Reseller marketing can have a lot of moving pieces as you, and your reseller partner, navigate the best strategies to reach customers and increase sales.

You need to build awareness about your product or service. Set yourself apart from competitors. Generate demand and nurture leads. The list is long, but not unfamiliar – the overarching goals are similar whether you are marketing alone or with partners.

If you approach reselling as just another revenue stream, you miss out on some of the most powerful benefits of reseller marketing. And while there are many different reseller marketing strategies that work, there’s one strategy that stands out above all others: co-marketing with your partners.

Reseller co-marketing exponentially increases both of your efforts, driving more impact for less. And that’s a win for both of you.

Here’s what you need to know to make co-marketing a successful part of your overall reseller marketing strategy, from best practices to advice from experts on executing a co-marketing campaign. Plus, we share some ideas and examples of what’s working for others.

Why Co-Market With Resellers?

Combining marketing resources, expertise and networks with your reseller partners can help you both create more integrated and impactful campaigns.

It allows you to leverage your resellers’ established customer bases, helping you reach a wider audience. You can tap into the resellers’ knowledge of local markets, customer preferences and industry trends, which ultimately leads to more targeted and effective marketing strategies.

On top of that, co-marketing with your resellers is a good way to strengthen relationships. It shows an investment by prioritizing joint activities. Collaborating with a reseller can lead to better engagement and a more highly fine-tuned commitment to promoting your organization’s product or service even after the co-marketing campaign ends.

Examples of Reseller Co-Marketing Strategies

Working with your reseller partners on co-marketing campaigns requires collaboration and communication to make sure that the initiative meets both of your goals.

But what does that actually look like in practice?

The right campaign strategy will depend on your partnership, but these are some of the co-marketing assets that typically drive the best results.

• Joint webinars: Hosting webinars together allows you and your partners to combine your expertise and present valuable content to your joint target audience. By sharing the responsibility of promoting and conducting the webinar, both parties can benefit from increased brand exposure and lead generation. 

• Videos: If content is king, then video is king of content. Collaborate on producing videos of different lengths such as on-demand educational ones showcasing your (and your partner’s) expertise as well as short, snappy snippets that are shareable for social media. You can reuse parts of webinars, for example, to make that investment stretch further.

• Social media promotions: Collaborating on social media campaigns enables you and your partners to cross-promote your products or services. By leveraging each other’s social media channels, you can both expand your reach and engage with a broader audience, which means increased brand visibility and improved customer acquisition.

• Long-form content collaborations: Content is a great strategy for co-marketing with resellers because of how versatile and flexible it is. Collaborate on creating long-form content such as eBooks, research studies or comprehensive guides that dive into the benefits of your joint offerings. This allows both parties to showcase their expertise and provides valuable information to the shared audience, while also generating leads and driving traffic to your respective websites.

• Short-form content collaborations: For more time-sensitive or pressing topics, work together to create quick hit pieces like blog posts, infographics, one-pagers, emails or landing pages to quickly get in front of your shared audience, which can help improve brand visibility and drive organic traffic for both of you.

• Events: Hosting or participating in events together, such as trade shows or conferences, can significantly enhance brand visibility and lead generation. By pooling your resources, you can create a more compelling presence at events, attracting a larger audience and generating more interest in their products or services. Events can be in person or virtual.

• Case studies: Showcasing real-life examples of how your products or services have solved specific problems or delivered tangible results can inspire confidence in potential customers. Detailed examples can be a powerful way to build credibility and trust.

• White papers: Delving into industry trends, best practices or thought leadership can position you and your resellers as experts in your field. By combining your knowledge and insights, you can produce high-quality content that educates and engages your joint target audience, establishing yourselves as trusted authorities.

You can’t go wrong with these tried-and-true reseller marketing strategies. 

 If you’ve already tested out a few of these strategies and have gotten into the swing of things with your resellers you may want to take it one step further.

Up-and-Coming Reseller Marketing Strategies

Here are some innovative partnership marketing ideas gaining traction in the industry that can help take your reseller co-marketing plan to the next level. 

• Thought leadership pieces: Consider collaborating on thought leadership content such as opinion pieces, industry reports or expert interviews. By sharing unique insights and perspectives, you can differentiate yourselves and attract the attention of industry influencers and potential customers. This approach not only helps generate awareness, but gives your reseller partners additional marketing content into their arsenal to share with their clients.

• Campaigns “in-a-box”: Providing partners with pre-packaged marketing campaigns that include ready-to-use assets and resources simplify the co-marketing process. These campaigns often include customizable materials such as email templates, social media posts and landing pages, enabling partners to quickly and effectively promote joint offerings.

• Interactive assets: Interactive content such as quizzes, assessments, games, dynamic infographics or interactive demos can captivate the audience. By collaborating on interactive assets, you create a two-way experience to encourage active engagement, rather than just passive consumption of your content. This, in turn, helps you to capture valuable data and generate qualified leads.

• Proprietary data: Leveraging proprietary data obtained from surveys, research or customer insights helps to create more compelling content. For instance, you could use your first-party data to highlight market trends, customer preferences or industry benchmarks. This data-driven approach adds credibility to your joint marketing campaigns and positions partners, and you, as authoritative sources of information.

• Localized campaigns: One of the big benefits of working with resellers is access to a more niche market. So, tap into that with more localized campaigns that are specific to your individual resellers! By customizing messaging, content and promotional activities to resonate with local preferences and needs, partners can drive higher engagement and conversion rates.

Best Practices for Co-Marketing with Resellers

To ensure success with these co-marketing campaign strategies, establish some ground rules from the start. But before we dive into the best practices and the specific steps needed for successful reseller co-marketing, let’s take a step back. 

As we covered in our Partner Marketing 101 masterclass with Terry Moffatt, Editor at Channel Marketer Report, it’s important to make sure the foundation of your channel marketing strategy is solid before moving on to more specific tactics. 

“What are your business goals? What activities and elements of your marketing program are going to achieve those goals?” Moffatt said.

“And then, very specifically, who are the partners that you are going to be working with to help you achieve those results?”

Choosing the right partners goes back to your recruitment strategy, but it’s a key step to get right.   

Once these pieces are in place, you are better positioned to tactically market with your reseller partners. As you craft the specifics of your co-marketing strategy, keep these best practices in mind. 

1. Clear alignment of goals
   Establish a shared understanding of the objectives, target audience and desired outcomes of your co-marketing strategies. This will help both parties work together effectively and efficiently.
2. Specific definition roles, responsibilities and expectations
   Clearly outline the deliverables, timelines and metrics to measure success. Regularly communicate and update each other on progress to maintain transparency and accountability.
3. Comprehensive training and resources
   Empower your resellers to effectively market with the right support. This can include product knowledge, sales enablement materials and co-branded assets. It can also include monetary support like market development funds (MDFs).
4. A culture of collaboration
   With partners, you’re not selling alone. And especially with co-marketing initiatives, effective collaboration underpins your overall success. Fostering a culture of collaboration at an organizational level brings a lot of positive impacts, including better co-marketing projects.
5. Internal alignment
   There’s a lot of talk about aligning with your partners, which is critical. But don’t overlook the importance of internal alignment. Getting buy-in and collaborating with other departments at your organization supports your partner-led initiatives and improves overall outcomes. It’s more effective when channel marketing and global marketing work together, for instance. Make your reseller marketing part of the overall marketing strategy.
6. Strong storytelling
   Storytelling is an important part of any marketing messaging. But with reseller co-marketing in particular, it should be front and center. These kinds of initiatives are not just about you so, more than ever, your messaging needs to not just be about your brand. Put your customer front and center so it’s clear how your solution will impact them.

And, of course, regularly evaluating your reseller marketing campaigns is critical – we’ll get into that next.

Measuring Reseller Co-Marketing Strategies’ ROI

To understand the effectiveness of your reseller co-marketing efforts and demonstrate the value, you need to be able to measure the return on investment. 

“A lot of what we see in channel marketing programs is that the people who are behind them are not really being challenged to craft programs that are measurable or that have a really clear goal in mind,” said Moffatt. 

There are many metrics that can measure partner success, but these in particular help track the return on investment of a reseller co-marketing strategy. 

• Lead generation: Look at how many leads were directly generated from your co-marketing campaign.

• Conversion rates: Track how well your calls-to-action performed and how many people converted to your content.

• Attributed revenue: Use different attribution models, like multi-touch attribution, to make sure that your co-marketing campaigns are getting credit for their part in sales.

• Impressions: Keep an eye on the impacts on brand visibility and reach by monitoring website traffic, social media engagement, webinar views or other relevant data. 

Make sure to use UTM parameters when you launch a joint campaign for more accurate reporting on where traffic is coming from. For instance, Google Analytics has a free tool to build different parameters on a URL so you see if partners are sharing your campaign landing page and the impressions that can be attributed to that partner. 

Similarly, if you use a PRM tool and partner portal, you can see partner views and content shares. This is helpful for tracking that partner’s engagement in your campaign and the results it helped generate. 

The more specific your analytics, the more easily you can attribute success back to a specific co-marketing campaign and reseller partner.

Additional Resources To Support Your SaaS Resellers

Channel Partner Marketing Plan Checklist – Use this checklist as a launching pad to establish a strategy specific to each partner. From mapping out upcoming initiatives to making sure your overall campaign strategy aligns with your resources, establishing a strong foundation upfront will help you down the road. 

Channel Partner Marketing Best Practices & Planning – the Ultimate Guide – This guide goes into the best practices for improving your marketing materials and creating better promotional campaigns. Learn more about what your partners need from you, the different ways to market with resellers and how to make your strategies scalable. 

Harness the Power of Through-Channel Marketing Automation – Through-channel marketing automation can be hugely beneficial for both you and your partners. Here’s how to market “through” your resellers and create the most useful assets that your partners can leverage.

Perfecting Your Reseller Partner Program: 5 Mistakes to Watch Out for and Their Fixes – Great reseller marketing starts with a great reseller program. Here are some of the most common challenges with a reseller partner program and solutions to overcome them.