Tips & Guides — 18 Dec 2024
How to create a long-term relationship with your partners
Performance marketing is about building thriving and mutually beneficial relationships. From the moment you launch your program, how you communicate with your partners directly impacts the performance and revenue you generate with your campaigns.
Most successful relationships between brands and their partners are motivational, encouraging, and supportive. It comes down to partners sharing the same goals and benefiting both parties. So, if you are looking to start your program, knowing the steps to establish a long-term partnership is essential. Let’s dive in.
For a start, an ideal partner should have a similar audience to your target market, share common interests, be willing to promote your brand, and so on. That means you need to make some effort to find a partner that fits your brand. Undoubtedly, you hope that this relationship will last and both sides will benefit, so the time invested will have been worth it.
Another reason is the growth of the competition. In a survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub, 68% of respondents said that companies would increase their budget for influencer marketing in the coming months.
Unsurprisingly, over 90% of our survey respondents believe influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing. As more and more competitors enter the market, maintaining strong relationships with your partners is critical to keep them motivated to continue to promote your campaigns.
What is Partner Relationship Management?
Learn now →Partnerships are ongoing business collaborations. Both parties have needs and goals to achieve. In this context, engagement with your partners is essential, and maintaining healthy communication is the ultimate resource to ensure goals are aligned. Below, we have compiled a series of tips on how to build partnerships that benefit your brand.
Partnerships are not an end, but a means to achieve actual brand goals. Therefore, it is essential to define your goals from the beginning clearly. That way, you can keep referring to them throughout the process and ensure that your strategy stays on track.
Keep in mind that partnerships should provide immediate benefits and be designed for long-term collaboration. That’s why setting short- and long-term business goals for new relationships is important to define the future of your partnerships.
Additionally, a clear vision of your goals will help you to communicate better and be open and transparent with your partners about your expectations and what they can expect from you. Thus, you can prevent missing or hidden details from hindering your campaigns in the future, and your partners will know what to expect from you, which is key to a trusting relationship.
Remember to support your partners by communicating clearly and allowing them autonomy. Regular communication can prepare your partners to run their campaigns more successful and can be established by applying a few tips that will help improve interactions with your partners:
Regular communications will give your partners even more ideas for promoting your products and help them stay motivated to share your campaigns with more customers. The traditional time-consuming way includes setting up a blog and manually doing the tasks above one by one. Consider employing a dedicated partnership platform to streamline these tasks and give you more time to focus on improving your relationships with your partners.
Try to understand what your competitors are offering in terms of payout and ensure your offer is competitive. If you want to know more about what defines an offer, we can say that an offer is a public proposal from a brand to advertise a specific product or service in exchange for a partner commission.
However, it is important to remember that there is no single definition or template to follow. Each offer is defined by the specific brand and may be based on competitor offers.
In general, it can say that the most important elements of an offer are: The destination link through which the offer can be accessed; the detailed description; the collateral materials available, such as banners, logos, etc.; and the conversion flow, which describes what user actions partners need to trigger to get the commission.
Each partner has different strengths in terms of vertical, country, or preferred collateral to work with. You not only need to make sure that your partner is a good fit for your brand, but also your brand is a good fit for them; For that, ask if they understand what your goals are and what collateral you can offer so that both can benefit from the relationship.
There are many ways a partner can fit, but to know which is most important to your business, you need to establish your goals. Keep in mind that a partner can help you grow your customer or member base, increase brand awareness, or increase your participation in a new market where the public is not yet aware of your brand.
By aligning your brand values with your partner’s, you ensure they are consistent and avoid working with a partner at odds with your values.
Incentives will help get your partners excited about and engaged in your program. Thus, they tend to promote your products and services more and more.
Create these incentives through a tiered commission structure where, for example, an additional percentage is paid based on the number of customers referred by a partner. It is also possible to provide free product samples, but remember that the best way to create incentives is still by establishing commissions.
How to Keep Affiliates Engaged to Maximize ROI
Learn now →To decide which commission model makes the most sense, consider the structure of your partner program. Another idea is to search Google for other partner or affiliate programs and see how companies are operating in the same niche as you build their commission structure.
If you think a partnership would bring you excellent returns, put some effort into making the relationship take off.
Once you find a great partnership, by using a tool like Affise Reach, you can contact them through the in-app messaging system. Consider also visiting their LinkedIn; by doing so, you will increase your chances of getting answered and create long-lasting relationships.
As you can see, accomplishing this task is time-consuming and does not always yield the best results. With Affise Reach, you can free yourself from all the manual tasks and scale your partnerships by spending more time building, tracking, and ensuring all your partners are on the same page.
You can make the process easier by having a complete platform to be your ally. Affise Reach helps you at every stage of your partner program. With it, you can:
Affise Reach has a friendly interface that allows brands, marketers, and entrepreneurs to manage partnerships at all levels. Brands and digital marketers can search through more than 180.000 vetted publishers of every type and easily find partnership opportunities in every key vertical, including eCommerce, finance, gaming, and more.
With Affise Reach, we have new opportunities to connect with many publishers worldwide. This allows our product to be spread not only by the top publishers but also by the medium or micro publishers. It has helped us increase our revenue exponentially.
Get The Most Out Of Your Partnership Marketing Campaigns With Affise Reach
Learn now →One more tip before we end: ask your partners for feedback. Both parties must be willing to make improvements and adjustments to build a trusting relationship. One of the best ways to find out how to improve your partner program is simply asking your partners.
To do this, set up an area in your portal or community where your partners can request changes and make suggestions. You can also ask them what their experience has been with your brand.
It’s important to remember that building a good relationship with partners is key, as is investing in the technology tools that make this possible. This is paramount to a brand’s success. By putting the above tips into practice, you will surely have a top-notch partner program that is excited and motivated to promote your brand.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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