Tips & Guides — 13 Jan 2023
Best Partner Marketing Practices
Expanding brand awareness is one of the benefits of partnerships for brands - you'll gain access to new audiences and accelerate your revenue growth.
In addition to this, the surveys show that 63.5% of companies say that partners contributed to their annual revenue. Before starting, let’s keep in mind that partners choose which offers and products they are willing to promote and, in this regard, creating an offer with attractive terms makes them more likely to pick up yours. However, building a long-term relationship with them can be a challenge.
One way to encourage your partners and grow your campaigns is by making sure your offers drive engagement, provide incentives and competitive payouts. To do that, you may want to adopt the best practices that we will present during this article. Below, find out what you are going to learn here:
Let’s begin.
Image source: Freepik
In short, partnerships are a collaboration between partners or brands to achieve marketing goals, including increasing marketing reach, building brand awareness, growing customer base, and more.
An advantage of teaming up with a partner is that you take less risk if you employ an outcome-based model, which means that partners promote your business for a commission and get paid only for their results. Each brand can start its partner program, set rules, guidelines, and payments, and, finally, handle all communication between both sides.
Before we move on, it is crucial to understand the importance of employing a few actions to drive better results within a partner program. For instance, let’s take a look at a survey conducted by Aberdeen, which shows some benefits of adopting best practices for managing partners:
To find and maintain partnerships that will make a difference in growing your business, be ready to listen and understand your partners’ needs and consider using tactics, such as training programs or a forum for questions, to help them. But, that’s not all. To learn more, let’s take a look at the tips:
A great way to have a good start is to create a video or training material that you can email to your partners, with a link to your program’s landing page. It’s worth including in this email information about your brand and products, how to use the portal, and other tips that will help the partner successfully promote your products.
Be aware that not all partners perform equally well. Considering each partner’s performance in your evaluations will help you better understand how your programs perform, improve the results and reward the top-performing partners for further motivating them.
One way to get this metric is to measure how many goals are acquired through each partner. To access these numbers precisely, you may want to consider employing a platform for tracking attribution and opportunities. It’s crucial to measure that, once you want to avoid working with partners who are not promoting your products or getting results, which means they are draining your company’s resources. From a marketing perspective, that’s not ideal.
Any B2B or B2C company that wants a solid online presence needs to use multiple traffic sources for their campaigns. One of the reasons is that, according to a GWI study, 98% of users of a given social media platform use at least one other social platform.
For instance, 85% of TikTok users aged 16 to 64 said they use Facebook, and nearly 95% of Instagram users said they also use YouTube, which means that your target audience is most likely to be on more than one social media channel—thinking about using Youtube for discussing in-deep topics and inviting your audience to follow up your weekly news on Instagram.
We can say that within marketing, the different channels complement each other, and being present on more than one platform increases the chance of your brand being recognized by your audience. As a result, once customers are ready to take action, they will more likely remember your brand and send a message asking for more information or even request a quote.
Thus, you need to take advantage of the direct traffic and best channels, which means any platform that takes the target audience to the site, blog, or social media page. To make the most of your marketing initiatives with partners, keep in mind which channels perform better for your business goals. To learn more, explore the list of the best traffic sources for Partner Marketing that you should look at.
Image source: Freepik
When you provide training to your partners, you not only help them better understand and educate themselves about your products and services, but you also help them communicate the message about your brand and products more clearly.
In addition to this, training programs can explain more about improving your partners’ performance to obtain better results. Essentially, consider that some new partners may be beginners. Therefore, training materials or surveys conducted every six months will help them develop and thus improve the results of selling your products and services.
By creating a friendly partner portal, you can personalize your partners’ experience and provide marketing content, promotional materials, and referral links. You can gather all relevant information about your brand in one place by adding brand videos, for example, and add to your portal.
Sending emails to your partners is crucial, but it is also important that your emails are personalized. One way to do this is by adding each partner’s name to the top of the email. Give extra attention to the topics of your emails as well and prefer to send content geared towards improving your partner’s skills.
For example, you can send emails that help them sell your products better. For this, including suggestions on how to improve the performance of each campaign with examples of success.
Image source: Freepik
Marketing and sales materials such as press releases, photos, videos, and logos, are excellent to encourage partners to promote your offers. Thus, you will attend to the partner’s needs while ensuring that the outreach is within the guidelines set by you. It is helpful to have a press release template as it will assure a uniform look for your outgoing announcements and make sure you’re not glazing over any important details.
Additionally, ensuring accurate presentation of your products is one of the advantages of offering collateral. And, when you have good content and share it, your relationship with partners benefits. By making outreach easier and faster, you’ll make your partners trust your brand more and ensure your campaigns will gain better results in many aspects, for instance, when it comes to customer acquisition.
Image source: Freepik
It can be a good idea to encourage your partners to promote your program to attract new partners. Think about how you can offer incentives to your partners, so they feel motivated to share your programs, such as custom discount coupons, gifts, or monetary earnings. To start with, learn more about the referral programs here.
Keep in mind that your marketing strategy is constantly evolving. In this case, analyzing engagement metrics can be beneficial in identifying and solving problems. Check if your partners are:
By measuring the success of your campaign and the conversion of leads, you can easily make progress and, for instance, offer incentives to partners who reach the goals you set, which is also one of the keys to a successful partnership. In this case, consider using Affise to manage and track your partner program. Let’s see some helpful features from the platform:
Tracking: With a robust set of tools, marketers can track clicks, impressions, and conversions. For instance, it’s possible to track user engagement by tracking URL clicks, seeing how ad views contribute to leads generation, and correlating traffic to your offers to evaluate and understand campaign performance.
In addition, Affise offers a variety of cookieless tracking tools that provides a friendly funnel for help with the absence of third parties. Meanwhile, the parallel server makes the web experience easier and more convenient, which increases the users’ travel speed.
Analytics: Customize your reports and group them by an account manager, advertiser, partner, offer, and more, as well as custom statistics that allow you to view some specific and detailed data for a certain period. Take advantage of the 50+ data breakdowns we offer, as well as drill-down reports that let you combine multiple pieces of data on a single page. You can filter this data by nine criteria and create filter presets, so you do not constantly check every required box.
Offer Management: Do you need to manage hundreds of offers every day? With Affise, you can create, configure, modify, and delete offers individually or in bulk. You can also set privacy levels to control who your offers are available to, set offer schedules so you do not have to manually activate or pause offers, notify partners before the offer is automatically stopped, and more.
Partner Management: You can add hundreds of partners into the Affise platform with a couple of clicks and alter their profiles in bulk or one by one. The system allows to filter partners by various criteria and set statuses – active, not active, banned, on moderation. The latter option lets you make sure that only quality publishers can access your offers.
Additionally, affise displays your traffic and allows marketers to configure dashboards easily. You can also add marketing collateral to your offer management seamlessly.
Automation: Make sure repetitive tasks, such as approval, access, and others, do not steal your time by automating them. Apart from it, Affise lets you automatically improve campaign performance with CR, KPI & Click automation tools by setting specific rules, making it easier for you to manage your partner relationship, and giving you more time to take care of other business areas.
Payouts management: Partners are more likely to promote your offer if they see that they are getting paid on time and without significant hassles. Using the Affise platform, you can pay your partners in different currencies and create your offer model to benefit them and your business. Also, we offer various payment types, for instance, CPI, CPA, CPS, CPM, CPC.
We hope this article has clarified how good it can be for your business to work with partners and shown what best practices make for successful partnerships. Yes, partnership marketing can bring many benefits to your business, but you need to understand how it works and put it into practice. To summarize, let’s recall some of them:
We believe you are ready for the next steps after reading this article, but return to it whenever you need a refresher on best practices. You can go even further and start from scratch with a partner program that will take your business to the next step by downloading our free e-book.
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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