Tips & Guides — 09 Feb 2021
4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Partner Program
Are you still questioning how to make the most out of a partner program and ensure that it indeed brings profitability to your business? We know some great tips which can really help you to enhance the impact of any partner program!
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Learn more →Today, more and more companies start including the partnership in their business development plan to significantly improve the sales revenue, increase brand awareness, and enlarge the target audience of their products. Owing to the vast number of business growth opportunities that come along, a partner program is a new but perspective “must-have” for different industries. If applied properly, it will help the company stay competitive in any area and easily take a business to the next level of growth.
Before we start talking about how to make the best of any partnership, let’s talk about the real cases. According to Forbes, one of the most powerful cooperation illustrations is the innovative partner program between Starbucks and Spotify, which allows generating unique music playlists for the coffeeshops and allows the Spotify users to receive points for the coffee purchasing.
This cooperation provides a great example of a strategic partnership and how it can expand brand awareness and boost both corporations’ income.
Whether you already have a partner program and think about bringing it to a new level, or you are just launching one and want to be fully-equipped from the outset, this article will give you a broader perspective on partner programs as a business strategy.
While a partnership program’s primary role is to be a promotion channel, you should consider it to be more than that. Your business partners heavily influence your brand image and your business success. So, what can you do to improve the performance of each partner and the partner program as a whole?
Though it may seem too simple at first, the partner analysis is the first thing you need to do to determine whether it will bring you the benefits or not. It is crucial to make sure that your partner has a similar target audience, matching values, and final goals.
However, that’s only one of the various criteria you have to keep in mind for setting productive and mutually beneficial cooperation. You need to make sure your businesses are of a similar size and possess a strong marketing potential to reach the local audience, which allows developing the business across the globe.
We recommend using the broad categories of the partnerships, including social media influencers, traditional content publishers, and other brands of your industry, which can make a notable contribution to your company’s growth and increase the number of directions for its further development.
To make it easier for you to understand the profile of partners and sort them out based on the volume of a potential partnership, you can make a structured list due to the following criteria:
It allows getting basic support, website listing, document integration, etc. This stage helps the small brands to start deploying their products.
Profitable Partnership
Here you can include the companies that will add a particular value to your company because of having a similar audience and goals; and those which can provide new prospects or add a key component to your marketing strategy.
This level does imply not only the full go-to-market strategy but also the organizing of the joint conferences of your companies, press releases, sales events, and more. It also includes various benefits like exclusive access to the product, its adopting and reselling, which allows to establish fruitful cooperation for both partners and greatly contribute to the companies’ further development.
When we talk about strategic brand partnership, it is no longer about solely creating a bonus system to motivate your partners to drive more results. Though obviously, you can do that as well. But it is more about the strategic determination of the value that both parties receive from this cooperation.
You are probably not the only one who wants to win a particular brand to partner with. Once you determine the right partner, it’s now essential to provide the list of benefits on why it is a great option to choose your company for a partnership. That is why you need to develop a strong business proposal where you point out the main benefits, prospects, and results of your companies’ co-marketing.
For example, let’s go to the Starbucks & Spotify partnership again. The colossal marketing potential and various benefits, such as enlarging a similar audience, increasing brand awareness, improving the customers’ interaction with the companies, and significant boosting of the sales revenue, allows two great corporations to make the most of this partner campaign.
According to research, in 2018, digital advertisers wasted $51 million to ad fraud daily. And, unfortunately, this tendency is only increasing. Talking about fraud in partner programs is not only about financial losses, it is also about the risk of losing a partner’s trust. That is why fraud checking is something you can’t neglect. To spot the fraud, companies need to know their own and their partners’ usual data patterns. Various fraud types heavily depend on the type of device the traffic is coming from.
Suppose you have noticed the unusual behavior of the partner’s leads. In that case, it can mean that the partner is utilizing shady techniques to increase his revenue without bringing real value to your business. Here are some of the signs that can help you spot the fraud:
By following the best fraud prevention practices and using dedicated tools, you minimize the risks of fraud in your campaigns, which in its turn minimizes the chances of a bad experience in partner collaborations.
The importance of influencers couldn’t be ignored to the degree that they even deserve a separate mention. They always keep updated with the latest trends and do various experiments with new formats and platforms, thus building a strong connection with their followers.
And one more beauty of partnering with influencers lies in the fact that they can communicate your products to their audience 24/7. It is a huge benefit as people are more eager to interact with social media posts in their free time, which for most will be in the evenings after work.
While choosing the influencers, you need to pay attention to their social image, the type of audience they have aggregated, and the success of their cooperation with similar brands.
Except for choosing the influencers that have access to your target audience and fit your brand, it’s important to present your product or service in the best possible manner. You may need more localized content if you work with different influencers. But don’t let this additional workload carry you away from this path. Today you can use the help of content creators and assignment writers who would create social media posts or scripts for videos that would highlight all the benefits of your product.
To sum up, nowadays the partnership is a profitable way for companies to work together for mutual benefit. So far, there are various ways of applying the partner program to boost the company development, such as making multiple cooperation with different companies and influencers or creating your strategy on how to bring further benefits for both parties.
So, if you are still in doubt whether applying for the partnership will be profitable or not – we insist you go and check it yourself! With these important partner program insights, you can now create a brilliant model that can significantly boost your company’s growth.
And should you need a partner marketing platform to manage your partner and run ad campaigns, Affise provides a 30-day trial. Check how you can create and manage your parетук program on Affise.
Content Manager
Yulia is a Content Marketer with a love to a great story and an eye to small details. Carrying a voice and delivering an accurate message - that’s what Yulia believes content marketing is for. Looking for thorough research and long-reads? You came to the right person. Her goal is to produce content that educates and entertains, and most importantly, has an impact. Challenges and something that is yet to be explored are her main motivators.
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