25.5.23

No business is an island - especially not in B2B.

Very few B2B organisations would survive without a network of collaborators, strategic alliances and supply chain partnerships. These successful relationships are one of your business’ strengths, but many organisations are missing a trick by failing to share them with their target market.

Strategic partner marketing is a growth area in the B2B space. Whether celebrating distribution channels, resellers or new collaborative products and services, many organisations recognise that combining their marketing efforts offers a range of mutual benefits, including:

Key considerations for partnership campaigns

Delivering a successful and cohesive partner marketing campaign requires considerable communication and understanding. Before embarking on a partner campaign, there are some critical areas to establish:

1. Find your partnership story

Why did your partnership come about? The most effective B2B partnership campaigns have an engaging origin story like a pressing challenge or shared customer pain point. From here, you can use your marketing to illustrate how, together, you were able to successfully solve the problem before explaining how it brings benefits to both sets of customers.

2. Consistency is key

Alongside getting your stories straight, your brand values and messaging must be aligned, too. It’s vital both organisations are clear and consistent about what they want to mutually achieve, how they’ll work together to achieve it and how the relationship will evolve from there. Clear aims will keep your marketing on track and ensure every piece of content is used strategically to further your partnership goals.

3. Keep messaging simple

Cobranding can be complex. Ensure that both teams start out on the same page and have a thorough understanding of each other’s brand guidelines, target audience, preferred content and tone of voice. This might mean creating shared brand visuals and examining each other’s house style to prevent clashes over things like logo placement.

Throughout the partner campaign, both parties will need to stick closely to these agreed rules to avoid overcomplicated or off-brand content. Simplicity is key to ensuring consistency and continuity across both organisations’ marketing teams.

4. Recognise your combined strength

At the heart of your joint marketing efforts there must be a clear message: how your partnership benefits customers. Outline what each organisation brings to the table and how your different experiences, solutions and services complement each other and add value for your target audience.

5. Understand your new audience

Partner marketing campaigns should expand each brand’s audience by offering access to each other’s customers and followers. Carefully consider which sector of your partner’s audience you want to reach and devise a clear strategy to target them. If possible, consult your partner for support – they should know their audience well.

6. Integrate your campaigns

To generate the most value, be strategic and plan the marketing materials you’ll jointly create and share. There’s a wealth of potential for collaborative thought leadership - think guest expert articles / blog posts, video interviews, joint webinars, co-hosted events, even combined whitepapers and case studies.

Celebrate your partnerships

The benefits are clear but there’s a lot to consider before setting out on a partner marketing journey. An expert steer can help. We have plenty of experience creating content marketing that celebrates our clients’ valuable partnerships and strategic alliances – helping them to illustrate to their customers the value of their partnerships while attracting new audiences in the process.

If you’d like to find out more about our strategic partner marketing strategies and what we could do for your organisation, please get in contact.

27.8.22

As a B2B content commissioner, a prime part of your role is to make sure internally and externally produced content speaks with your brand’s tone of voice – but what does that mean in practice?

All too often, corporate brand guidelines focus on a list of aspirational statements and are light on detail – the specifics of what you should be looking for when you review blog posts, whitepapers, brochures and eBooks. Vague, subjective pointers like ‘be inspirational’ aren’t always the type of practical guidance you need.

We’ve been interpreting and implementing global organisations’ tone of voice guidelines for over 16 years now, so here’s a brief rundown of our top tips…

1. Look beyond the aspirational aims

Use any tone descriptors to give you a flavour of how a brand aims to sound, but don’t get too hung up on trying to interpret them into concrete examples. They’re usually included to paint a word picture, rather than to provide hard-and-fast rules. Remember, too, that these descriptors are highly subjective: what’s ‘visionary’ for one person could well be exaggeration for another.

2. Take your guidance from the examples

Good tone of voice guidelines will include plenty of examples, usually demonstrating before and after scenarios. This is where you can really get to grips with the mechanics of tone, seeing it in action and understanding how it varies between different content types. Often you learn as much from what the brand team doesn’t want than from what it does.

3. Remember the constants of any brand voice

The brand voice may go through many updates, but the fundamentals of tone will remain the same:

• communicate clearly and directly, leading with the benefits for the target audience
• get to the point – take out any sentences that don’t add value
• cut the jargon
• beware of over claiming – it’ll devalue your message
• use an appropriate level of explanation – don’t assume and don’t patronise
• be led by your audience – the tonal shade that works for CEOs might not be right for colleague communications.

4. Get a second pair of eyes on it

Particularly in the early days of a brand voice update, it’s often useful to get a marketing colleague to review the tone of a piece of content. This way your team will quickly build up a shared view how your brand voice should be brought to life and will be ready to give constructive feedback to content creators.

5. Connect with your brand team

Your brand team have invested huge amounts of time into developing the tone of voice guidelines and they know them better than anyone else, so use your brand colleagues. It’s never helpful when marketing departments see brand as a hindrance to getting content out. Instead, see the brand team as a resource you can tap into for clarification and guidance. Bringing brand in on your first few content reviews, or on any tricky issues, is always a good idea and will deepen your tonal knowledge for the future.

We are experts at creating B2B content in your brand voice. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about working together.