Changing Environments Call For New Thinking
Collaborating in partnership marketing is a powerful strategy that enables multiple businesses to join forces and expand their reach to a wider audience. Such initiatives facilitate the collaboration between your business and a compatible counterpart that shares a similar target market, resulting in significant mutual advantages. Nonetheless, to attain favorable outcomes, it is essential that your goals and visions are congruent when embarking on marketing ventures together.
1. Make Greater Use of Your Customer Data
Considering what you know about your shoppers and buyers at three different stages can be highly valuable. Your first-party customer data is an exceptional resource that enables you to enhance programs, optimize offers, and tailor messages to take advantage of lucrative market opportunities. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of your customers, you can ultimately achieve better results.
- PRE-CLICKÂ What sorts of offers and information are the best motivators of first actions? How do you message for different stages in the buyer journey?
- POST-CLICK/PRE-PURCHASEÂ What measurable signals do anonymized shoppers provide to us before they buy? Are we collecting the information necessary to leverage buyer behavior for more effective tactics? Think in particular about their product searches, add to carts, and places in the buyer journey that users seem to get off track or lost. Consider also the laws and regulations regarding the collection and use of customer and prospect data in the regions in which you do business. Rules and conventions vary and it is essential you keep those in wind as you formulate your plans.
- POST PURCHASEÂ What insights do we have about our actual buyers versus our shoppers? Do they skew differently? Do there appear to be different buyer segments among our purchasers? To cite an example use case for the travel industry, this could also mean insights from booked versus consumed reservations.
When undertaking this process, it is crucial to take into account both the existing data being collected and the potential data that could be collected. If your current data collection only involves purchase value, how could incorporating data on product searches, items added to carts, and basket contents enhance the effectiveness of your approach?
2. Understand and Leverage the Strengths of Your Leading Partners
Establishing and nurturing connections, effectively interacting with, meeting payment deadlines, and fostering a direct association with your primary collaborators are essential for developing mutually beneficial strategies that benefit both parties involved. Though it may appear basic, interpersonal connections hold significant value in the field of partnerships. Various methods can be purposefully devised to incentivize and provide rewards to partners, in order to promote customer acquisition, expedite conversions, enhance lifetime value, trial-to-subscription models, and other objectives.
Personalized Communication Makes a Difference
Personalized outreach plays a crucial role in revitalizing underperforming partners and reconnecting them with your program. By directly engaging and understanding your partners’ objectives, you can establish a mutually advantageous program that can rapidly expand for further development.
Data Makes a Difference
One can internally analyze data to enhance programs collectively, or alternatively, work together with partners to share insights enabling them to provide more impactful and personalized messaging in forthcoming endeavors. Data has the ability to truly have an impact, and the crucial aspect lies in identifying the most pertinent information in order to capitalize on significant business prospects.
3. Explore Technological Solutions to Market Opportunities
In the ever-evolving martech industry, it is increasingly crucial to incorporate the most advanced and emerging technologies. Discover a time-efficient and cost-effective method to keep yourself informed about technologies that may have relevance to your business. This could involve receiving periodic insights from your team or agency, or staying updated on recent third-party tech integrations or improvements within your tracking solution or network.
Categorizing technological innovation into these categories can be beneficial for consideration:
- Program Management: Can a new technology make it easier for us to manage and optimize our partnerships or improve our speed to market? An example here would be an offering that used AI to predict future results and makes forecasting more accurate.
- Platforms and Access: Can technology improve the cross-device user experience we deliver, so that we can respond to clients on their terms, in the locations they prefer? An example here would be a technology that can improve measurement on mobile devices.
- User Experience and Purchase Friction: Can a new technology make the process of helping customers finding the right product and purchasing it faster and easier? Can it help address a bottleneck identified in your buyer flow or customer journey? An example here would be a technology that could reduce steps in the transaction process.
- Partner Enablement: Can a technology make it easier for partners to capitalize on our offers and improve revenue? An example would be a technology that helps partners get up and running quickly on your partner program and get paid faster.
- Reporting and ROI: Can a new technology or integration help you measure, visualize, and integrate other marketing channel data? An example of this would be a technology that gathers and pulls insights in real-time that’s easily added to your other marketing data to measure the return on the overall partner program investment.
5. Take Advantage Of Your Collective Data
It is crucial to ensure that the campaign is tailored for the identical audience. Partnership marketing offers the advantage of utilizing each other’s databases and sharing the collective data. However, it is vital to pre-establish the audience and desired campaign outcome, ensuring both companies are aligned on the objectives.
6. Focus On The Purpose Of The Partnership
Successful partnerships do not necessarily have to adhere to the practice of finding partners who have a similar product focus. Instead, companies may opt for collaborations where one brand has a limited market presence but wishes to expand its reach by teaming up with a rapidly growing consumer goods brand.
7. Be Transparent And Play To Your Strengths
Like any relationship, success can be achieved by being open and acknowledging and utilizing each other’s strengths. Both parties contribute their distinct value propositions, which can enhance and elevate the goals and objectives (such as marketing campaigns) that the partnership was created to accomplish. – Ajay Gupta, Stirista
8. Provide Something Valuable For Your Target Audience
Collaborate with your partner to offer your target audience something of value, like an informative webinar or podcast that addresses a query or resolves an issue. Partnering up can bring together a variety of experts to cover multiple subjects, captivate and educate your audience, and naturally create a positive buzz. – Corbett Drummey, Popular Pays
9. Engage The Right Technology Platform
If technology automation is utilized, partnerships can serve as a scalable and appealing substitute for primary marketing channels. By implementing the appropriate technology platform, partnership marketing campaigns can be freed from manual efforts, allowing marketers to dedicate more time to program strategy. – Maura Smith, pepperjam.com
10. Identify Cross-Promotion Opportunities
We prioritize co-marketing with our strategic partners to such an extent that we have a dedicated team responsible for ensuring ongoing collaboration. In developing our marketing strategies, we purposefully identify opportunities for cross-promotion, shared thought leadership, and collaborative innovation in order to enhance our solutions for clients. This consistent approach leads to more powerful campaigns and reinforced partnerships. – Jay Dettling, Ansira
