By: Brianna Moriarty, Partner Development Manager at Star Micronics
One of the biggest challenges that small ISVs face in marketing is finding the time to constantly create fresh content. When thinking about a content marketing strategy, it is important to have a balance of reusable and curated content, along with fresh information to provide to your audience. For ISVs and startups that struggle with finding the personnel and the budget to create new content on a daily, or even a weekly basis.
When developing a strategy for content marketing, you not only have to write the content, but you have to understand your audience, why you’re writing the content, where you’re going to post the content, and much more. The planning alone is almost a full-time job.
Let’s face it – we’re all strapped for time and content marketing is a huge time investment. In fact, the average blog post takes 3 hours and 16 minutes to write. That’s almost half of a standard work day. There have also been reports that companies who publish 16+ blogs per month get nearly 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish 0-4 blogs per month. So, some quick math brings you to about 52 hours and 15 minutes a month writing just blog content. For small companies that are running the entirety of their operations with 5 people, this is not an option.
That is why leveraging partnerships to create more marketing content is an ideal strategy.
When collaborating with partners, ISVs create a channel to incorporate fresh content into their marketing, without having to hire someone to do the job full-time. This can be as small as snippets to be included on the website or newsletter, or full content pieces. Through partner collaboration, ISVs can work to develop blog posts, infographics, eBooks, podcasts, videos, webinars, and much more.
Collaborating with partners to contribute towards your blog and other content marketing takes some of the pressure off you to constantly create new content. You and your partners can trade blog posts or write guest posts for one another, or you can repurpose their existing content (with permission, of course).
For ISVs that are looking to collaborate on marketing efforts, it is best to look to your vendor partners. Vendors of the industry tend to operate at higher levels, with more personnel dedicated to marketing. Some companies may even have an employee entirely dedicated to partner marketing. Through these relationships, ISVs can use their partnerships to not only leverage more content, but promote themselves and a loyal partner at the same time, resulting in a better chance of making a sale.
ISVs can also work with other software technology partners. For example, POS ISVs can work with software companies that develop in-store loyalty, or online ordering solutions to not only offer a more robust product to their customers, but to create more content that appeals to their audience.
When collaborating with partners to produce content, you are getting insight into topics or subjects you may not be familiar with. It allows you to expand on and add more value to the content you are providing to your audience. Partner collaboration can also help lighten the workload as it allows you to borrow and exchange content. Lastly, content collaboration is a reflection of a strong partnership. Partners that work together very closely, whether that be selling each other’s product or being a main component of the total solution, should want to offer collaboration on content. It helps your audience to associate your company with your partners and vice versa.
