What is a partner marketing plan?
A partner marketing plan serves as a comprehensive document that elucidates the concepts, objectives, tactics, and responsibilities linked with a partnership. Essentially, it documents the conversations between partners, ensuring that all agreed-upon decisions can be conveniently referenced from a single centralized source.
Ensuring that all partners are aligned, a partner marketing plan plays a crucial role. Additionally, it boosts visibility and motivates both partners to be responsible for the agreed-upon actions.
Partnership Marketing vs Business Partnerships – What is the Difference?.
Typically, business partnerships refer to official, lawful contracts forged between involved parties. Such partnerships arise, for instance, when two legal firms consolidate or when a company joins forces with another to offer a joint service or product. These collaborations entail extensive bureaucratic procedures encompassing contracts, taxes, registrations, liability aspects, and often endure as enduring or protracted arrangements.
In contrast, partnership marketing can be significantly less formal and may not necessitate any legal contracts, tax complexities, or monetary transactions. Despite being labeled as partnership marketing, it commonly takes the form of a more relaxed agreement or collaboration between parties, even though formalized versions of partnership marketing exist.
The objective is to attain marketing goals that can be challenging to measure, such as enhanced brand awareness, credibility, and trust through collaboration, even though these advantages may not generate instant revenue.
Instead of relying on a sales commission that is based on immediate sales impact, many marketing partnerships are evaluated by the actions taken or impressions generated.
In some cases, like when two influencers collaborate to jointly create new content, there is no exchange of money, no agreement and the collaboration may be a spontaneous, once-off event with no paperwork or agreement at all.
What should you put in a partner marketing plan?
Your partner marketing plan can be structured in various ways, and there is no definitive right or wrong approach. The crucial factor is that the plan effectively serves the needs of both you and your partner, facilitating the implementation of a mutually advantageous partnership.
Here are some useful things to consider including.
- A heading or title.
- Who created the document.
- The date it was last updated.
- A summary of your joint value proposition.
- Your idea or proposal.
- Your target market.
- The market opportunity or trends.
- Your ideal customer profile.
- Your marketing strategy (and who is responsible for doing what).
- What each partner will invest (in terms of money and resources).
- Key performance indicators (how will you know whether the partnership was a success?
Naturally, the constituent factors may differ based on the type of partnership established and the desired outcomes. Nonetheless, this serves as a promising beginning!
It is also advisable to continuously enhance and revise your marketing plan to incorporate any modifications that have been discussed in person. Having an outdated partner marketing plan can be detrimental, so make sure to avoid it at all costs.
What Are the Main Types of Partnership Marketing?.
Acceleration Partners suggests that selecting the appropriate type of partnership (along with suitable partners) is crucial for achieving success in partnership marketing as there are various options available.
We will now briefly examine some of the most popular strategies.
- Affiliate Marketing: a mutually-beneficial strategy that involves collaboration with a publisher, such as a blogger or an influencer, who will advertise and promote your product or service to their respective audience.
- Influencer Marketing: when an influencer or industry expert markets the brand’s product/service to their followers in exchange for a fee or free products/perks or upgrades. Influencers also benefit from creating content for the brand, as it forms part of their channel’s content and adds value for their followers.
- Loyalty Marketing: when a brand offers incentives to its customers to buy more frequently or spend more with a formalized program to earn points and receive benefits like discounts or a free product after x purchases.
- Distribution Partnership Marketing: when a certain brand will bundle up another brand’s products or services with their own products or services, as a package deal, and the brands then benefit from reaching each other’s distribution networks.
- Referral Marketing: referral programs are similar to affiliate and loyalty marketing, where a brand partners with people who will refer people to the brand in exchange for an incentive, reward, or commission.
- Cross-Promotion Marketing: when partners promote each other to their particular audiences through a joint marketing campaign that promotes the other’s product/service.
- Sponsorships: when a brand publicly sponsors the second party in exchange for visibility and views. Sponsors can sponsor events, public figures like athletes or musicians, or content creators, their channels, or individual pieces of content like a specific YouTube video by a popular creator.
- Product Placements: when a clearly branded product is used in a TV show or movie and the scene places emphasis on the product or brand, ensuring that viewers see it being used by a beloved character in the show.
- Co-branding: when two brands come together to create a co-branded product or upgrade, like the Apple Watch Nike Edition.
- Content Marketing: when a brand has their product placed in content like blogs, videos, and social media posts to promote their products in a natural and relevant way.
- Licensing: when a brand allows another brand to make and market a product under its branding. For example, Netflix and Ben & Jerry’s “Netflix and Chill’d” ice-cream edition.
Your partner marketing strategy checklist
For your partnerships to be successful, a partner marketing plan must be integrated into a strong partner marketing strategy. Prior to developing a plan and searching for a partner, there are several necessary steps that your business must undertake.
Follow this straightforward checklist to guarantee the maximum effectiveness of your partner marketing strategy.
Set clear goals
To begin with, it is essential to establish definitive goals that you aim to achieve through a marketing partnership.
Partner marketing can serve as a valuable tool for growth, but forming a partnership without a specific objective is pointless. Likewise, if there is a goal that can be more effectively accomplished through an alternative approach other than partner marketing, creating a partnership at this time is unnecessary.
Some potential goals that you may aim to accomplish through a marketing collaboration includes:
- Reach new markets.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Incentivise loyalty.
- Boost sales.
- Improve brand reputation.
- Generate leads.
It is advisable to be as specific as possible when establishing goals. It is highly recommended to establish SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) for maximum effectiveness, although a partner can assist in resolving any uncertainties or ambiguities that may arise.
Picture your ideal partners
As you start envisioning your perfect partners, ensure they possess the ability to collaborate with you effectively, assisting in the achievement of the goals you outlined.
There are a wide range of entities available for collaboration, including affiliates, influencers, publishers, and similar businesses. It may require careful consideration, but it is even possible to collaborate with your competitors (although it may not be suitable for everyone, we have witnessed various competitors joining forces to enhance their competitiveness against other brands in their industry). The possibilities are endless!
It is crucial to bear in mind that any partnership you enter should be mutually beneficial to both you and your partner. Hence, when considering potential partners, it is necessary to evaluate the value you could offer to them.
Sometimes, it is beneficial to consider the possibility that a prospective partner shares similar objectives with you (such as targeting markets they excel in, while they wish to enter yours!). Nevertheless, this is not an absolute requirement, as numerous fruitful partnerships exist where brands derive advantages in distinct ways.
Work out the nitty-gritty
Now that you have a clear understanding of your goals for a partnership, your preferred approach to collaboration, and the type of partners you are interested in, you only need to turn these concepts into actuality.
Before reaching out to potential partners, it is crucial to determine what you are seeking from them and what you can offer in return. This will greatly assist in effective communication and serve as the foundation for your partner marketing plan if they agree to collaborate. For instance, you may choose to collaborate with a partner brand to develop exclusive content that requires email capture before jointly promoting it to your respective audiences and sharing the resulting leads.
It is beneficial to customize your proposal according to the specific brands you reach out to, adjusting your request and offer accordingly. For instance, in the previous example, you can propose diverse content topics to each brand, considering their current website content and the mutual expertise you both possess.
Recruit partners
After completing all the preparation, you can now focus on recruiting partners who can collaborate with you to bring mutual benefits to your business.
If you have made the decision to establish a conventional partnership program (such as finding affiliates), it is essential to develop a strategy on how to promote it. This may involve utilizing platforms such as paid advertising or email marketing.
However, in most cases, the main focus of recruiting partners is on locating suitable prospects (which Breezy can assist you with in a faster and easier manner!). While it is important to clearly communicate the type of partnership you are seeking during the initial outreach, the objective should be to arrange a meeting in order to have a more in-depth discussion and negotiate a mutually beneficial partnership.
