While it’s an important part of any ISV marketing strategy to create reusable content, it is equally important to keep things fresh. It’s important for ISVs to find a balance between creating new, fresh content, and sharing content that withstands the test of time. It’s recommended that blogs add one new post per week, and social media has a constant mix of new and recycled content.
It is also important to create fresh content that revolves around new partnerships, software updates, etc. Without fresh content, you cannot let your audience know about all the new things that are happening within your company. Unfortunately, this can be a challenge for ISVs, who are already pressed for time. That is why partner marketing to create more marketing content is a great strategy.
Time: The Constant Hurdle
Undeniably, the biggest hurdle is time. In fact, time is a common hurdle in content marketing for almost any business that does not have a full-time team dedicated to content marketing. Many of the ISVs in our industry tend to operate with a smaller staff, resulting in those employees wearing many hats. You might find one marketing employee juggling content marketing, website maintenance, email marketing, and graphic design all at once.
The first step in improving time management and making time to create content is to build out a realistic editorial calendar. Make a goal of how many new content pieces you’ll produce per week, and make sure that you actually have the bandwidth to do it. Plan topics in advance so you’re not stuck developing a blog topic in the same week that blog is due.
How Collaborating with Partners Can Help ISVs
Partner marketing is one of the best and easiest ways for ISVs to create fresh content for their websites, newsletters, and other initiatives. This includes:
- Blog sharing
- Guest posts
- Infographics
- Writing about a partner’s e-book
- Interviews
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Research collaboration
- And more
If you’re strapped for time and just physically cannot write one blog per week, look to your partners that have a more robust marketing team to write a guest blog, or ask if you can repurpose some of their existing content while providing backlinks and social shares for them. Loyal partners are usually always happy to help and collaborate on creating marketing material. People are consuming more content than ever, so it is a never-ending race to keep up. We could all use a little help!
Vendor partners can play a huge roll in content collaboration for ISVs. Usually, vendors operate at a larger scale than many ISVs and may have more bandwidth to create new content on a regular basis. This also allows vendors to speak to the full solution rather than just their own product.
Other partnerships that can contribute to content collaboration are that of other ISVs or software technology partners. Coming from point of sale, I see a lot of our ISV partners that add on third-party integrations for online ordering, loyalty, store analytics, etc. All of these companies are looking to target the same audience (in this case, retailers). When these types of partners collaborate on content, it not only gives them the opportunity to provide more information to the customer than they may have been able to on their own, but it also gives them more channels in which customers can find the content piece.
What Are the Biggest Pay-Offs of Partner Marketing?
It is simple: two is better than one. 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 marketing 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. 
