1. Smart Partner Marketing Workshops
Trainer Guidance
See the Presenter Guide for class / workshop setup
Smart Partner Marketing Workshops

2. Foundational Marketing: Content Marketing
Trainer Guidance
Discuss goals for this workshop
Ask students: What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?
Also describe your goals for the students
Our goals? Help partners increase their marketing skills to flourish in the cloud era
Foundational Marketing: Content Marketing
This workshop will guide you through marketing in the cloud era by introducing modern marketing concepts and techniques that will be the foundation of your marketing efforts. We will focus on how to use marketing to grow your business. To do that you will define, revisit, and refresh who you are selling to, who you want to sell to, and why they will want to buy from you. This workshop is the first in this series of hand’s on workshops. It and all the others are designed to be actionable. In our time together today, we will be using a combination of learning and practice to help you gain the skills and knowledge for you to take action and move forward with your own marketing campaigns.

3. Topics in this workshop
Trainer Guidance
Omit any items not on the agenda for the workshop you’re presenting
Describe each item.
How to tell your story
Content marketing
Advocacy
Build your marketing plan
Cloud challenges & opportunities
Buyer personas & best clients
The buyer’s journey
Competitive differentiators
Value propositions & Elevator pitches
Cloud challenges and opportunities – The current environment and why marketing is so important
Buyer personas & cloning your best clients – Who are you selling to and who do you want to sell to?
The buyer’s journey – Understanding the client lifecycle – the steps to a sale and after the sale
Competitive differentiators - What makes you different? What makes you stand out?
Value propositions & elevator pitches – What do you have to offer prospect and clients? What is your Wow factor?
How to tell your story – Getting your messages and content right for your audience
Content marketing – Using content to nurture prospects and clients along the buyers journey
Advocacy - Making clients the focus of your marketing
Build your marketing plan - Putting this all together
During this session we are going to focus on the strategic and tactic plans to deliver results. Bottom-line, if marketing is not delivering leads it’s not doing its job. But there is much more to it.
 First, let’s talk about the cloud era’s unique challenges and opportunities.

4. How to use this workshop
Trainer Guidance
Describe workshop event to students
Draw their attention to the workbook
Some worksheets will be used in class
Some will be used on your own off-line
Some will need input from your staff
You will learn concepts and ideas today
We will practice using some of them as well.
Don’t stop there. Continue to use the workbook after class to take action
Class learning & practice
Workbook after class
We will use some of the worksheets in the workbook together, which some you’ll use after the class to create your own comprehensive marketing plan. In some cases, you will want to get input from your staff to complete the worksheet activities. These worksheets build upon each other. The information you derive from each worksheet will help complete a piece of the information needed to develop plans and take action. The worksheets are not complex or difficult. But you will have to think about the items the worksheets call for, so you can create the marketing plans that work best for your business.
Digital marketing skills

5. Content marketing
Nurturing prospects and clients along their journey

6. What is Content marketing?
Trainer Guidance
Ask audience about what types of content they think is most useful. What do they respond to?
What is Content marketing?
What is content marketing? It’s using articles, whitepapers, videos, checklists and other types of content to nurture prospects and clients along each step of the buyer’s journey.
Content marketing needs to be a core discipline of your marketing strategy. It compels us to take a close look at our client's needs to provide partner branded information hyper-targeted to those that need it. Helpful to this cause is the journey that a prospect takes to becoming a client and their journey as a client. Explore, Evaluate, and Purchase, are before the sale, and Expand Renew, and Advocacy are after the sale. To help a client or prospect through their journey content appropriate to each stage should be available. Appropriate content you may already own or need to develop could be whitepapers, articles, social postings, blogs, benchmark reports, landing pages, downloadable tools, worksheets, infographics or videos. Almost anything that’s client facing either in whole or in part could be and asset that you can use to provide valuable information to a client or prospect.
Remember in the cloud era people purchase very differently, they research extensively before they even attempt to make contact with a partner. Understand where your persona gathers information, for example what social groups they frequent, blogs they follow, and topics of interest you can tweet about. Don’t only count on yourself for these sources, utilize your entire team and company employees to get your message out. Most importantly, make all your content available on your Website search engine optimized, on pages that can help you identify what stage in the buyer’s journey the prospect or client finds themselves. Connect your content to a landing page and either Google Analytics or even better a marketing automation solution and you’ll be able to measure the uptake of your assets.
According to MarketingProfs’ the most successful companies are producing 78% more content then they did last year.

7. Marketing tactics per stage
Trainer Guidance
This is a great opportunity to engage the audience by asking them to suggest the types of content and marketing tactics they think might resonate with buyer for each stage.
Marketing tactics per stage
Advocacy
Renew
Expand
Purchase $
Evaluate
Explore
Website SEO and content
Social media- including blogs
Sales presentations
Website content
Social media
campaigns
ROI tools
marketing
Case studies
Product trials and demo’s
Telemarketing
Public relations
White papers
Events – online or in person
Offers and incentives
Web syndication
Since Content is used to engage and nurture prospects through each stage of their journey, you need content for each stage of the journey.
Generally thought leadership content is best. Things that engage them by teaching and informing them. Things that demonstrate your understanding of their industry, businesses, and needs. Things like White papers, articles, case studies and client success stories. This is important in that you want to attract people you don’t know but who are looking for solutions. This type of content helps prospects remember you, particularly when they are ready to buy or to engage with sales to help validate and affirm their thinking.
This chart helps indicate some of the marketing tactics and types of content you might use for each stage of the journey. You can see that the items in the Explore stage are items that will help people find your company and your website in internet searches. Offers on your website for a free trial or demonstrations are very useful. You can leverage the various types of content and tactics to nurture them along their journey. Doing so will help keep reminding them that you have solutions that meet their needs and gain “mindshare”.
These are just suggested tactics to consider using. You need to test and see what works best for your targeted personas in your market. What have you tried and what has worked or not worked?
Content can take many different forms and types. Articles, whitepapers, case studies, testimonials, product demo videos, blogs, and more some of the more popular formats.
Early in the journey, evaluation and comparison guides are useful. A little later, case studies and video testimonials are powerful. Financial Return on Investment (ROI) information is excellent during the Purchase stage. But it shouldn’t stop then. “How-to” articles, tip sheets, checklists, and “did you know you could…..” information helps on-board and expand usage and consumption.
Reports and information about usage is helpful when approaching a renewal.
The nirvana of content marketing comes with Advocacy, the stage at which your client is the hero of your story!
A key goal of marketing is to generate high quality sales leads, so each item should have strong calls to action. Things like demos, free trials, links to other articles.
Marketing automation tools are very helpful in executing these kinds of programs.

8. How to get started Take inventory of your content using the worksheet
Trainer Guidance
To determine what content you already have, and what you need to create, take inventory of your content using the Content Inventory Worksheet in the workbooks.
How to get started
Take inventory of your content using the worksheet
Evaluate each items relevance and usability
Associate each item to a stage of buyer’s journey
Do this for each persona
Small adjustments may make content usable for multiple personas
Identify content gaps
Plan the development of those missing pieces
You will want to have appropriate content for each stage of the journey for each persona. You may not have all of these items today.
Take a good look at all the content you have and evaluate its current relevance and usability. Using the Content Inventory Worksheet, decide how your current content works for each stage of the buyer’s journey for each persona.
Identify the gaps in your content, and build a schedule for developing those missing pieces into your marketing plan.
A few tips:
Some content items may be usable for multiple personas. Sometimes just a few small tweaks is all that’s needed to make it useable for a different persona.
Be careful to not try to make your content generic just so you can use it for different personas. Take the time and effort to make it specific and relevant to each persona and to each stage of their journey.
To help build brand recognition, try to create content with consistent visual designs and formats so the buyer will recognize your “stuff” through the journey.

9. Fill content gaps Understand what’s important to your clients
Trainer Guidance
Fill content gaps by repurposing, developing, or acquiring
Fill content gaps
Understand what’s important to your clients
Ask for recommendations
Can you repurpose content you already own?
Deliver value at each stage of the buyer’s journey
Quality of content = quality of the experience
Once you know where you have gaps in your content, you need a plan to acquire or develop content to fill the gaps.
When thinking about the content you need, consider these guidelines.
It’s never about you, it’s always about the client. Whatever content you develop you should always focus on the client's needs, not what your selling, and certainly not about the features and benefits of your products and services. Just for fun bring up a white paper or article that you own, client facing that’s not a sales sheet. Count how many times your company name is mentioned, how many times you refer to “we” or “I” or the features and benefits of the product. A few times is OK, but if it seems like the piece focuses on your wants rather than the clients needs it may be time for a rewrite.
Don’t look only at a full video, article, or whitepaper, consider pieces of each that you can repurpose for your persona and the buying stage of their journey. Once you’ve identified your content asset library fit individual assets to each of the stages of the journey. Note those stages that have few assets or none at all, you’ll need to develop content for these stages. If you’re at a loss for what needs development, ask a few clients for recommendations. Ask them specific questions about their pain points and what form they’d like to see their content, for example are they more comfortable with a detailed whitepaper, infographic, or a video?
Here’s a great tip, the more valuable your content, the more people will seek you out as a thought leader and the more likely that when they have a problem to solve that involves your area of expertise, the more likely they will seek you out.

10. Where to get content Partner Marketing Center / Ready to go
Trainer Guidance
You may edit this list to include localized content sources
Where to get content
Partner Marketing Center / Ready to go
aka.ms/pmc or readytogo.microsoft.com
Write your own
Other partners
LinkedIn, Blogs, Social
Repurposing content you own
Content authoring services
Content is available everywhere if you know where to find it. Partner Marketing Center, Modern Biz, Ready to go . plus the dozens of website properties under “Microsoft.com” contain content that you can utilize in your marketing. Besides the content you own and Microsoft content you should attribute the content to the author whenever published content is used. YouTube is a great source of video content and a good search engine for locating appropriate content for you campaigns. Another great source for content are your business partners, sharing via Social media, and online articles. Bing and google can be a powerful locater of content. Just be careful that the content is appropriate and actually owned by the visited website.
One of the most overlooked source of content is the repurposing and updating of content you already own. Print out the content you’ve created over the last 3-5 years including white papers, articles, Blogs, and even sales materials. Re-read the content and determine if the collateral needs updating and if sections stand alone or can be combined with fresh content.

11. Individual activity Inventory your existing content for each persona
Trainer Guidance
This activity should be done by the students after the class.
Individual activity
Inventory your existing content for each persona
The purpose of this activity is to inventory all the content you already have that can be used. Later on you will plan on building the content you need to fill in gaps.

12. Content inventory worksheet
Trainer Guidance
This Content Inventory Worksheet is in the workbooks.
Content inventory worksheet
Persona 1
Persona 2
Persona 3
Persona 4
List all the content items you have. Look at the gaps. Plan on repurposing, developing, or acquiring content to fill the gaps

13. Review Use content to nurture prospects along the journey
Need content for each stage and persona
Content takes many forms
Demonstrate thought leadership, expertise, successes
Identify current content assets
Repurpose, develop or acquire to fill gaps

14. Partner resources to use
Marketing helpdesk: your marketing questions to the workshop developers
Smart Partner Marketing
Microsoft value props partners can use
Marketing planner tool
Partner Marketing Center Ready To Go Marketing
aka.ms/pmc
readytogo.microsoft.com
ModernBiz campaigns
aka.ms/modernbiz
Workshop feedback and questions