How can you get started with platform partnerships, and do you need them? The traditional agency model can feel like you’re always starting from scratch, having to prove your worth with each new prospect.

But what if there was a way to instantly establish credibility, create recurring revenue, and position your agency as a strategic partner rather than just another service provider? What if you could leverage and establish platforms, reputation, and resources to grow your agency?

Some forward-thinking agencies are doing that through strategic platform partnerships. Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton talks with Ali Schwanke, founder of SimpleStrat, a growth marketing agency that has successfully leveraged platform partnerships, particularly with HubSpot to build a thriving agency. Ali has not only transformed her agency through the strategy but has helped countless other businesses implement and optimize their marketing technology stacks. She’s here to pull back the curtain on how platform partnerships can be a game changer for agency growth.

Agency as a Platform Implementation Partner

Mike Allton: Before we dive into platform partnerships, tell us a little bit more about your agency, your agency journey, and what led you to become a platform implementation partner.

Ali Schwanke: I think, like a lot of agency founders, you don’t wake up and say, “I’m going to be a platform implementation partner.” That wasn’t a thing I filled out when I was in second grade about what I wanted to be when I grew up. My whole life, I love solving problems, so I thought maybe I’d have a career in medicine.

Ultimately, I feel like I’m a doctor of business in some regard.

But we started as a marketing strategy agency and found that the platforms were a way for us to establish what you mentioned in the intro: a way for us to establish our credibility and our expertise. And so it became a HubSpot partner—and that’s a big part of our journey because how we eventually went to market was with videos.

Now if you search YouTube, you search for HubSpot tutorial, there’s a good chance you’ll see me and my team among 180 of our videos online. We rank for a lot of those. And now we do a lot of work in the ecosystem and, more specifically, Justin Hubspot as a CRM partner as a result of our go-to-market motion. It’s been fun. I think a lot of people are curious about what’s happened along our journey.

We’ve been happy to share some of those secrets because I think we can all benefit from the groundswell of business that comes from it.

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Initial Challenges

I’d love it if you could share some of the initial challenges or hesitations that you faced when you were thinking about becoming a HubSpot partner [and] just that route in general.

Ali Schwanke: What’s funny is when we became a HubSpot partner, I knew about HubSpot. I’d used it for a couple of different companies.

What happened along the way was we decided we wanted to put our credibility behind something that would help us. At the time we were thinking we were going to get more leads. We’re going to become a partner and use that as some of our marketing message—and all that became true.

But what happened? At the time my business partner Tyler was the one that led us through the HubSpot partner journey. And so what I falsely believed at the time is you become a partner. You get a badge, you put it on your website and some people start calling you.

Well, let’s be honest. That doesn’t happen quite that way. I think we think that about “I just need the right certification, and my career will take off.” And it’s just a little piece of the recipe.

We took over as the user group leaders in the state that I’m in—we’re no longer just state-based, we’re nationwide—but the state that I’m in. Again, we led the user group but just felt like it wasn’t doing what we needed it to do.

Fast forward, I think the thing that I learned and became a partner is thinking about a go-to-market plan. Like, what is your go-to-market plan with that platform partnership? What sort of value does it drive for you?

For us, HubSpot was just releasing its CRM at that time. I had been in the salesforce ecosystem prior, and I knew the power of a CRM baked with a fully automated marketing tool. And so that’s ultimately why we decided to make the jump at that time. We’ve brought on a couple of other platform partnerships since, but similar thinking like, “Where’s the market going? How can we better serve it? And will this partner be a piece of our bigger strategy and not just like a tool in our tool belt?”

Mike Allton: Now, to your point, a lot of software-as-a-service (Saas) providers have partner programs, but I think we can all agree that HubSpot is probably the gold standard when it comes to agency partner programs. And so we’ll be talking about them a lot today.

Could you walk us through the process of becoming a HubSpot implementation partner? And what does that mean for an agency?

Ali Schwanke: I think the hard thing today is everybody realizes that channel partnerships are a way to go to market.

Not a day goes by that I don’t get a pitch in my inbox that is a new software. They’re releasing a partner program, and they’re offering 20 percent commissions. And here’s your affiliate link. And that’s just table stakes now. I’m not going to represent you if you don’t have some sort of commission payout.

Back when we became a partner, it was probably different than it is today because there were only probably hundreds of partners. Now there are thousands of partners. There are solution partners and service partners. What I’ve learned is what used to be well known and understood as being a HubSpot partner and that used to feel somewhat exclusive. Now it feels like there’s a whole bunch of us. Differentiation among even just the partnerships is critical, not just the differentiation among other agencies.

When we became a partner, one of the first things that we did was we went through the certification.

“Differentiation among even just the partnerships is critical. Not just the differentiation among other agencies.”

We white labeled a couple of their offers, put those on our website, got the decks, did a couple of meetups, and things just so we could understand what the conversation was around the platform, what sort of problems people are having—that was all very important. When it started to take off for us, though, was when we started creating content around our ability to serve people using that platform.

For those of you who don’t know who I am or haven’t seen us on YouTube, we run a channel called HubSpot Hacks. Mike, that was the biggest catalyst for us, and being a partner is creating content that validates that we knew what we were talking about, relative to our platform partnership.

So if I had just put that we were a partner—and so were 15 other people at this conference, but we have a YouTube channel that demonstrates that value net. Now it’s different. As we got deeper into that platform partnership, there were things you had to hit. We had to set goals for new business development.

A lot of those goals become realized as a result of our content engine, not just by simply going through the motions of what they asked us to do as a partner.

Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. I think in the second episode of this podcast, I was interviewing an agency where they’d started with HubSpot quite a bit further down the road than you. I think he was saying when he joined, there were 8,000 or 9,000 partners, and he was bemoaning how challenging it was to stand out right amongst that literal sea of sameness. But that’s fascinating how you’re describing your journey. And I love that you were leaning into creating content, of course,

How has being an implementation partner changed your agency’s positioning and its ability to attract clients?

Ali Schwanke: One of the first things that we did was we said we were going to be focusing on HubSpot, but we didn’t say that exclusively you have to use HubSpot to work with us. So it was just kind of one of the tools in our toolbox. And as we launched the YouTube channel again, like. What’s funny is the YouTube channel wasn’t, I’d love to say at the time that we were so smart, but that was our go-to-market motion.

And, like all entrepreneurial experiments, that was one thing that we tried, and then we started to double down and where customers were asking for our help. And so a lesson there would be one thing that you think you might use your platform partnership for, like, be open to what customers in the market say, ’cause that’s really how business works.

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But as we started hearing folks say they needed help with HubSpot, we had a decision to make as an agency. And that was, are we going to continue to support people on MailChimp and Constant Contact and Zoho and other places like that? And the answer to that was, it was getting harder and harder to remain an expert in those while also everyone knows HubSpot has changed and continues to change. It’s one of the fastest-changing technologies in the marketing and tech space. So we went all in and today we are a HubSpot implementation partner, but we do not work in any other CRMs. We integrate maybe an external CRM with HubSpot, but we do not work on anything new. We don’t set up anything new.

It’s all HubSpot. So that was a decision that we had to make. And I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been able to amass the expertise we have because now, instead of seeing two use cases in Zoho a week and three in Salesforce and, you know, 10 in HubSpot and seven in MailChimp, we’re seeing We’re now seeing, you know, 40 instances and 40 challenges and whatever every week, plus all the calls and all the questions we’re getting on our YouTube channel, the, just the speed of knowledge acquisition and expertise is just like, it’s 10 times what it was before.

Mike Allton: I’ve got two follow-up questions. One, how long did it take your YouTube channel to demonstrate some traction, you know, too, to kind of show you, Oh, okay, this is, this is working. And the second is, do you, or are you ever concerned about the fact that now as an agency, you are almost seemingly fully dependent on a completely different business platform?

Ali Schwanke: Yeah, there’s definitely, I think with the further I get in my entrepreneurial journey like I’ve taken a lot of time this last year to think more about, like, I’m going to be a good entrepreneur and not just a good Hubspot teacher or a good agency owner. Like I am, I am an entrepreneur and I don’t even think about it quote unquote, agency owner some days. I’m like, we sell services, let’s get inspired by their business models. But you know, a lot of businesses have proven that that can be a liability. But we look at the ecosystem and we look at, you know, there’s plenty of very successful service firms that have built an operation on Salesforce, for example, and been acquired by places like Accenture or, you know, Boston Consulting.

And so, I think about our trajectory as a company, I think about what types of services might we offer that are strategy-based, that are implemented in a tool like HubSpot, but don’t necessarily restrict us from having that domain knowledge of how to build like, let’s say a RevOps engine. So, you know, kind of mitigating that balance a little bit.

But the platform can use it to show really good growth for us. And we continue to win business because we have just more deeper expertise. So right now I’m gonna continue to play that fiddle and see, you know, where it goes, but I think there’s a good opportunity for us.

Mike Allton: Cool. And the YouTube channel, how did that?

Ali Schwanke: So, yeah. What I love to tell people is again, in hindsight, this could be a great story, but at the time we had a couple of videos on our regular channel. So if you go to find us, we do have a SimpleStrat channel and it is sad. Like Mike, it is so sad. I mean, it’s probably better than the majority of agency channels where they have 20 followers and 10 are their relatives, but we have maybe 1,600 followers or subscribers on this SimpleStrat channel.

And the SimpleStrat channel was like, we tried to do some videos that were kind of funny. We tried to do some that were brands. We had testimonials knowing what I now know about YouTube, I would look at that channel and be like, bad, that’s bad. But we did use that channel to do what we had the original idea for our HubSpot tutorials.

And that is at the time, nobody was creating short-to-the-point tutorials that were just like, get to the point people, none of this life story stuff. And so that was our idea. It was just like the loom was very new. I’m an early adopter of video technology. We shot looms and put them up on YouTube and just put a little intro slide on it.

Well, we had a couple of those and they were so simple, stupid, Mike. It was like how to connect your HubSpot to Gmail. Well, the reason why we created it is because we would send it to a client. We would tell them, we’d give them step-by-step instructions. And then they’re like, I don’t get it. And so hello, we just shoot a loom for them.

So after we did that we noticed that a couple of those videos had some views on that, like it was like a month and one of them had a thousand views. We didn’t know what we were doing. I didn’t read a YouTube book. I was just like, “Hmm, this is interesting.” So then we thought what if we just rolled this out into a separate brand? Because our goal at the time was not lead gen. Our goal at the time was just to see if we could build some subscribers on YouTube. That was the whole experiment. So we launched the channel and I think it was in May or June of 2019. And we produce videos weekly for about six months on a separate channel.

We treated it as its brand, had its brand kit and everything. And then in December, I took a look at it, and I thought you only have like, I don’t know, it was, it was sad. It was like 120 subscribers. So those of you that have a goal of hitting a thousand in the first year, like I hear, yeah, it’s hard.

But then I went back and looked at the channel and I’m a strategist by nature. And I looked at the channel and we were using tags, like, Oh my gosh, Mike, it was like Midwest. And like Adobe, my current self wants to just jump out of my skin because of tags. I mean if you are a YouTuber tags may or may not be as influential.

It used to be, but still, it was just sad. Our description, Oh my gosh. Mike, our description was like, shot on a Sony, blah, blah, blah, and edited with this. Well, blah, blah. And I’m just embarrassed because now it’s not on there, but if you went in the Wayback Machine you’d find it. So I went through and re-optimized all those videos.

And then we did that for, so now, then we put a practice in motion where we said, what’s happening on the channel. What is it telling us? What should we do? And so we did that for a couple of months. And what we found was a couple of video styles that started to drive views. And then we said, what if we stick a bottom-of-funnel offer, like literally again, just like, we have the traffic. So we were getting at that point, like there’s a couple of videos that I think had maybe like 15, 000 views. And we said, what if we put a bottom of the funnel there? Can we just get any consultations?

And we started to get a couple of people that would book, you know, like if you’re in business and the first time you get someone that books a meeting with you, that doesn’t know you or your grandma or your neighbor, and you’re like, I have a real business. What is going on here? So we started to see that. And then the perfect storm happened for us, which was the world shut down because of COVID and everybody, like half their teams, were gone and everyone left behind is like, what the heck is this HubSpot thing? And HubSpot at the time had no tutorials on their channel.

Everybody found us. So like super-perfect storm, super-perfect storm for us. But like, had we not invested at the time, I’m telling you, Mike, nobody else in the industry was making YouTube videos in the agency space because they all were looking for a direct response in terms of like lead gen. And we just know it was a long-term play.

So anyway, all that to be said, the growth of the channel finally then really blew up during COVID because everyone’s digital. They’re all HubSpot had a heyday. Every tech company had a heyday. We were getting a lot of traffic and started hearing that HubSpot was using our videos for their social. So we started seeing that they hired a YouTube team, they were watching what we were doing and now PS like, you know, they, they do a lot of stuff.

We do. So it’s been fun, but I think that the patience that was involved and growing was really important. And then at the same time, we just had been into it. And yes, it was a risk, but it was a risk that if we didn’t take it, we would have to probably grind a lot harder on the sales front than we did.

Mike Allton: That’s super powerful advice. I think to anybody listening, whether you’re thinking about partnering with HubSpot or some other platform, you don’t necessarily even have to partner with that platform to create great content about the platforms that your target audience has questions about. And to your point about hitching your trailer to another platform, you know, at Agorapulse that’s something we are scared about nonstop every day because we’re at the whim and dependency of social platforms. We saw that in 2023 when Twitter then X decided to change their API. And I mean, that was just a death now blow to a lot of platforms. Other providers in the social media space just couldn’t afford to spend $500, 000 dollars on access to an X API. But I want to talk a little bit more though, about how your agency, you become a HubSpot partner, you’re getting people coming in.

What’s different about the sales process when you’re selling that kind of implementation service versus just traditional agency marketing services?

Ali Schwanke: Yeah. So we’ve got two ways to think about it. And one of the things that I think is important is the more you do consulting in the sales space, the more this becomes clear, but you know, you’ve got your inbound sales process and then you’ve got an outbound sales process, or maybe like one that’s a little more, it needs more education.

So with the types of services that we do, we’re demonstrating a lot of our expertise online, and we’ll hear that folks have watched several of our videos or we’ll hear things like, I’ve been following your channel for the last year, or we have a project next year, and I know that I want to work with you guys.

And so we spent a lot more time on calls talking about the actual thing that we would do because we’ve already kind of earned that trust. Whereas I think, you know, other agencies might have like a pitch deck and a thing that they need to demonstrate their expertise and we don’t have that as much, I think the marketing agency, one thing that’s been helpful for us is when you use a tool like HubSpot and you sell services around setting up that platform and you sell the ability for you to streamline your sales process.

For example, there’s a lot of data through the platform that makes it possible for us to show our value.
Whereas sometimes when you’re in a marketing capacity and they bring you on, there’s this whole setup period and kind of ramp up and the clients might get in because there’s no results there yet. And you have to tell them that they’re going to trust you and. So it’s not that we don’t still have that. It’s just because we’re working in the platform and we, we kind of can build something in front of their eyes. I think it provides that tangible view of the value that maybe sometimes when you sell marketing services or packages, it’s a little bit harder up front to demonstrate that progress.

Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. And I love just how much you’re promoting a good, solid content marketing strategy to your point. A lot of agencies don’t do that for themselves, even though they may do that for their clients. Folks, we’re talking with Ali about the potential for agency growth when you leverage existing platforms capabilities, and audience, and I’ve got some more questions for her, you’re not going to want to miss it, but first, let me share with you how another agency is leveraging the power of Agorapulse to grow and scale.

Platform Partnerships: Revenue, Stability, and Retention

Mike Allton: So I know if I harken back to my agency days, which were a long time ago but many other agency owners listening will kind of bemoan this with me. Often we’re going through this cycle of we got a new client and we got maybe multiple new clients, and then we’ve got some revenue coming in and then we get some clients who are churning and now we’re struggling. We got to leave people off because we’ve got like a revenue and then we bring on new people, we’ve got to bring on new clients, and so on. And it’s just this rollercoaster ride.

How has a platform partnership model affected your agency’s revenue, stability, and client retention?

Ali Schwanke: Yeah, I think you still have to have a healthy perspective on how you think about business development. Cause that, that still strikes us too. I mean, I think that we were just talking before we started recording here on, this is an election year that we’re recording this podcast during, and there were a lot of stalled B2B deals, you know, industry agnostic through the B2B space. And so you, you almost have to rely on some winters, I guess you could say from a sales perspective, but for platform partnerships, you always have something, or you should always have something new to bring to your clients to talk about, and it’s never about the features. We were just talking about this relative to our next upcoming campaign and sort of us planning 2025, and it’s not about HubSpot.

For instance, they’ve now got a couple of tools inside of their platform. Breeze AI is a, is a new enrichment. It was their acquisition of Clearbit that’s now baked into the platform and it’s an enrichment of data. It also makes it possible for them to do what’s traditionally known as buyer intent. It’s called HubSpot buyer intent and the buyer intent’s not the piece.

But if we were to reach out to our current prospect database and say, “Hey, you know what? There’s some new functionality probably already available to you and it needs to be set up, but you could see what companies are hitting your website and interested in your services based on your target markets. Would you like to have a call about that? ‘Cause I could show how you might get access to that right now?”

So that is how I like to think about agency partnerships. I think that’s true of Agorapulse, too, where there’s things or there’s trends or things that have changed in the marketplace, and you can use your partnership and some of their credibility and their new features to position yourself to talk about the problems in light of what’s newly available in that partnership.

Mike Allton: That’s a terrific example. We just released support for Threads publishing, which is a huge opportunity then for every agency that’s using Agorapulse to go to their clients and say, Hey, look, if you haven’t gotten on threads yet, they’re announcing that they’re up to almost 300 million monthly users. They’re surpassing X in usability. You guys should be on Threads. Let’s talk about that. And of course, then they get to use Agorapulse and upsell the additional profiles and all the extra things that have to go into, now they’ve got to support a threads account, which is great. That’s, I think probably one of the hidden benefits of platform partnerships.

Benefits of Platform Partnerships

What are some other benefits that an agency owner might not know about or might not have considered if they’re looking at partnering with a platform?

Ali Schwanke: [Take advantage of] talking to your partnership rep. So I was just talking to a potential partner we’re looking at partnering with here in 2025. And the benefit is asking questions. “Tell me what you’re seeing in this space. Who do you know that can help me with X?” Really using that partnership [is more than] we kind of have a badge that we put on our website and sell these services. It becomes a knowledge and a connection resource for you.

Again, if we were in the social space, more like maybe some of the folks that are using Agorapulse across clients, with this new threads feature coming out, what agency is a threads power user? And who could I talk to maybe to get some insight? That’s a non-competitive sort of discussion.

That, I think, is an underutilized part of a platform partnership.

And the other thing is having done this, I know with HubSpot specifically, they have different levels of their platform partnerships, and every year they release a, let’s call it, elite partnership level. Are you taking full advantage of all those things?

So for us, we can be able to publish on their community blog because of the level that we’re at, we get a chance to co-brand some webinars. We have a chance to pitch stories for their sales blog. Are we doing those things? If we’re not, we’re missing out on some of the value that we really could get from those platform partnerships.

Measuring Business Impact

How are you currently measuring the business impact of social media? 

Ali Schwanke: Yeah, we have a strong propensity for numbers. And so there’s a couple of things. So we’re B2B. So again, I can’t say B2C specifically, cause that’s not my expertise, but for B2B, there are a couple of things that come to mind.

  1. One is going to be the importance of brand followers among the executives of the company on LinkedIn. So we know that people buy from people. And so if you’re not consistently growing the followers that follow the thought leadership of your executives, you’re missing an impact there because people buy from people. And that is like an awareness metric. Who cares about the company page these days? Like the company page size. If you get to a thousand and you’re an SMB, like 500 employees or less, you’re doing pretty good state a thousand. Don’t worry about driving it from there. That’s all you need from a credibility standpoint.
  2. I would say the other thing is, are you tracking that so that you’re able to retain that source data in your CRM? So when we look at the impact of social, I’m looking at where are we promoting our webinars. Where are we promoting our videos and where are we promoting our email list? So you have to have some sort of conversion mechanism to figure out where someone came from.

But I’ll tell you, Mike, every month we do two webinars. And I’ve gotten busy with some of the UTM tracking lately, 50 percent of our registrants from our last webinar came from LinkedIn. 15 came from Twitter. A big portion of those came from our email list, and YouTube. And then we’ve got some like random in there from, we’ve got Reddit, we’ve got Instagram.

If you follow the path of those people, we haven’t gotten strategic Mike on Instagram. How much more could we be getting from Instagram? We just tossed up a couple of random stories with some links in there. And could we get more from that if we, if we, you know, tried a little harder? We know LinkedIn is huge. We play a lot there, but I’ve still had a lot of brands that say LinkedIn hasn’t delivered for me. And I look at them and I say, That’s because all you’re doing is putting a paid ad in front of people. That’s not how the world works now.

Tools/Resources

What are some of the tools or resources that you’d say have been most valuable in your journey as an agency and/or on this path of being an implementation partner?

Ali Schwanke: Oh, goodness. People who know me well know I love it. I have so many tools and so many resources that I use, but I would say it comes down to people, processes, and then tools. That’s really how things shake out.

You have to have good people who are open to learning, who want to provide a good experience, and who can get past their curse of knowledge.

If there’s anything that’s benefited me the most, it’s talking to other agency owners about their onboarding process. I’ve gone to a lot of webinars from folks like yourself and others in this space that help agencies think through their process. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel.

For tools, we use a lot of things to map things out for clients:

Mike Allton: That was a huge tool stack.

One thing that I think you suggested, which I appreciate, is the fact that obviously, AI is becoming more and more important. I have a whole another podcast about AI and marketing, but to your point, a lot of these tools already have AI baked in: Adobe, you mentioned Canva, HubSpot, of course, and Salesforce with their Einstein.

We don’t necessarily have to go looking for a whole new tool to do some aspect of our business. Look first at the tools that you’re already using, and see how they’ve implemented or augmented what they do with AI. The use of AI to help identify and expand on contact information [is] huge. That’s incredibly helpful.

Advice If You’re Thinking About Platform Partnerships

What advice would you give agency owners who are considering working/partnering with other platforms, the likes of which we’ve been talking about all day?

Ali Schwanke: One of the first things you want to think about when you bring in a partner is—probably due to some of the stops and starts we’ve had in our journey—what will you do with that partnership if you’re thinking about it beyond just having a badge on your website?

We think about new certifications or new platform partnerships as a thing that adds credibility to our offering. And, while that’s true, there is a level of titration when you’re doing that. In science and chemistry class, there’s a certain point that it’s effective. Beyond that point, it’s not going to do anything else for you.

It doesn’t dilute.

So, what are you going to do with that partnership? You have to build a plan and have someone own that because ultimately, if you’re not getting an ROI from that partnership, it’s not a good thing for you. It’s not a good thing for the partner program, either. I always want to be someone’s best case study and best customer. And if I can’t be that, then it’s going to cause me to pause and think about whether or not I should move forward.

Thank you for reading all about platform partnerships in this latest episode of Social Pulse Podcast: Agency Edition on Apple, powered by Agorapulse, where every week we’re talking to marketing agencies like you going through many of the same struggles you’re going through and sharing their stories, subscribe to find in each episode, inspiration, motivation, and the perspiration that go into growing and scaling agencies like yours.

The Hidden Power of Platform Partnerships: A Marketing Agency Growth Story
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