you create real value and deliver it to your partner and your partner’s audience? For a strategic partnership to work, you must deliver value to both. There are several ways to do this, such as creating comprehensive how-to guides and tutorials, developing educational webinars and workshops, and sharing practical tips and best practices. You can also offer free tools or resources that solve common problems and create informative and helpful infographics. These content strategies work for current and potential customers and partners.
3. Highlight the unique benefits of your partnership
You can highlight your partnership's unique strengths and perks that address specific customer pain points. You can also share partner testimonials or case studies highlighting partnership benefits to showcase past successful partnerships.
4. Drive engagement and conversions
You can craft compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) within your content or marketing campaigns for your partners and their audiences. This includes gated content to generate leads, targeted partnership landing pages, and interactive content to boost engagement (quizzes, assessments, calculators). You can improve your website's search engine optimization (SEO) and retargeting strategies based on how people use your content. This will help you get more results across different marketing channels.
5. Build long-term relationships with potential partners and customers
Valuable content can help your business develop nurturing campaigns at each stage of the buyer's journey. This helps you create personalized content experiences based on user behavior and preferences. You could also offer exclusive content or early access to a partnership audience. Generic content won’t work, but personalized content will help you build long-term relationships and may even help you get a referral.
8 Key Elements of Effective Partnership Marketing Content
Without strong content, your partnership efforts are likely to fall flat. Sales content won't resonate with new audiences and could damage your brand's reputation.
So, what exactly makes for great partnership marketing content? While the specifics may vary depending on your industry and goals, several key elements tend to be present in high-performing partnership content:
1. Relevance to both audiences
Your content needs to be relevant and valuable to both your existing audience and your partner's audience. Look for topics and themes that align with the interests and needs of both groups. You can also encourage two-way communication through comments, surveys, and social media.
2. Unique insights and expertise
Use the combined knowledge of your marketing team and partners to provide unique insights that neither could offer alone. This is what makes partnerships truly valuable. Use these new ways to market your products and services online. See how they can help you reach your digital marketing and overall marketing goals.
3. Clear value proposition
You should make your value proposition very clear. What problem are you solving? What new perspective are you offering? Make selling easy for your partners, and make it easy for them to get to know your product or service. Make it obvious how your partners and their audience will benefit from the content.
4. Brand alignment
The content should feel authentic and aligned with your business and your partners’ brands. The tone, style, and messaging should make sense for both parties and customer bases. You can also create co-branded content or let your partners do some guest blogging for your website. This cross-promotion makes your partners feel a part of your brand.
5. Compelling storytelling
Use storytelling techniques to make your content more authentic, engaging, and memorable. Case studies, customer stories, and behind-the-scenes content can work well. Partners and their audiences want to know how you’ve solved different problems and how you would approach theirs. Real storytelling also helps to build long-term relationships.
6. Strong calls-to-action
Your content should guide your partners and their audiences on what actions to take next. Tell the audience what to do next, whether joining a webinar, downloading a resource, or looking at products. Answer the so-what’s and what-afters. Once customers convert, you can also help your partners by giving them help and resources to stay engaged after they’ve converted.
7. Visually appealing design
Invest in high-quality design that reflects well on both brands and makes the content more engaging. It also makes the content more shareable. Look at all the content shared on Instagram stories–they intrigue in design and copy.
8. Multi-channel optimization
How do your partners and their audiences consume content? Where do they hang out? Make sure your content is written for the different ways it will be shared - on social media, email, websites, etc. If not, repurpose content for different platforms. Sharing content that meets each platform's needs and audience expectations is important.
Types of Content for Partnership Marketing
What types of content work best for partnership marketing initiatives? Some of the most effective content include:
Blog posts and articles: Working together on a blog lets you explore topics more deeply and show your combined knowledge. You could let your partner guest blog or co-write a blog post or article with your partner!
Webinars: Live or on-demand webinars featuring speakers or partners can be highly engaging. This gives you the chance to interact with your partners and potential customers. Hosting partners-only webinars could also help your partners get the training to sell more of your products and services.
Video content: From short social videos to longer documentary-style pieces, video is a powerful medium for storytelling. You can also create videos with your partners. Video content can help your partners convince their audiences to engage with your brand.
Infographics: Visual content is highly shareable and can distill complex topics into digestible formats. This makes it easy for partners to share with their audiences. It is also great for partner onboarding or training and can be reused or repurposed for email marketing campaigns.
Ebooks and whitepapers: Longer-form content assets are great for lead generation and establishing thought leadership. Show off your knowledge and expertise. This could also help your partner better understand your products and services, especially if you’ve just launched a new one.
Read ‘The State of Partnerships 2024: Navigating the Evolving Landscape’
Podcasts: Audio content allows for in-depth discussions and behind-the-scenes insights. In some ways, it is the most authentic and intimate type of storytelling. This is a great way to feature your partners and share it across multiple platforms.
Social media content: Collaborative social campaigns can drive engagement across your company’s and your partners' followings. This can make your brand more relatable and increase brand awareness for both parties.
Case studies: Highlighting partner and customer success stories shows the real-world impact of your partnership. Train your partners on which customer stories to show for different problems, and share partner stories to motivate your partners.
Interactive content: Quizzes, assessments, and other interactive pieces boost engagement. This can help your partners talk to their audiences more, which may make them want to interact with your brand and content.
The key is to choose content types that match your goals, appeal to your target audiences, and use the strengths of both partners.
Tailoring Content for Different Partnership Formats
Your specific approach to content creation will depend on the type of partnership you're engaged in. Here are some tips for tailoring your content strategy to common partnership formats:
Co-marketing partnership
Focus on highlighting your company's and your partner's complementary strengths. Create content that discusses the problems both audiences have. Create co-branded assets that blend both brands' visual identities.
Affiliate partnership
Provide affiliates with a variety of content they can easily share and promote. Create content that shows the value proposition for both audiences. Make sure to include strong calls-to-action and tracking links.
Influencer partnerships
Give influencers creative freedom to showcase your brand or product authentically. Provide key messaging points but allow for personal storytelling for authenticity. You can also work together to create behind-the-scenes content to humanize the partnership.
Content partnerships
Ensure content is highly relevant to the partner's audience–whether it’s a blog, YouTube channel, or publication. Optimize headlines and meta descriptions for click-through rates, especially for blog posts and other online publications. Include clear links back to your website.
Strategic thought-leadership alliances
Focus on thought-leadership content that positions both brands as industry leaders. Create in-depth research reports and whitepapers with both expertise. Develop content that supports joint product and service offerings.
Best Practices for the Content Creation Process
Creating great partnership marketing content requires close collaboration between both partners. Here are some best practices to follow:
1. Start with a strategy: Align on goals, target audience, key themes, and success metrics before diving into content creation.
2. Define clear roles and responsibilities: Decide who will be responsible for ideation, creation, design, distribution, etc. This makes execution straightforward.
3. Establish brand guidelines: Create a shared style guide covering voice, tone, messaging, and visual elements.
4. Set up collaborative workflows: Use project management and content collaboration tools like Notion or Monday.com to keep everyone on the same page.
5. Use both strengths: Identify subject matter experts from your business and your partner to contribute insights.
Content Tip: Meeting often to discuss ideas and share knowledge (like brainstorming sessions) can help build stronger partnerships and a more robust marketing pipeline. Remember, the effectiveness of your content hinges on its quality, relevance, and consistency.
6. Build in plenty of review time: Allow stakeholders from both parties to review and approve content. Leave plenty of time for revisions and final approvals.
7. Create a content calendar: Include publication dates and promotional plans to maintain consistent output. Consistency is key to a successful content strategy and partnership.
8. Repurpose and distribute: Find ways to repurpose content across multiple formats and channels. This saves time but doubles down on your ideas.
9. Focus on quality over quantity: It's better to produce fewer pieces of great content and repurpose them than to churn out mediocre work. Make the content work for you.
Content Tip: Remember, good content speaks to your audiences and their pain points, not at them.
10. Continuously gather feedback: Discuss what's working well and what could be improved. Feedback only improves your content and helps you come across with authenticity.
Content KPIs: Measuring and Optimizing Content Performance
Tracking performance and continually improving is crucial to ensure your partnership content efforts deliver results. Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch:
Traffic and engagement metrics (pageviews, time spent on page, social shares, etc.)
Lead generation metrics (form fills, email signups, etc.)
Conversion metrics (product signups, sales, etc.)
Brand awareness and sentiment (social listening, mentions of brands, etc.)
Audience growth and quality (website traffic, number of followers, etc.)
Content Tip: Be sure to set up proper tracking and attribution to separate the impact of your partnership content efforts. Many brands use unique UTM parameters or promo codes to track partnership-driven traffic and conversions.
As you gather performance data, look for opportunities to double down on what's working well and improve or pivot away from underperforming content. Some ways to gather feedback with real data and improve content include:
A/B testing headlines and creative elements
Expanding top-performing content into more in-depth pieces
Repurposing successful content into new formats
Boosting distribution of high-performing assets
Refining audience targeting based on engagement data
The content optimization process is an ongoing one. Both parties should review the results often and find ways to improve them.
Read more about affiliate tracking
Create and Distribute Content That Drives Partnership Success on Partnero
Creating great content for partnership marketing requires careful planning, close collaboration, and a commitment to providing real value to your audience. By focusing on relevance, unique insights, compelling storytelling, and strong calls to action, you can develop content that resonates with your partners and their audiences to drive meaningful results.
Remember that partnership content creation is an iterative process. Finding the right approach may take trial and error, but continually gathering feedback and improving based on performance data can refine your strategy.
With the right content strategy, your marketing partnerships can become a powerful tool for growth. They can help you reach new people, build your reputation as a thought leader, and achieve your business goals.
On Partnero, you can easily distribute your content to your partners by building a content library. So, invest the time and resources to get your partnership content right—the results will be well worth the effort. For maximum impact, sign up for a free trial on Partnero and try building the resources library yourself!