Maybe your product or service is produced, sold and maintained solely by your company. More likely than not, however, you combine your product with those of others to provide an end-to-end solution. And in many situations, you may work with several specific partners – each with a specialized position in a vertical market – in order to offer a “best of breed” solution that is precisely aligned with customer requirements.
As you target these multiple verticals, it makes sense to collaborate with your partners to optimize your content for each vertical market, and to leverage the exposure that your partners have in these segments.
In general, a basic list of potential joint activities might include:
- Create a partner area on your website. Depending on the level of engagement, this could be a fully-functional, dynamic site focusing on vertical markets, or simply a listing of partners with links.
- Joint demos, interviews, booth participation at trade shows; videos that can be used after show – demos, interviews. This includes pre- and post-show marketing activities.
- Produce content jointly with partners – white papers, videos, data sheets, use cases, success stories
- Each partner is free to use materials
An example of a company that operates an extensive, multi-tiered partner program is Oracle (www.oracle.com). The company maintains formal, managed partner programs, such as Oracle Partner Network and Oracle Technology Network, and they also engage in ad hoc activities with partners when conditions warrant.
A recent example of a multi-partner activity is part of an overall “Internet of Things” marketing initiative by Oracle. Working with partners Eurotech, Hitachi CTA and Hitachi Consulting, Oracle developed a joint demo entitled “IoT in Motion, Driving Business Value from Edge Device to Application” presented at the JavaOne and OpenWorld events held in San Francisco, September 22-26, 2013. This demo was based on a “people counting” technology provided by Eurotech that included software from Oracle (Java SE Embedded), and middleware from Hitachi Communication Technologies America, Inc. (SuperJ Applications Ecosystem). In addition to these technologies, the demo incorporated Oracle Exalytics data analysis and Oracle Event Processing, and design and integration services by Hitachi Consulting.
First, let’s understand the original venue for the introduction of this IoT partnership campaign and the initial joint demo: Oracle’s OpenWorld and JavaOne events attract some 60,000 live attendees, with exhibits and a broad array of conference sessions. Not many companies can stage their own show on this scale – with an audience of their own customers and prospects – but these same techniques can be used at almost any trade show at a scale manageable for the partners. In this case, each of the partner companies had its own booth, with a people counter device, collateral and signage that communicated the company’s contribution to the application.
This collaboration effectively showed how the basic data – the number of people passing through doorways in a trade show environment – was processed through multiple systems to a point at which it could be analyzed and displayed for conference attendees. The illustration is clear: the original data could be people passing through any type of portal (the original application for this technology was passengers entering and leaving a public transit bus) such as a sports venue, retail store checkout lines, and so on, and is used to evaluate the traffic patterns on bus routes, or advise a supermarket manager that a new checkout line should be opened.
From a content marketing point of view, the content received widespread attention at a major trade show (multiple booths, recognition in multiple keynote addresses), and generated press releases and collateral that each company could use in its own marketing programs. Indeed, the demo was staged again at Embedded World 2014 in Nuremberg, Germany. Most importantly, the collaboration linked the partners for future sales efforts and provided exposure to multiple vertical market segments. Each partner secured value from the collaboration, and Oracle demonstrated their end-to-end “Internet of Things” capability, and the ability to quickly combine the resources of specialized partners to achieve an optimum solution.
References:
– https://blogs.oracle.com/java/entry/at_the_java_demogrounds_the
– https://blogs.oracle.com/IOT/entry/oracle_is_showcasing_iot_at
– http://www.hitachi-cta.com/news_events/releases/20130911.html