With various marketing strategies, a multitude of apps and platforms to use for promotion, and a range of tools on offer, marketing and sales teams have never been so well-equipped.
Yet working with other businesses and individuals has become increasingly common, with widely used options including influencer marketing, affiliate schemes, and partner programs. These make business marketing more effective, with professional entities using their expertise and platforms to promote products like yours.
To use multiple programs together, however, you need to scale these and build a partner ecosystem into your business model.
Identifying what initiatives to run and how to facilitate a partner program can be challenging. Luckily, this guide will take you through everything you need to know to scale your partner program and set you up to develop beneficial eCommerce partnerships that deliver quality results.
What is a partner program?
Before we go any further, what exactly is a partner program? This is a network used by your company to promote products and services through external businesses or individuals. The idea is to aid marketing lead generation and target consumers with interests related to your products or services, without this requiring additional research or initiatives from your team.
A partner program seeks out existing promotional channels to use with your products. Partner programs are used for many reasons. Startups, for example, might be looking to save on costs or the time required for metrics analysis, while more established businesses may be hoping to use the high-level functionality of a partner’s promotional channels.
To access these benefits, businesses switch from working alone on their marketing strategy to adopting a partnered approach. In recent years, this has seen many companies either create affiliate programs or scale these by moving existing partner programs to a SaaS platform.
There are three main partner program templates to choose from. These reflect how external companies interact with your business. They can be used simultaneously, in combination, or individually to create uniquely integrated eCommerce marketing strategies, with the aim of reaching specific customer bases, discovering new verticals to sell your products within, and so on.
Let’s take a look at each of them below.