You’ve heard of inbound and outbound—but what about nearbound marketing? 

Nearbound may sound like the new kid on the marketing block, but it’s actually based around a familiar strategy: partnerships. Partner marketing is an immensely valuable marketing tool, but one that’s not always given the time and attention it deserves. By filtering your existing go-to-market strategy through the lens of partnerships with nearbound marketing, you can enhance your reach and get better results with less effort. 

In this post, we’ll delve into everything nearbound—what it is, why it’s valuable, and how you can implement an effective nearbound partner marketing strategy, from discovery to activation.

What is nearbound marketing? 

Nearbound is a growth strategy that relies on partnerships. Instead of speaking to buyers who are already interested in you (inbound) or blasting your message out in the hopes that it will reach the right audience (outbound), nearbound marketing targets your partners’ customers, aka buyers that are already “near”  you. 

This is effective for a number of reasons. Firstly, your partners’ customers may already have some passing familiarity with your product, which turns them into warm leads. If you have a shared ecosystem with your partners, this can also make it easier for their customers to adopt your tool—minimizing switching costs and helping you close deals faster. 

By leveraging your partners’ data, you can help determine which buyers are in the market for a solution like yours and target your account-based marketing (ABM) tactics accordingly. And by co-marketing with your partners, you can reach these audiences more effectively. Overall, a nearbound approach should enhance the effectiveness of your existing marketing efforts and help you close bigger deals with less time and effort. 

Below, we’ll share a step-by-step guide to implementing a nearbound marketing framework. 

How to implement a nearbound marketing strategy

Phase 1: Discovery, aligning people, and vision 

Before you know where you’re going, you have to know where you’re starting from. In this phase, you’ll document your current state and get all key stakeholders to agree on a vision. To do that, you’ll need to follow three key steps. 

1. Discovery: Gather everyone currently involved with your partner marketing strategy and document your current-state challenges—as well as your desired future state—together. Make sure to get input from all key stakeholders.
   
   
2. Alignment: Use the delta between the current-state assessment and your desired future state to generate a list of what’s missing. For example, is your customer success team informed of your partner marketing efforts? Are their own responsibilities tied to those efforts? If not, how could they be?
   
   
3. Vision: Document how you’ll disseminate this strategy within the organization. Partner marketing requires a full commitment from all stakeholders, so it’s critical to define what exactly that commitment will look like, and how it will be tied to each stakeholder’s responsibilities and performance.

Phase 2: Setting goals, auditing resources, and building a roadmap

In this phase, you’ll focus on setting goals based on the desired future state you envisioned in Phase 1. Here’s where things get practical as you break down how to make your partnership program dreams into reality. 

4. Goal setting: Clearly outline what you hope to achieve through nearbound partner marketing. How much total pipeline and revenue will it bring in? If you can’t set clear goals and define your success metrics, you’re at risk of repeating the past where partner marketing remains an adjunct afterthought.
   
   
5. Resource auditing: Conduct an honest audit of your current resources. What data can you get from partners vs. in house? Do you have the right tech stack in place to support the tactics you want to use? What might help you bridge any gaps?
   
   
6. Roadmapping: Build a roadmap that leads you to your goals. Define how partnerships will impact various teams within marketing, sales, and customer success. How will their workflows, relationships, and processes change? Which milestones must each stakeholder hit on their way? 

Phase 3: Activating the roadmap

Now you’ve gotten to the fun part: implementing your roadmap. This is partner marketing in action, and it relies on three continuous activities.

7. Socialization: If nearbound partner marketing is new to your organization, you’ll need to both sing its praises and be explicit about how it should function. Provide training and clear, role-specific goals for each team to work towards.
   
   
8. Change management: While you can try to anticipate any questions or bumps in the road that may appear, you’ll also need to prepare to solve problems on the fly. Refer back to your vision, goals, and roadmap to guide you.
   
   
9. Resource alignment: Continue to iterate and allocate resources to your partner marketing strategy as you activate it. Name why the strategy is working well, or whether any adjustments could improve it. Refer back to your goals often, particularly in campaign and annual planning.

Nearbound is nearer than you think

Eager to try nearbound marketing but overwhelmed with where to start? We’d love to chat. We’re a B2B marketing services firm that helps marketing leaders achieve better results. Get in touch today to learn more about how we can help you build the marketing strategy your business deserves, and achieve success in 2024 and beyond.

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