Partnership marketing is an effective way for two or more businesses to combine forces and reach a broader audience. These campaigns allow your business to collaborate with a complementary business with a similar target market for a big mutual benefit. However, partnering up on a marketing initiative will only work if your goals and visions are aligned.
If you’re planning a partnership marketing campaign, here’s how the experts of Forbes Agency Council recommend approaching this arrangement. Follow their advice to give yourself the best chance of success.
Forbes Agency Council members share recommendations for organizations planning to launch a partnership marketing campaign.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Link Offerings To Enhance Both Brands
Businesses develop collaborations with like-minded, non-competing brands because they share similar target audiences and want to tap into new markets. Through strategic marketing, show these audiences that you can’t have one offering without the other. Present your partnership in a way that enhances each brand and brings new meaning to owning a product or using a service. – Marilyn Cowley, PREM – PR & Social
2. Seek Partners To Help Deliver Turnkey Solutions
Identify partners that can help you deliver easy-to-implement, turnkey solutions. An end-to-end approach makes the buying decision easier for your target customer, especially in the B2B space. So if you’re a training organization, find teaming partners in technology and marketing to help address a client’s people, processes and market position. You’re more powerful together. – Crystal Sargent, Invested Advisors
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3. Get Aligned On Goals
For any partnership marketing campaign, it’s crucial to ensure that both sides are aligned on goals and desired outcomes. When only half of the partnership is excited about the end result, it’s an indication that there was a miscommunication along the way. Setting expectations and maintaining check-ins throughout the campaign are imperative to the success of a long-term partnership. – Abby Campbell, Perform[cb] Agency
4. Look For Partners With Audiences In A Parallel Cluster
Since partnership marketing is a form of leveraged marketing where you unlock a new audience, you want to make sure that you don’t already have access to that audience. You want a new audience in a parallel cluster. Simply put, find partners who are different enough to give you leveraged exposure to a big enough chunk of new potential customers. – Brian D. Evans, Influencive / BDE Ventures
5. Take Advantage Of Your Collective Data
Make sure the campaign is designed to target the same audience. The benefit of partnership marketing is to take advantage of one another’s databases and share that collective data, but it’s imperative that the audience and end goal are mapped out in advance and that each company is on the same page about the desired campaign outcome. – Meredith Xavier, The Ligné Group
6. Focus On The Purpose Of The Partnership
Often companies look to find partnerships that complement their own product instead of the purpose. Successful partnerships don’t have to follow that model. It could be a partnership between a B2B brand with a limited reach that decided to partner with a fast-moving consumer goods brand in order to accelerate a conversation with a larger audience. – Mirella Vitale, ROCKWOOL Group
7. Be Transparent And Play To Your Strengths
As with any relationship, transparency and recognizing and playing to each other’s strengths are building blocks for success. Both parties bring their own unique value propositions, which together can enrich and elevate the purposes (marketing campaigns, etc.) the partnership was formed to achieve. – Ajay Gupta, Stirista
8. Provide Something Valuable For Your Target Audience
Team up with your partner to provide your target audience with something valuable, such as an educational webinar or podcast that answers a question or solves a problem. Joining forces with a partner can offer diversified experts to cover a range of topics, engage and educate your audience and create some great buzz organically. – Corbett Drummey, Popular Pays
9. Engage The Right Technology Platform
Partnerships are an attractive scalable alternative to primary marketing channels, presuming they are supported by technology automation. Engaging the right technology platform will eliminate the manual nature of partnership marketing campaigns, giving marketers more time to focus on program strategy. – Maura Smith, pepperjam.com
10. Identify Cross-Promotion Opportunities
Co-marketing with our strategic partners is so integral to our business that we have a team dedicated to ensuring we have an ongoing collaboration. As we create our marketing plans, we look at where we can cross-promote, jointly share thought leadership and work together to innovate and drive even better solutions for clients. The continuity results in more impactful campaigns and stronger alliances. – Jay Dettling, Ansira
11. Ensure A Mutual Benefit
A successful marketing partnership requires that both partners receive roughly the same level of benefit. If one partner receives a much greater benefit than the other, the partnership will fall apart or never materialize in the first place. – Jeff Bradford, the Bradford Group
12. Know The Different Strengths You Bring To The Table
Make sure your audiences align and make sure you’re both bringing something different to the equation. Partnership for partnership’s sake, to increase reach without understanding how you’re doing it or to whom you’re marketing, will generate a lackluster performance. Success lies in making sure it’s a true, authentic and credible partnership. – Craig Greiwe, Rogers & Cowan
13. Maintain Clear And Concise Communication
The one thing that has truly helped us to leverage the power of partnerships during marketing campaigns is to create channels of clear and concise communication. When both partners are on the same page regarding working styles, creative vision and execution of KPI-driven behaviors, the campaign’s success is inevitable. – Danielle Sabrina, Tribe Builder Media
14. Seek A Long-Term Partnership
Find a co-marketing partner with whom you can work long-term. It takes a lot of time and effort to find a great match. You want to leverage that effort and create multiple successful campaigns so that both of your brands benefit from the increased and repeated exposure to each other’s audiences. – Terry Tateossian, Socialfix Media
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
