As with other activities within your business, any collaborative marketing strategy should be carefully planned out. The first step is to choose partners wisely. This stage of your planning should involve detailed research to identify companies you feel would be a good fit with your brand. As with the CoverGirl/Lucas Film example, that can sometimes include thinking outside the box.
Once you’ve identified potential partners, the next step is to meet with them and see if interests and goals truly align and tentatively explore how you can work together. You’ll set out guidelines as to how you and your team members will work together and what any stated goals of a particular campaign are. You can then move to drafting and finalizing a partnership agreement.
Once an agreement is reached and a partnership established, you can move to planning campaigns. What products will you jointly promote?
Choosing the products to promote, the channels you’ll advertise on, the format of any adverts, and how you will measure the success of those campaigns are all crucial decisions in your planning process. You also need to analyze metrics, something that is easy with Affise, and regularly evaluate the campaign to see how it’s performing.
5.Adapt and thrive
One factor that can be a major influence on the success of any collaborative marketing campaign is recognizing that all partners may have different organizational needs. It’s also important to recognize that those needs may change and evolve, even within the lifetime of any partnership. You also need a good way of sharing data between partners, something that is simple with Affise’s CPAPI platform.
Having regular audits of your relationship and of the performance of any campaign can help maintain a healthy partnership. These meetings can also help highlight whether there have been any dynamic changes to a partner’s needs, whether there have been changes to the digital marketing world you operate in, and whether there have been changes to tools and martech that may benefit the partnership.
Good communication is key to all aspects of your collaborative marketing partnerships, especially so when there are multiple partners. Having a robust IP telephony system means that communication is easy. You need to regularly assess and discuss any changes to needs within the relationship as well as any changes as to partners’ relationships with external organizations and markets.
From good communication comes efficient evaluation. The partnership has to continue to be viable and, above all else, it must continue to offer benefits to each of the partners. Any partnership campaign should be fluid and able to adapt to any changes so create shared templates for evaluation, both internally and of the partnership, that can help with success.
The takeaway