7 steps ensure top-down strategic alignment between business strategy and partner marketing

Aligning partner marketing with your organization's overall business strategy and specific strategic initiatives is essential for driving success and maximizing the value that partners bring to an organization. However, this alignment can often be challenging due to a lack of understanding and buy-in from internal stakeholders. Before exploring practical strategies to bridge this gap, let's first clarify business strategy. Harvard Business School defines Business Strategy as “The strategic initiatives a company pursues to create value for the organization and its stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This strategy is crucial to a company's success and is needed before any goods or services are produced or delivered.”

Does your organization value partner as part of your overall strategy?

If the answer is “no” or “partly” then it will hinder the effectiveness of any marketing programme. There is a need to establish…

A vital step towards marketing digital transformation

In the current climate, digital interactions between brands and their B2B and B2C partners have become a major feature in their customers' buying journey. Given the complexity of customer interactions via different touchpoints and channels across the modern customer lifecycle as shown in the visual, planning frameworks can help simplify the analysis and prioritization of digital marketing activities. It is sometimes difficult to orchestrate marketing activities in order to ensure that the right digital tactics are used at the right time and in the right place in that journey, to nurture a customer lead. However, in the partner world it’s a lot more complex, because before you embark on the development of any marketing campaign with or through a partner, an imperative step is to market to that partner to raise awareness of your brand and educate…