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October 12, 2022

What is Partnership Marketing?

Digital advertising strategies are constantly evolving to keep up with shifts in technology and social media trends. In the age of the internet, having a solid plan for marketing your brand online is a key part of growth and client acquisition for your business.

One of the advertising techniques most commonly endorsed and utilized by top-tier digital marketing agencies such as Advertise Purple is partnership marketing. This performance-based, collaborative strategy relies on community-building and mutually beneficial relationships to improve the outreach and brand recognition of both parties involved.

How does partnership marketing work? And how can it increase your sales and increase the strength and scope of your business’s internet presence?

The digital advertising experts at Advertise Purple are here to answer all of your questions about partnership marketing. Get in touch with an agent today to learn more about this valuable strategy and how to implement partnership marketing in your business’s advertising plan.

What is Partnership Marketing?

Partnership marketing relies on building a strong relationship with a non-competitive company as partners as opposed to the vendor & client model. The two companies then work together using the strengths and resources they each bring to the table to build a powerful advertising campaign that will reach a broader base of potential customers than either company could hope to reach alone.

At Advertise Purple, we’ve developed a number of ways to achieve success from a partnership marketing campaign. However, no matter what techniques are used, the goal is always to achieve positive results for both parties.

Two Main Types of Partnership Marketing

The two most common executions of partnership marketing are affiliate marketing and distribution partnership. These strategies mainly differ in the approaches they take to collaboration. Different types of partnerships may be drawn to one method or the other, depending on each party’s specific needs, strengths, and advertising goals.

Affiliate Marketing

In an affiliate marketing strategy, a brand works closely with a publisher to share its products with the publisher’s audience. An example of this is a brand that makes running clothes paying a popular exercise-based Instagram influencer to promote their new shoes in a post. 

In this example, the clothing company gets the benefit of reaching a wide audience that shares interests (athletic wear) with their target client base, boosting sales as a result. Meanwhile, the Instagram influencer receives either a portion of the proceeds from those sales or a fee for directing their audience to the company’s website. The influencer also gains credibility and authority as a result of their association with an established brand in their field.

Digital advertising sees its greatest success when companies pay attention to the needs and interests of their intended consumers. Affiliate marketing provides a focused and direct path toward attracting your target audience by reaching out to them through the publishers and content creators they’re already loyal to.

Advertise Purple utilizes several different methods of affiliate marketing to help our clients achieve their web-based advertising goals. Some of these tactics include video content, backlinks, special promo codes, and in-depth product reviews.

As a top tier digital marketing agency, Advertise Purple has access to an extensive and diverse network of affiliates and publishers. This allows us to facilitate strong, mutually beneficial partnerships between companies and affiliates that will spur the growth and recognition of both parties.

Distribution Partnership

In this form of partnership marketing, two different brands combine their products or services into one bundle. This bundle is then advertised to each business’s target audience, often through the use of coupons, e-mail vouchers, or QR codes.

The main strategy behind a distribution partnership is its focus on customer loyalty as a means of advertising. Developing brand loyalty is a long and arduous process, one that takes years of targeted marketing efforts to achieve. 

Establishing a distribution partnership benefits both companies by granting each brand access to new consumer bases that are already loyal to one of the brands in the bundle. Consumers are more likely to gain interest in a new brand when they see that brand advertising as part of a partnership with a company they’re already loyal to, or a product they already think highly of.

As with affiliate marketing, distribution partnerships tend to be most successful when mediated by an experienced agency like Advertise Purple. We are proud to have developed a performance-based strategy for partnership marketing that ensures all collaborators get the most out of their distribution venture.

Benefits of Partnership Marketing

There are multiple ways in which partnership marketing surpasses the capabilities of traditional advertising techniques. The success of advertising partnerships depends largely on the combined strength of both halves of the collaboration.

Increases Brand Awareness and Reach

Gaining access to a whole new consumer base is one of the major draws of partnership marketing for many companies. Whether these new customers are familiar with your company already or just discovering your brand for the first time, they are more likely to purchase your products or services if those products and services are being marketed jointly with a brand they already like.

Social media campaigns are a popular way for companies to broaden brand awareness, but they often have a limited reach, and are dependent on everyday users who enjoy the brand to spread the word to their family and friends. Using partnership marketing, companies can enjoy the benefits of joining forces with established social media influencers who have a much larger following.

The greater your brand’s reach, the more attention and web traffic your promotions and sales will generate. This often leads to greater profits, especially when maximized through customized and targeted techniques developed by professional agencies such as Advertise Purple.

Boosts Web Traffic

Generating more traffic to your website is another attractive benefit of increasing your reach through partnership marketing. More traffic means more eyes on your products, and can increase your profits by making it more likely that people will purchase your goods and services.

Higher traffic can also help improve your search engine rankings. The longer users linger on your website and the more clicks your links get, the greater chance you’ll have of generating high-quality backlinks from authority sites. Better performance in search engines increases the likelihood that potential customers will find your brand when searching for relevant keywords.

Improves Customer Acquisition and Retention

Attracting more customers to your business is one of the major reasons for running an advertising campaign in the first place. By implementing partnership marketing strategies with the help of Advertise Purple, you stand to improve your customer acquisition by tapping into a consumer base you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Using traditional techniques, broadening your consumer base requires meticulous research, not to mention a tremendous allotment of resources and employee energy. Through partnership marketing, you can unlock new markets and customer demographics without putting resources into consumer research beforehand. You and your partner both benefit from each other’s existing consumer bases.

Customer acquisition is only half the battle, of course. Your company needs to establish high rates of customer retention in order to really reap the benefits of acquiring new consumers.

Fortunately, Advertise Purple has many strategies in place to help our partnership marketing clients improve their consumer retention and customer loyalty. Our experts can help ensure that both you and your collaborator will have the tools and the knowledge to maintain customer interest in your products and services after the initial advertising campaign has concluded.

Relatively Low-Risk

A sometimes overlooked advantage of partnership marketing is that it’s relatively low-risk to both parties involved. As long as you’ve done your research beforehand, and you know you’re not entering into a collaboration with a disreputable entity, there is little to be lost from a joint advertising venture. You’ll only be out a small fee or commission if the campaign doesn’t generate as much growth or traffic to your website as you hoped.

On the other hand, the possible rewards from a partnership marketing campaign are significant, particularly if you manage to pair up with a highly influential publisher who can spread your brand to a wide audience. This potentially high return on a relatively low investment makes partnership marketing a no-brainer for many companies.

Tips for Building a Successful Partnership

Before diving into a partnership with a publisher or another brand, it’s important to do extensive research into your potential partner to make sure the collaboration will be beneficial to all parties involved. Advertise Purple can assist you with this preliminary analysis, as well as helping you find collaborators that are a good fit for your brand and advertising goals.

Here are some of the strategies our experts recommend when seeking to build a partnership for advertising purposes.

1. Find Firms That Share Your Core Values

As with any form of teamwork, partnership marketing works best when the two parties involved have similar values and ideals. Noticeable culture clashes are a sign that the partnership might not be a good fit.

Additionally, the publisher or brand you want to work with should not be in direct competition with your company. That said, you want to make sure your products and services complement each other, or go together in some way.

Finally, your two businesses should have significant overlaps in your target audiences. This is necessary to ensure you both reap the benefits of marketing your services and products to each other’s existing consumer bases.

2. Seek Out Mutually Beneficial Opportunities

Investing in the health of your partnership requires looking for collaborative opportunities that can advance the standing of both companies. Some examples of potential joint ventures include:

  • Conducting a survey or research study together
  • Collaborating on a webinar, podcast, or other informative content
  • Referring clients to each other, when appropriate

The strength of partnership marketing lies in its ability to benefit both members of the partnership. In order for the campaign to be a success, you have to consider your partner’s goals and needs as well as those of your own company. An Advertise Purple agent can help by identifying opportunities or suggesting potential ventures that will meet or even exceed the marketing expectations of both businesses.

3. Set Clear Goals and Expectations

The success of most new ventures has a lot to do with the extent and the quality of the preparation done beforehand. When it comes to partnership marketing, this means determining what you want out of the partnership before you team up with a company or publisher. After all, how will you know you’ve achieved success if you aren’t sure what outcome you wanted in the first place?

However, many companies who aren’t familiar with affiliate marketing practices or distribution partnerships may struggle with setting concrete and achievable goals. This can lead to frustration and lack of clarity down the line when you’re trying to analyze the results of your partnership marketing campaign.

In order to ensure you’ll have a well-defined lens through which to assess your success, work with an Advertise Purple agent to figure out what you expect to achieve through a partnership marketing campagin. This will put you in a position to choose the best partner to suit your needs, while also giving you a framework for analyzing the results of your campaign and figuring out what to change for the next venture.

Why Work With An Agency?

Ultimately, the strength of your partnership marketing efforts depends on the quality and expertise of your collaborators. Achieving success from a digital marketing campaign requires partnering up with a top-tier affiliate management company that has the connections and experience to help you fulfill your advertising goals.

Advertise Purple is a results and performance-driven agency with years of experience in analyzing digital marketing data and identifying key tactics for internet advertising. By strategically utilizing our extensive affiliate marketing network, we have brought in over $22 million dollars in revenue for our digital advertising clients over the years. We know what it takes to build a successful and mutually beneficial partnership, and our expert moderators can ensure your joint advertising venture goes as smoothly as possible.

When you work with Advertise Purple, you gain access to a winning combination of cutting-edge tracking and analysis tools and experienced, highly talented account managers. We’ll be on hand to help you at every step of the way, from setting your initial goals to executing and evaluating your finalized campaign.

The Bottom Line in Partnership Marketing

With the continuous evolution of consumer habits and digital advertising trends comes an exciting array of opportunities for community support and teamwork. The development of partnership marketing offers companies a chance to reach out to previously untapped audiences by pairing up with leading influencers and publishers in relevant fields.

At Advertise Purple, we embrace a community-forward and collaborative approach to building and expanding brands and business ventures. We have a knack for seeing how the different pieces of a potential advertising venture can come together to create a cohesive and successful campaign. This ability to see the bigger picture makes us particularly well-suited to developing and managing partnership marketing ventures.

For assistance in developing a custom-tailored affiliate marketing venture or distribution partnership for your company, or for any other questions related to program management, contact the experts at Advertise Purple at any time. We look forward to working with you.

 

Are you getting started in affiliate marketing or looking to improve your current program?

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