What Is Collaborative Demand Generation?
As we’ve discussed before, Demand Generation is the process of staying in front of your target audience on a regular basis. By providing highly relevant, educational content you remain top of mind when members of your audience are ready to buy.
Demand Generation programs build brand awareness and help grow an engaged audience. Prospective customers willingly build a relationship with your company over time through a variety of regular touchpoints, like niche newsletters, webinars, and in-person educational and networking programs.
Collaborative Demand Generation is a strategy where firms with complementary products or services work together to increase engagement and awareness of each other's expertise. Partnering with another firm to educate and engage the same target audience lets you broaden the reach of your Demand Generation investments and touch more prospective clients. Successful collaboration reduces costs, makes more quality content available to your audience, and improves the overall return on your Demand Generation programs.
How Does Collaborative Demand Generation Work?
When two companies with synergistic offerings come together to develop quality content and programming to educate and engage the same target audience, both firms benefit from increased name recognition and brand awareness. Each firm is able to demonstrate its unique expertise and engage with the wider audience, providing valuable content about the subjects they know best. By coordinating their efforts to understand and address the needs of this shared audience, both companies can engage with this pool of future customers in a meaningful way.
Collaborative Demand Generation, when done well, captures the interest of potential customers and helps build relationships for both firms without sales pressure. The audience receives even greater value from jointly presented opportunities to engage. They gain access to a variety of informative educational content and can participate in more robust online and in-person activities specifically targeted to their interests.
Benefits of Collaborative Demand Generation
Here are 3 top benefits for firms that participate in collaborative Demand Generation:
1. Cost Sharing
By running Demand Generation campaigns with other business leaders who share your target audience, your firm has the opportunity to split costs and provide a higher quality interactive experience to more people. For example, the cost of hosting a small group dinner with an educational speaker or a series of dinners can be shared between the two companies. People buy from people they know, and meeting prospective customers in person is one of the highest value Demand Generation engagements. Sharing costs with your partner firm lets both companies connect with more people and build more relationships for the same amount of marketing spend.
Another example is sharing the costs to prepare, promote and deliver a co-hosted webinar where a speaker or panel of speakers discuss common business challenges faced by your audience. Webinars are another high-value touchpoint in Demand Generation campaigns that help build ongoing relationships with your target audience. Cross-promoting attendance at the live webinar as well as coordinating the programming and logistics to deliver and record the event are great ways that firms can share costs. As you can see from these examples, creatively partnering with another firm can provide huge potential savings using collaborative Demand Generation strategies.
2. Shared Content Creation
A common resource constraint for growing companies is the time and budget available to create the educational content that is required for successful Demand Generation programs. Combining forces with another firm to develop and create targeted content for your shared audience is a great way to lighten the load for each individual firm.
Members of your target audience prefer to consume content in ways that work best for them. Using the webinar example above, this high-value, recorded webinar content can be reused and repurposed in many ways for minimal cost. Just one webinar can provide a tremendous amount of content that both firms can use in collaborative Demand Generation activities.
Audience members who couldn’t attend the live webinar can watch the replay on demand or download it from either firm’s website. Using the transcript from the webinar, each firm can easily create a blog post for its website that the other firm can share and comment on using social media platforms like LinkedIn. Both firms can develop newsletter articles using the jointly developed content from the webinar, or create downloadable fact sheets or graphic resources for the target audience.
Webinar content can be incorporated into presentations made at future in-person meetings with potential clients. Both firms can draw from content in the webinar to build a survey or other interactive engagement tool for their audience. Working with another firm to create shared content saves both time and money. Each firm receives a larger amount of quality educational content to draw from by using collaborative Demand Generation strategies.
3. Increased Reach
Although two firms may target the same audience for their products and service, each business leader has typically developed their own network of relationships and connections that have helped them be successful. Each leader may participate in different groups and organizations and have unique personal relationships that give them access to members of the shared target audience.
Collaborative Demand Generation activities provide a way for firms to get valuable educational content in front of members of the target audience they have not engaged with before. Working with another firm to develop content and cross-promote events and activities to the contacts of both companies is a great way to increase your reach and grow your audience. Because you are leading with value and focused on meeting the needs of the target audience, the audience is highly likely to be receptive to your opportunities to engage.
Clearly collaborative Demand Generation has the potential to maximize the return on sales and marketing spend for firms willing to work together to grow their reach into a shared target audience. For more information on how Demand Generation programs can be implemented in your organization to scale revenue, subscribe to FounderScale’s monthly Scaling B2B newsletter.
