Reinventing partner marketing
PartnerHacker is a new media start-up run by a team of four people. With the motto “Trust is the new data,” they believe in the market that talks to customers. They are also confident that the next decade will belong to companies that think integrations and ecosystems first.
PartnerHacker collaborated with PartnerStack to host a virtual event—the Ecosystem Week in June 2022—which is the only partner management platform that caters to B2B SaaS organizations and supports them with affiliate, referral, and reseller channel partnerships to drive recurring revenue and scale their partner channels.
In an interview with Airmeet, they shared their experience with events, philosophy, working style, and future plans as they utilize events as a growth machine.
Establishing a waterhole for community and partners
The two companies collaborated to host the Ecosystem Week 2022 and pulled the event from end to end in 6 weeks. The Ecosystem Week was a 4-day virtual event that served as a watering hole for partnership marketing. Together, the companies stood strong and brought their capabilities to the stage to introduce the philosophy of an ‘ecosystem.’
Evangelizing partnerships and ecosystems with events
In January 2022, Tyler Calder, CMO at PartnerStack, saw an opportunity when customers started adopting new terminology. Listening to the Gong conversations, he found mentions of ecosystems increasing and that of partner relationship management (PRM) declining. This idea gave birth to hosting Ecosystem Week in the purview of customer education as a virtual event to create awareness about the concept of the partner ecosystem.
PartnerHacker as a company utilizes events as the center of gravity. They are an events-led company that does events to build an audience and are aggressive in evangelizing the idea of partnerships and ecosystem via their PartnerUp podcast and daily newsletter (PartnerHacker Daily).
With the Ecosystem week event, they focussed on the idea of partnerships, which has emerged from being a channel to partnership within a decade. They discovered a market for their philosophy—the demand for tactical steps and playbooks that can help attendees implement the idea projected during the event went through the roof.
They repurposed a lot of its event content into palatable content items to re-engage customers and prospects on social media, as Isaac Morehouse, Co-founder at PartnerHacker explains in the video below:
On choosing Airmeet for hosting virtual events
“Open chats and conversations are what people love the most at an event,” says Jared Fuller, Co-founder at PartnerHacker. The live chat feature elevated the excitement among the audience. They witnessed stellar post-event engagement in the chat box as people wanted to keep going. The professionalism of Airmeet’s mixed media intros, opening sessions, and the entire event experience appealed to the team.
Outcomes from The Ecosystem Week event
To amplify the event, both the teams took hundreds of chat feature screenshots and utilized them for post-event content strategy for social. They used quotes from the event and used them in the newsletter, witnessing immense potential in the platform for a great attendee experience and their event data repertoire.
PartnerHacker added 698 new subscribers directly from the event. Other tangible benefits were:
- Witnessed a large spike in social media follows, impressions, engagement around and after the event – attendees quoting, screenshotting, tagging, etc.
- The PartnerStack referral link (used when mentioning them as the co-host in promos) got 1,035 clicks.
- Got massive recognition—”I came across you guys from Ecosystem Week.”
PartnerStack booked $270K in pipeline, which continues to grow every week. Other tangible benefits were:
- 42 demos booked
- Received 752 subscriptions to their newsletter
- Witnessed that customers are talking about the event. To be precise, 60 references to “Ecosystem Week” recorded in Gong Calls.
Time is the last gateway for events
The team at PartnerHacker believes that time is the last gateway for events. An event with a date is a functional approach that creates excitement among your target group. The ones who missed it may not watch your entire event again, but you should have content in the form of crisp video snippets and highlights from the event to nudge them and re-engage them.
With events, the team has been able to discover new demands, repurpose event content, and build an event roadmap to achieve its business goals in partnerships.
PartnerHacker and PartnerStack hope to explore Airmeet’s analytics integrations and other features by hosting more partner-led summits to provide an enhanced experience to their attendees.
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