One of the easiest ways to scale your business—and earn more revenue with less effort than it takes to build new products—is to work with channel partners. Doing so allows you to offer new products and services to your past, current, and future customers.

The trick to making these types of partnerships successful is to build a solid channel partner marketing plan—a strategy for two companies to collaborate on selling or marketing services, products, or technologies.

Channel partners can include value-added resellers, managed service providers, systems integrators, distributors, IT consultants, and affiliate partners.

Benefits of Partnership Marketing

Partnership marketing has many benefits, including the following:

• Broader reach and wider networks: When your company works with a channel partner, you are, in essence, partnering with its partners and users, thus growing their and your network in the process.
• Building brand trust: When your company receives an endorsement from a trusted and well-known partner in the industry, it helps build your brand's trust while giving you credibility in your niche.
• Express testing: Working with a channel partner gives a company a quick way to experiment with marketing campaigns, products, promotions, and customer audiences in a less risky environment.
• Improved revenue: Additional revenue is perhaps the biggest benefit, and it's what leads most businesses to consider partnership marketing. Simply by gaining a new offering for your customers, you can improve your bottom line.

Considerations for a Solid Channel-Partner Marketing Strategy

The potential benefits of a channel partnership are clear. To improve the chances of your channel partnership marketing plan's success, take the following six actions.

1. Obtain useful data on company products and services

In addition to knowing how to sell different types of products effectively, channel partners need to know more about the products/services they will be adding to their offerings.

Your partner should bring your company up to speed so you can market the products effectively. You know how your business works, and how you sell to your own customers. Now, you need to know your partner's business—what's performing well already and how to integrate it into your messaging and marketing.

The information your channel partner provides should also include their unique vision of the marketing and selling process. Who are their target customers? How do they position their brand and products to meet customer needs?

When everyone understands the products and target audiences, it's easier to come up with a better partnership marketing strategy.

2. Stick to brand guidelines

Don't forget about your own guidelines for branding when you start working with a channel partner. In other words, you're independent from your partner as a business owner, and you need to maintain your own brand.

Respect your partner's branding guidelines, sure; however, you've already carved a niche for yourself, and your audience has certain expectations for how you will serve them.

Figure out how to best include your channel partner's most successful marketing strategies without throwing out your own branding book.

3. Get clarification on how product marketing will work

Your channel partner needs to know how you are selling their products and services. Accordingly, they will likely want to keep an eye on your activities to make sure you're not hyping their offerings or using unethical business practices to land sales.