We love marketing with partners. In fact, that’s the basis for our marketing webinar series. The partnership provides content and then jointly promotes that content. In other words, one of us produces a webinar and then we both promote the webinar.
This is Content Marketing 101 and Partnership Marketing 101.
Obviously, each one of these partnerships require just a bit of work. They require an occasional promotional email, for example.
The Story
We have an agreement with one of our partners that requires us to produce a marketing webinar each quarter for their audience. All the partner has to do is promote the webinar to their email list.
That’s one email a quarter from them. That’s it. Not a big deal. (Keep in mind that we’re the ones actually putting together the presentation, doing the research, and conducting the webinar).
Well, today we received an email from that marketing partner that said they could no longer send that one email a quarter.
Why?
Because it “takes too much effort with our limited resources.” That’s a direct quote from their CMO. Seriously. In other words, sending one email each quarter–remember a quarter typically has three months in it–is too difficult. It takes too much time. It is too hard.
Are you kidding?
An email should take like 30 minutes to write. This isn’t an all day task. It isn’t an all week task. It certainly isn’t a task that should overwhelm and consume an entire quarter.
The only way writing an email should take an entire quarter is if the email was from the Kennedy administration to the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis or something. Maybe an email like that should be vetted and edited for a few weeks.
The Stunning Part
Get this…we actually write the emails for them! All they have to do is approve them and plug them into their template.
Yes, you read that correctly. We write the emails for them!
So, just to be clear, they are concerned about editing and sending one email every three months. They don’t even have to write the email.
We. Write. The. Email.
That’s too much effort for them though.
How is this possible? There are only three possible reasons creating an email each quarter is too much work:
1) They’re lying and it isn’t about effort at all. They just don’t value our partnership. That’s fine. Good riddance.
2) This is an example of bureaucracy run amock (that’s a great word). I’m going to start using the word amock on a regular basis. Seriously though, perhaps these marketers have to get approval from a Director, who has to get approval from a VP, who has to get approval from the C-Suite, before an email can be sent. Or, maybe they have some sort of email committee that pours over every word in the email to ensure accuracy, transparency, and optimization. Maybe run this organization with a level of bureaucracy comparative to a Federal agency.
This is an example of bureaucracy hindering content marketing.
3) These marketers are slow, awful writers. This is fairly likely.
Again, the partnership agreement required one email every quarter. Last I checked there are 3 months in every quarter. This was, apparently too much effort.
Am I overreacting? Probably I am.
