Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner, and I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital and content marketing, seven minutes at a time.
I am a firm believer that the function of marketing is to grow business and support sales. Great story telling, wonderful commercials, and fantastic events all sound great, but they need to have calls-to-action that tie with sales directly or indirectly. Otherwise, they are just some marketing fluff.
I met Jenny, CEO for 3 Busy Dogs, a company that makes beer for dogs. Yes, you hear me right. Beer for dogs, but no alcohol. The company is small, so she doesn’t have a big marketing budget. To create buzz, she relies heavily on user-generated content on social media and co-marketing.
Creative UGC and co-marketing examples
User-generated content such as pictures of owners and their dogs hiking, watching TV or simply just spending time together, drinking beers and living it up. You know, cute dog and cat pictures garner tons of likes and shares. Any free media impressions are good media impressions.
Jenny also focuses on co-marketing. She doesn’t do co-marketing for the sake of doing co-marketing. Whatever co-marketing she does, it has to sell her products. She finds products that will complement her dog beer. For example: what goes well with beer? Oh, pizza. Yes, there’re pizzas for dogs. She partners with Paw’s pizza. What else goes well with beer? Oh, Cigars! She found a company that offers cigar sausages for dogs. I am serious. Oh, what more things go with beers? What about yogurt? Yes, there is frozen yogurt for dogs. I am not making this up. Feel free to Google dog pizzas, dog cigar sausages, dog frozen yogurt. And to sell more beers, she actually creates various beer float recipes which combine beer and different flavors of yogurt as treats for your dogs.
I was laughing so hard when she was talking to me. I was not laughing at her, but I was laughing with her. Those are clever and creative ideas to sell more products. You go, Jenny.
Bentley’s Pet Stuff has stores in multiple states and took the beer float idea and created “ice cream social” events to offer dogs free ice cream and beer floats to drive foot traffic during the summer.
To me, this is a creative, fun, and low-cost way to drive traffic and increase sales, in addition to building brand awareness.
Co-marketing in B2B
Partner marketing can also work on the B2B side. Jobi George, VP of Business Development and International Operations at StreamSets, shared his partner marketing story with me. Since companies’ data comes from different systems, StreamSets helps companies manage and organize data flow in pipelines. They call themselves air traffic control for data. StreamSets, a start-up, does not have a big marketing budget. To make their marketing dollars go further, they choose partners who can complement their solutions. ‘Together is better’. Co-marketing helps them present a strong solution for their joint target customers.
Cloudera, a platform for machine learning and analytics optimized for the cloud, doesn’t offer the data flow performance management that Streamsets does. If they work together, they create an end-to-end solution for their target customers. So they partner to create joint messaging. StremSets positions itself as an ideal solution for data input into the Cloudera infrastructure. They attend industry conferences together. Also, they develop an invitation list to invite each other’s customers to attend special events, do webinars incorporating both platforms and create joint white papers and other content.
Jobi said it nicely: “The purpose of partner marketing is to make one plus one equals more than two. At the end of the day, it’s about creating more customers for both companies.”
Of course, the B2B example doesn’t’ sound as much fun as an ice cream social. But it is equally impactful to drive demand.
Are you doing co-marketing in your company? Share your example with me.
It was wonderful talking to Jenny and Jobi.
Send me your marketing questions here, or via Twitter @pamdidner
Be well. Until next time.
What can Pam Didner do for you?
Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.
