Partner campaign generates over 28,000 engagements in a 3-year span

The partnership between two large technology vendors brings together two trusted brands with complementary technologies, enabling their clients to maximize their business outcomes. They offer a broad range of integrated product solutions across compute environments to enable hybrid workforces with flexible workspaces, virtual desktop infrastructure, and AI infrastructure solutions for the data center.

Program request and the challenges to overcome

This program started in 2020—the marketing managers from both organizations needed an ongoing integrated marketing program to engage with potential customers and partners, and to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

The challenge was to create a program where both parties achieved mutual satisfaction in a highly competitive industry. Specifically, they needed to increase awareness of the customer-focused benefits of their partnership.

They reached out to Sudden Impact Marketing, as a preferred vendor with a 20-year relationship, to establish an attractive and compelling identity for their global strategic partnership and to build awareness and create demand for their joint offerings.

Our solution—strategy implementation and campaign execution

Sudden Impact Marketing provided the neutral arm required to run partner and channel programs for the strategic partnership between these organizations, affording them the ability to drive awareness and enhance engagement of their joint solutions, as well as increase MQLs. We also led the program by serving as the liaison between the two companies—to develop program strategy. That strategy was chosen based on the best practices Sudden Impact Marketing has defined and refined over decades of experience leading partner programs.

Our approach blended traditional demand-generation marketing tactics with analytics-driven paid media/social tactics. The plan included defining targeting parameters to direct media efforts, compelling offers and an array of ads to use in top-of-funnel awareness that invoke actions, high-value assets for demand generation through intent-based paid digital outlets, and developing assets to promote through content syndication, paid digital, email, and telemarketing.

We constructed a foundation for the campaign by deploying a website that served as a marketing platform for all traffic and engagement. This provided a destination for an ongoing integrated marketing push directed at both organizations' targets. A database with well-defined targets was built to include recent engagers from recent activities, as well as purchased names based on profiling. We then launched a program that established distinct KPIs, included development of joint content, and set an ongoing cadence of promotions with optimization and nurturing of all prospects.

Measures of success

We established the following goals along with the performance criteria needed to objectively evaluate the outcomes of our program:

• Collaborating with both teams, as well as interviewing product experts to develop messaging, positioning, and top/mid/bottom funnel content
• Establishing an identity for the global strategic partnership
• Developing a strategic plan-of-action to be agreed upon by all key stakeholders
• Building a database from past inquiries and purchased list
• Setting up an ongoing lead generation program to drive awareness, enhance engagement, and increase MQLs
• Developing a cadence for engagement along with integrated strategies and tactics for ongoing promotions and nurturing efforts
• Establishing baseline KPIs and setting specific KPI goals, such as engagement rates and number of leads driven by program
• Determining additional measurable goals, such as database growth and building a content library
• Proving continual reporting and assessment for optimization of efforts

The results

Over time, the program has continued to successfully promote new joint solutions and drive traffic and engagement, and it is still active today. It has grown to add a message track to partners, with a partner portal to promote onboarding and participation.

Success factors include:

• All stakeholders consider this to be a successful joint endeavor—bringing together their complementary services
• All KPIs were met or exceeded, and the program continues to run and gain momentum after 3 years running
• The program has grown in budget and gained greater visibility over its three-year run
• Key stakeholders have been added from both entities as the program has expanded to include essential events and additional programs that have been rolled up under the overall umbrella

Future directions

Based on the outcomes of this effort, both organizations have continued to fund this program and work with Sudden Impact Marketing for strategy, content development, and execution of the program.