As 2024 planning intensifies, B2B tech partner marketing leaders are facing increasing pressure to generate pipeline and prove ROI despite lean teams, tight budgets, and shifting priorities. The partner ecosystem is becoming more complex, with a growing number of partner types and go-to-market motions. This complexity is further compounded by economic uncertainty and heightened scrutiny from leadership and investors. For partner marketing leaders, making smart, impactful investments that deliver measurable results has never been more crucial.
To help you navigate these challenges and set your partner marketing strategy up for success in 2024, here are three key steps to take now.
1. Refine and Validate Your Joint Messaging
Before you invest in content or demand generation, take a step back and review your joint messaging to ensure it aligns with current industry trends and buyer priorities. Ask yourself:
- Is your messaging clear, concise, and compelling?
- Does it reflect emerging trends like generative AI (GenAI)?
- Does it highlight your key competitive advantages?
- Does it effectively tell the “better together” story of your solution?
- Are you addressing both technical and economic buyers’ needs?
Collaborate with your peers in Product Marketing to ensure your messaging is aligned with any shifts in the competitive landscape or changes in positioning. Testing your messaging with a select group of partners can help you gather insights quickly and refine it before rolling it out at scale.
2. Build a Strategic Content Library
With your messaging in place, the next step is to ensure you have the right content to tell your “better together” story throughout the buyer’s journey. Evaluate your content library and ensure you have materials for each stage of the funnel, including:
- Awareness: Thought leadership and market insights.
- Consideration: Case studies, demos, and product deep dives.
- Decision: Technical validations, ROI/TCO calculators, and testimonials.
Look for gaps in your content and prioritize creating high-impact assets. Don’t forget to repurpose existing content and explore AI tools that can help you scale production efficiently. Work with third-party experts to produce independent, research-backed content that buyers trust, such as white papers and webinars.
Remember, today’s buyers require input from multiple stakeholders, including both technical and C-level decision-makers. Tailor your content to speak to both groups—helping technical users solve problems while also addressing business leaders’ concerns about ROI and bottom-line impact.
3. Focus on Quality Leads and Conversion
Maximizing your partner marketing budget means focusing on lead quality, not just volume. It’s tempting to choose lead generation vendors based on cost-per-lead (CPL), but this can lead to wasted spend. Instead, prioritize leads from active buyers who have shown real interest in solutions like yours. Use purchase intent data to build a precise target account list, and be prepared to invest more in reaching the right decision-makers.
Before launching any demand gen campaigns, make sure you have a clear conversion strategy in place. Work closely with your partner(s) to align on roles and responsibilities, ensuring that efforts are not duplicated. Consider using marketing automation tools to nurture leads and provide your SDRs with resources that help them engage and convert leads quickly.
For partner-led campaigns, provide your partners with easy-to-use resources, like brandable materials and step-by-step guidance, so even less experienced partners can effectively convert leads into opportunities.
In Summary
As you plan your partner marketing budget for 2024, focus on refining your messaging, filling content gaps, and prioritizing lead quality. By making strategic, data-driven investments, you can ensure that your partner marketing efforts drive measurable results and contribute directly to pipeline growth.
If you need support with messaging, content creation, or lead generation, MarketingVogue’s Partner Marketing Services team is here to help. Reach out to learn how we can assist you in executing a strategy that maximizes ROI and accelerates pipeline growth in the year ahead.
