While many businesses might believe they are self-sufficient, partnership marketing can help you collaborate with others to reach a broader audience.
It involves companies with mutual goals and similar target markets launching a campaign together. Many companies are achieving new milestones using this tactic. However, if your goals and vision aren’t aligned, the campaign will likely be unfruitful.
Are you planning a partnership marketing campaign for the first time? These eleven tips will help you approach it effectively.
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1. Partner with like-minded brands
Collaborations can help grow your business. An ideal brand would share similar target audiences to your brand and would be looking for an opportunity to make its way into new markets. But that is only the case if you get associated with a like-minded brand that is also not your competitor. So, you need to research properly to find a brand you can form a link with for the campaign.
The purpose of this campaign is to enhance the branding of each business. It must present equal importance of the two businesses in partnership to add new meaning to using a service or a product. With the implementation of strategic marketing, you can show the targeted audiences that they need to get associated with both the brands as one can’t do without the other.
Hence, it would be best if you had a well-thought business plan before you do anything so that you don’t take a step you would regret.
2. Form a partnership that delivers turnkey solutions
It is essential to look for partners that can offer you easy and ready-to-use solutions. So, identify and collaborate with them to utilize an end-to-end approach that makes buying decisions more straightforward for your target audience – especially in the capacity of B2B.
So, for instance, if you’re a restaurant, you can collaborate with a snack and use it in your recipes (like the Taco Bell and Dorritos partnership). That way, you can target both the customers of snacks and the restaurant to come in one place to enjoy their favorite thing to eat. It will give power to both brands.
Conducting successful partnership marketing campaigns can even take you out of a crisis. If you cannot recover from the situation and plan to sell your business, you should study the best time to sell it.
3. Get your goals aligned
Partnerships only work when the goals of both parties involved have similar objectives. So, for your marketing partnership to survive, it’s crucial to bring the partners on the same page and align their goals. Moreover, they should be equally enthusiastic about the collaboration to get the desired outcome. If one of them downplays their role, it will be a sign that there was a lack of communication along the way.
Therefore, to ensure that your partnership lasts long, communicate your expectations for the campaign and do regular check-ins.
4. Make sure your audiences are a different cluster
The partnership will have no use if both the brands belong to the same cluster. The aim should be to bring a new audience to your cluster instead of targeting the same people as it wouldn’t add any value. So, leverage this technique to unlock and expose your brand to a new audience.
While these brands should have a different audience, you also need to ensure that they aren’t too distant. Otherwise, the collaboration won’t make sense to the audience. Hence, the target audience of the brand you collaborate with should be potentially interested in your brand as well.
You can use advanced digital marketing tools to achieve the desired outcomes of this partnership, as they will allow you to target your audience accurately.
5. Leverage collective data
When you collaborate with another brand, your collective data can indicate who the targeted audience is. But you need to ensure that most of the individuals on that list are potential customers. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any point in benefiting from the database.
So, in a partnership, you should use each other’s databases and share them to form a collective database. However, map out the goals first to approach the collective data in a way that gets you the most desirable outcome.
If you carry out this campaign online, you can monitor the website to check its performance and make changes to the resulting date where necessary.
6. Drive your partnership with purpose
A common mistake is to opt for partnerships that complement their product while focusing on finding a mutual purpose. For your B2B business to be in a fruitful collaboration, you must choose a partner that offers fast-moving consumer goods. That way, your brand with a limited audience will leverage from the larger audience by accelerating conversion.
7. Be transparent
Being in a partnership means that you need to maintain transparency in it. You must recognize and inform each other about your strengths to use them in the campaigns. With the collaborative campaigns, both the partners will bring their value propositions to the arrangement. Doing this will elevate and enrich the marketing campaign, achieving the outcomes that it was meant to achieve. For example, this could help boost the conversion rates for both businesses.
8. Bring more value to your target audience
Remember that the purpose of your partnership is to bring more value to your audience – something that they would be interested in. So, you can arrange events like a podcast or educational webinar that addresses their questions or explains a solution. The benefit of having a partner on board through this process is that you will use diversified experts to cover various topics, educate and engage your audience and make a buzz about your product through organic means.
9. Take advantage of cross-promotion opportunities
Forming a partnership with a relevant brand is not enough until you fully benefit from it. It would help if you had a dedicated team on the project to keep finding opportunities to run a cross-promotional campaign between the two brands.
So, the marketing plan should include cross-promotional strategies with shared thought management. That way, you will be able to bring innovation to your work and help you in driving more suitable solutions for clients. Besides that, this will ensure that the continuity results remain impactful campaigns and form stronger alliances.
You will find many opportunities for cross-promotion in social media marketing.
10. Ensure there is mutual benefit
The very base of any partnership is finding a reason to collaborate. There should be mutual benefits involved when you offer or accept a partnership opportunity. Unless you have a mutual benefit of roughly the same level, the partnership won’t be successful as you initially planned. If one partner’s benefits are much more significant than the other partner’s, the collaboration will never materialize or fall apart at the first stage.
11. Maintain clear and concise communication
No partnership can be a success without the assistance of effective communication. So, if you truly want to leverage the power of partnerships in marketing campaigns, you must establish means of clear and concise communication. They should know the creative vision, working styles, etc., for each other to make informed decisions regarding the campaign.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for ways to bring a new audience on board, forming a marketing partnership can significantly benefit you. However, you need to know precisely how to approach this partnership. Otherwise, you’ll lose more than you gain from the collaboration. Implement and deploy the guidelines mentioned above to make the most of a marketing partnership.
Guest author: Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed — among other intriguing things — to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.