3 Steps to Creating Effective Co-Branded Content
- Makiko Ara
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.”
Partner marketing is an invaluable tool for B2B companies, helping both you and your content marketing partners achieve sales and marketing goals. Co-branded partner content marketing takes that collaboration one step further to create an end product that delivers value to end users while (done right) saving all involved partners time and money.
What is Co-Branding Content?
A co-branded content marketing strategy involves two or more brands working together to create assets to boost awareness, build engagement and increase perceived value for all partners. Co-branded partner marketing content can come in a range of forms, including ebooks, email campaigns, blog posts, and other assets.
Most often, the co-branded content project is shared behind a lead generation form, and leads are generated by partners, tracked with UTM codes, and shared fairly.
The Benefits of Co-Branding in B2B Partner Marketing
While co-marketing campaigns are common among B2C corporations, co-branded partner content marketing can deliver a lot of value in the B2B world as well.
- Access to new audiences: Collaborating on an asset with a partner gives your business access to their existing audiences and vice versa.
- More valuable content: Your experts may not have enough to say to fill an ebook or keep webinar audiences engaged. By combining your expertise with that of your partner(s), you can deliver a well-rounded, solution-centric asset that offers value to potential customers.
- Cost savings: Sharing the costs of creating your marketing content means lower costs for both partners.
- Driving sales: If you have channel partners distributing or reselling your product, your partners may not have the dedicated marketing resources needed to promote your offering.
How to Create Co-Branded Content
The success of a co-branded content marketing strategy depends on it working for all parties involved in the collaboration. Here are three steps you can take to develop a flexible, successful B2B partner marketing project.
1. Choose the Right Format
Not every content format is right for every brand. Your co-branded content should be built in a format that makes it easy for all partners to contribute to and use. Ideally, you’ll produce content in several forms to avoid limiting your audience to people who consume a specific type of content.
Decisions on format should consider brand guidelines, budget, and the output capabilities of each partner. If one partner has the capacity to create and edit a video, but the other lacks the resources or budget, the full burden falls on a single partner — unless a third-party marketing agency is engaged to support content production.
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Long-form content (ebooks, white papers, reports) |
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Webinar |
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Videos |
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Podcasts |
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Microsites |
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Infographics |
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2. Co-Author the Content Outline
Before you dive into the creation of your partner marketing content, it’s best to co-author an outline. A well-defined outline has several benefits:
- Ensuring everyone is aligned on the topics and breakdown of your content before production begins
- Identifying which sections will be customizable by partners and which must remain intact
- Providing structure to ensure you deliver a final asset that offers value to your audience without repetition or information gaps
An effective content outline is more than just a list of topics. It’s a framework for your ideas that will help bring your content to life in a way that engages, entertains, or educates your audience.
Follow these guidelines to create an outline that will serve as a foundation for high-quality partner marketing content.
- Purpose: Define the goal of your content. What do you want your readers to understand?
- Audience: Identifying an audience will enhance the focus of your content. Who are you trying to reach?
- Key Point: What is the main point you want audiences to take away from this content? (This may take several iterations to get right.)
- Ideas: Brainstorm all the ideas you might want to cover, including key sections you’d like to explore or data that supports your message.
- Sections: Break down your thoughts into sections with headings and subheadings. It’s helpful to include approximate word counts for each section.
- Draft: Building out a first draft of your content can help you rearrange your ideas, sections, and message into a more compelling order.
- Review: All stakeholders should provide feedback on the draft to set expectations and limit revisions at later stages.
3. Make Personalization Possible
You’ve got your own style and vision for your marketing content, but it’s important to leave room for content marketing partners to add their own touches to partner marketing assets.
You may want cornerstone content (like an ebook or report) to remain as-is but allow partners to customize related blog posts, infographics, or social media content to fit their own voice.
Kickstart Your Co-Branded Partner Content
The team at TPM eats, sleeps, and breathes content marketing — and some of the campaigns we’re most proud of are co-branded partner marketing initiatives. If you (or your partners) lack the time, expertise, or resources to build out effective co-branded partner content, we’re here to help.
Contact us directly to discuss your partner marketing needs.
