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 more 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.
Building successful relationships: audience overlap + value exchange
Many marketers default to thinking that a partner with a broader overall reach is a better partner to go after. This is not usually the case. A better indicator of success = partners with relevant audiences and relationships that add value to everyone involved. Otherwise, you end up with wasted resources, mismatched demographics, or way different internal prioritization levels.
Audience overlap: Coverage & composition
One of the core concepts that stuck with me from my media buying days is the idea of coverage & composition. I started my career in media planning at an ad agency in 2006 buying online, print, radio, and out-of-home ad placements for Microsoft Zune (Microsoft's iPod “competitor)–that’s more detail than you needed, but just so you know AI isn’t writing this newsletter thought I’d throw in a personal fact.
I think this concept applies really well to evaluating if partners in your ecosystem are worth working with.
Coverage = % of your target audience your partner reaches
Higher coverage means you can reach more of your TAM through this partner
Example: If an integration partner (i.e. Hubspot) can help you reach 60% of your audience (i.e. B2B startup marketers), Hubspot has high coverage of your audience.
Composition = % of the partner’s target audience or customer base that matches your target audience
Higher composition means less waste–you aren’t reaching a bunch of people who don’t care about your product at all.
Example: If 80% of a partner’s newsletter subscribers are in your target audience (e.g. B2B marketers), that newsletter has a high composition.
A couple more examples imagining if MKT1 Newsletter was looking partners:
Salesforce has high coverage with MKT1’s audience but low composition: Most of my audience has used and is familiar with Salesforce, but B2B startup marketers are a tiny part of their audience. A Dreamforce booth wouldn’t make sense—too much waste for too little impact (does a Dreamforce booth ever make sense? That’s a topic for another newsletter or podcast). However, a targeted Salesforce event for B2B startups could be a great fit for brand alignment and mutual value.
On the flip side, partnering with a small SEO agency offers high composition (most of their audience would benefit from reading the newsletter IMHO), but low coverage (they reach fewer people overall in my audience). While it wouldn’t expand my audience much, it could add value for my core readers by bringing SEO expertise and trusted agency recommendations.
It’s fairly straightforward to calculate coverage and composition if you have the basics of your potential partner’s audience or customer base (this calculator is also available for paid subscribers in our ecosystem template):
Summary: If you can find a partner with high coverage and high composition, who is not a competitor, and you have shared values and goals, it could be a match made in B2B heaven. But, it can still be beneficial to work with a partner where there is only high coverage of your audience or only high composition of your audience, but you’ll want to use different strategies.
Value exchange: Additive or duplicative?
I don’t have a tidy framework from my advertising days to apply here, but I do have a simple rule of thumb. The best ecosystem marketing programs bring value to all 3 parties: your company, the partner, your audience.
Start by trying to understand your partners: what they care about, what they need most, what their GTM challenges might be, etc. This is exactly how you’d approach making a marketing strategy for your prospects. Making sure you understand your potential partners well is the best way to get their attention to begin a relationship or to maintain a great relationship. This might seem obvious, but I see the wrong offers presented in partnerships all the time.
Value add to your company and/or to your partner(s):
Increases resources or budget
Improves credibility or reputation
Increases value for audience
Value add of partnership to your audience:
Cost savings
Improved product value
Access to content & experiences they wouldn’t otherwise get
Here are a few examples and the value all 3 parties get:
"List sharing" isn’t much of a value add anymore.
With modern tools, it’s easy to get contact info and engagement signals. If all you gain from a partnership is a list of attendees, you’re not making the most of the partnership’s potential value. So if you are doing an event or partnership just for the list share, check to make sure it helps you in another area too.
Whenever you add another cog in the wheel, there’s room for failure, so make sure it’s worth it–for everyone involved. If you can achieve the same result by going directly to your audience, it’s likely easier. But if you can work together and increase value for everyone involved, you can grow super fast!
Details on ecosystem marketing programs
Types of ecosystem marketing programs
I’ve hinted at these program types and mentioned the types of 3rd parties you can work with. But to summarize, here are strategies and tactics I put under the category of ecosystem marketing.
Note: These are not mutually exclusive, it’s actually quite the opposite. You’ll see when I talk about the examples, the best programs often blur these lines.
1. Integrations: Develop integrations with tools your audience already uses or products that will enhance their workflow. You can promote integrations with or without co-marketing from the partner.
Pitfall: Getting publicly listed on the platform page or marketplace of a large company is table stakes, but set expectations low for how much traffic this will drive.
2. Partner Co-Marketing: Work with complementary companies to co-create and promote campaigns that leverage each other’s strengths and audiences. This strategy works best when there’s clear alignment in values, goals, and target audiences.
Pitfall: Don’t go all in too fast. For instance, building a community with another startup sounds like a great idea, until you get into issues of day-to-day management.
3. Customer Co-Marketing: Collaborate with customers to drive growth. There are 2 main tactics here: 1) Inviting customers to be part of your content and event efforts and making sure they share with their networks after. 2) Creating a customer referral program by making it really easy and mutually beneficial to share your product with others.
Pitfall: Creating case studies and testimonials is table stakes here and lots of startups spend way too much time on these. Think of more creative ways to use customers to really make this a viable growth strategy.
4. Channel or Affiliate Partnerships: Incentivize partners who have existing relationships with your audience with cold hard cash, typically through commissions or revenue sharing, to encourage them to promote and sell your product.
Pitfall: Getting the incentive wrong. In some cases, the partner may not care about money themselves, but may care about getting product features catered to them as a partner, discounts they can pass along to clients, etc.
5. Influencer Programs: Collaborate with influencers who align with your brand to amplify your message and reach niche audiences.
Pitfall: Don’t go for the biggest influencer first. You can start with micro-influencers (who may have lower coverage, but higher composition of your audience) for authenticity and deeper engagement, and then focus on building lasting relationships.
6. Community Marketing: Create or engage a community around shared interests tied to your brand. Build connections with customers, advocates, or peers, and use this group to drive advocacy, gather insights, and build brand loyalty.
Pitfall: Don’t jump to launching your own community–especially if others exist. It can become very difficult to maintain and a distraction from driving growth for your core business.
Takeaways
Ecosystem marketing fills the gaps left by inbound and outbound: As traditional channels lose effectiveness, leveraging 3rd-party relationships is becoming essential.
Look at audience composition & coverage when considering partners: Partnerships with larger companies are often less effective than partnerships with smaller companies, look for partners who can help drive meaningful growth without wasting resources.
Create value for everyone involved: Like everything in marketing, hold yourself to a high bar: This partnership must be additive for my company, the partnering company or individual, and our audience. If not, don’t do it.
More from MKT1
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[preview] Examples: My favorite ecosystem programs
I’ll be detailing ~10 ecosystem marketing programs and why I think they are great models for B2B startups in a newsletter for paid subscribers later this week. Become a paid subscriber so you don’t miss it. Here’s a preview of 2 examples.
Arrows + Hubspot: Doubling down on one platform
Strategy: Originally Arrows, a customer onboarding platform, had integrations with many source-of-truth platforms for customer success and sales leaders. But, a couple of years back they decided to go all in on Hubspot.
Why I like it: Focus is key when breaking into a market.
With this decision to go all in on Hubspot, both product and GTM become more focused and unified in their strategies.
Clearly defined ICP: Customer success teams using Hubspot. This means less distraction trying to reach and speak to companies using different CRMs and tighter positioning.
Bonus: Hubspot actually cares about Arrows as well—which may not have happened if they were focused on many platforms. Hubspot Ventures even invested in Arrows after this decision was made.
Many startups think more integrations is better, and Arrows has other integrations too, but sometimes just one really smart integration is all you need.
Live Data Technologies + Newsletters: Proprietary data meets influencers for reach
Strategy: Live Data Technologies, a platform for real-time job change and human capital data, works with influencers (Like Lenny and me!) who can publish reports using their job data.
Why I like it:
Rather than trying to publish reports themselves, they work with influencers who already have distribution. They provide the data and graphs, the creators do the writing and distributing. It’s a win (for Live Data), a win (for the influencers), and a win (for the readers who get unique insights).
Even though Live Data Technologies sells a data product, they aren’t afraid to “give away” some of their data for free. But not in the form of a free product, but instead in the form of content. Many companies might hold this data for paid customers only—even though sharing it seems so obvious when you see it in action!
…To be continued.
Paid subscribers will get a bonus newsletter with 8 more examples this week.