The rise of ecosystem marketing & how to make it work for your company
MKT1 Guide to Ecosystem Marketing
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I’m bullish on ecosystem marketing, especially since inbound and outbound are losing effectiveness. So, if you’re in an industry where partners have credibility and reach with your audience—and if these partners can benefit from working with you too—don’t sleep on investing energy into this growth engine.
With search volume declining, outbound channels feeling oversaturated, and event budgets stretched thin, I think the stars are aligning for ecosystem marketing to fill in the gaps:
This newsletter will help you determine how you can use your ecosystem to grow faster:
Finding the right partners for your startup—integration partners and influencers aren’t your only options
Building successful relationships: Look for audience alignment using the Composition & Coverage framework & add value for everyone involved
Types of ecosystem marketing programs + examples
Paid subscribers: Ecosystem template + bonus newsletter with examples
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Overview: The case for ecosystem marketing
Depending on the year and trend of the moment, people tend to narrow their thinking of what ecosystem marketing means. From 2020 to 2022, community marketing was all the rage. Now, it’s influencer marketing on LinkedIn. But, don’t limit yourself to those buckets.
Ecosystem marketing means lots of things, so let’s start with the basics.
What is ecosystem marketing?
Definition: Ecosystem marketing means using 3rd-parties to drive growth. It involves co-creating value (joint content, events, integrations, etc) and/or leveraging shared resources (distribution channels, budget, audiences, etc). The goal is to build mutually beneficial relationships that enhance your brand’s reach, relevance, and value.
Ecosystem marketing is one of the six main growth engines (though you might group them differently). What sets ecosystem marketing apart is that you’re marketing to partners, not directly to your audience. Of these six growth engines, ecosystem may be the most complex and varied—it’s a big bucket.
How to figure out if ecosystem marketing is right for you
I wrote extensively about how to choose your high-level growth engines in my last newsletter here. To summarize, choose the best channels for your startup, and don’t just copy what other startups are doing. Look to your audience, market, and GTM motion to help you decide.
That said, I think ecosystem marketing is a fit for most startups—maybe not as the first channel you focus on, but definitely when you are scaling your marketing efforts. While building an ecosystem strategy may not be quite as universally relevant as inbound marketing, there are so many types of partnerships startups can leverage, that I think you’d be remiss not to explore this engine!
Ecosystem marketing is typically a good fit when:
Your target audience trusts integration partners, service providers, or influencers to make decisions on what to buy.
You believe you’ll grow faster by building 1 to many relationships with partners who help you reach your audience, compared to using other methods like inbound or outbound, which require you to nurture individual prospects and accounts.
You see signs that partnerships are working already without much effort: partners reach out to you, you get lots of referral traffic, and you notice unexplained "word of mouth" growth.
Partners have something meaningful to give to you, and you have something meaningful to give to partners–whether that’s reach, extra budget for events, revenue sharing, proprietary data, tools and resources, a founder everyone wants to talk to, etc. Like any great relationship, it takes 2 to make it work!
When ecosystem marketing works, here’s what to expect:
Marketing to one partner helps you market to many companies (your prospects)
Your startup seems to be talked about everywhere
Your startup seems like it has a bigger marketing team than it does
Your startup has a strong reputation and audience trust based on who you are associated with
Here’s what to watch out for…
While I think most startups can find an ecosystem strategy that drives growth, there’s a lot to watch out for and it’s not quite as easy as doing a small outbound test, trying some social sharing on LinkedIn, or throwing a small budget at a paid search campaign…here’s what to watch out for:
You are now marketing to 2 audiences: 1) The partner and 2) your buyers. You can distract yourself by spending way too much finding the right partners and equipping them with what’s needed to reach your buyers, that you never reach your buyers.
Success is tied to another company–that always makes me a bit nervous and it makes results unpredictable. We’ve all seen products fail when they are overly reliant on another product and the same can happen with marketing strategies. Relatedly, your reputation is on the line, especially when you have a deep relationship, they are reselling your product, or you are doing long-term co-marketing.
Like all things in marketing, more is not more when it comes to partners. One or a few partners may deliver way more value than a million transactional relationships.
Team structure: Where does ecosystem marketing fit in marketing orgs?
Ecosystem marketing is a growth engine, but it’s also a foundational marketing strategy and a key part of a content marketing strategy.
Given this, I typically don’t recommend ecosystem marketers sit under growth marketing or demand gen.
I recommend ecosystem marketing, including partner marketing and customer marketing, sit under product marketing, especially when you are first building these out. They should closely collaborate with the growth marketing team though. Later on, it may become its own sub-function of marketing.
Reminder: product marketing is a poorly named function. Product marketers must not only know your product inside and out, but also deeply understand your audience and market. Ecosystem is part of this!
If you have a partnerships team at your company that’s separate from marketing, that doesn’t mean you don’t need ecosystem or partner marketers too! Partnerships teams often focus on building one-to-one relationships, while marketers handle one-to-many efforts like enablement and broad outreach—similar to how marketing supports sales.
More on marketing org charts in this newsletter.
Finding the right partners by mapping your ecosystem
Marketers often miss the most useful potential partners and jump straight to the obvious ones. I think you need to look at your ecosystem holistically and to quote Mr. Rogers: “Look for the helpers”. Pretty sure he wasn’t referring to ecosystem marketing, but I think it still works…
There are a whole bunch of ways to organize a list of potential ecosystem players aka partners aka 3rd parties aka “channels”, but I chose to put them on a 2x2 to break down just how different some of these relationships are. Things to note:
There are tons of players in ecosystem marketing. Don’t limit your thinking to influencers and integration partners—or whatever else is “hot” at the moment.
Within ecosystem marketing, there are lots of ways to drive value for your startup, your partners, and your prospects & customers. Knowing the nature of the relationship and how everyone wins as a result of partnering is half the battle.
“Sell to” vs “sell with” framework
In the spirit of defining and understanding partnership relationships before you dive too deep…You may be familiar with this popular framework in partner marketing (that I did not make up), similar to what I’ve described above. I’m not sure how helpful I find this framework, but people seem to talk about it a lot, so if you want to sound like you know your way around partner marketing, whip this out.
“Sell with” partnerships: Collaborate with partners to jointly market to a shared audience, using reach and credibility to grow faster.
“Sell to” is the opposite. Your partner is your customer. They buy your product to resell to their audience or use it in their own offering.
Most of the examples I’m talking about in this newsletter fall into the “Sell with” bucket, “Sell to” relationships are often a much bigger company strategy decision.
List and classify players in your ecosystem
As I hinted at, marketers often do competitive research, but forget about understanding who in their market with a similar audience can complement or accelerate their efforts. Think of ecosystem mapping as “competitive research” + “complement research.”
I think ecosystem mapping, specifically partner and complementary company research, is an overlooked responsibility of product marketing. And it’s an overlooked part of building your marketing foundation in general.
Bottom line: Know your complements like you know your competitors.
Categorize potential partners:
To map out complements, start with a list then fill in details for every potential partner on this list:
Type of partner: Influencers, existing communities, analysts, customers (to co-market with), complementary businesses, channel partners, affiliates, and referrers.
Type & size of partner: Indicate if it’s an individual, company (tech or service provider), or publication. I also list the size of the company. You don’t have to get fancy—large, medium, small is a good start.
Audience overlap: Indicate the composition & coverage – I’ll explain in a second, this is critical!
Value exchange: Get a general sense of whether both you and the partner could get something out of this relationship, then list any potential risks (i.e. they have a wildly different brand, a recent compliance breach, a really small marketing team).
Cost: Some partnerships require $$$, whether it’s a rev share, a referral or affiliate fee, a sponsorship fee, or a pay-to-play situation. Make sure you know this upfront–it’s always awkward when you think it’s a friendship and then someone starts talking price!
10 questions to help you map your ecosystem
If you are struggling to make this list, ask:
What are the source of truth platforms for your audience?
What service providers or professional services firms have the most influence on your audience?
Who creates the content that is most often referenced or consumed by your audience?
Do you have customers already sharing your product regularly? Who are they?
Where does most of your referral web traffic come from today?
When you say “we grew by word of mouth”, whose mouths were those words coming from?
Who has outsized influence or power in your market?
If we want to learn more about our audience we’d talk to ________?
Does anyone in our ecosystem have access to something we want? (data, trust & reputation, influence, etc)?
Is there someone or a group of people your ICP follows on LinkedIn or their social platform of choice?
Paid subscribers: Get the Sheets template screenshotted above to evaluate your ecosystem and the viability of working with each partner in our template library.
More from MKT1
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👁️ Related newsletters: My favorite ecosystem marketing programs, How to build a growth (marketing) strategy, How to run effective campaigns
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can access our overall template library here & our ecosystem template in our product marketing template summary.
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can now add jobs to our job board for free.
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter—which explains the two components of successful ecosystem relationships: audience overlap and value exchange.