A marketing partnership is a relatively inexpensive way to go about promoting your brand. Partnering with the right company, on the right project, can help you gain a foothold in new markets and gain exposure to demographics you hadn’t reached before. When you and your counterpart get the same amount of returns on your project, it can even lay the foundation for a regular, mutually beneficial partnership.
Marketing partnerships should be entered carefully, though; ill-advised or timed collaborations can damage the reputations or brand identity of both participants. Here are some tips to help you prevent a partnership from becoming an enormous waste of resources.
1. Get a partner that resonates with your audience
You need to know your customers well to make marketing collaboration work. Target brands that you know your core audience likes; for example, a retailer whose main audience is teenagers and people in their early twenties might partner with a music artist popular in their demographic and come out with custom merchandise.
Fitting your brand styles together is not just a matter of making coherent publicity materials. You need to get a collaboration that reinforces people’s ideas of what your brand is about. The partnership should excite your audiences, not confuse them.
2. Have something to offer your partner
As in any partnership, brand collaboration works better if the participants complement each other’s goals. A company that sells bespoke furniture can highlight a linen company’s products in their blog or their newsletter as a perfect match for their items. In turn, the linen retailer can feature the furniture store’s items in their showrooms.
This arrangement makes sense because it gives both parties access to customers who have similar customer profiles, but who may not have been to the other brand’s store. In this case, a partnership makes sense because of the overlapping target markets with similar interests. While your first consideration is your audience, you need to know what you can bring to the table when speaking with your counterparts at your prospective collaborating brand.
3. Know when to say ‘no’
Don’t jump on every opportunity to partner with another company. Just because a business is in your industry or in a related one, it doesn’t mean that their brand is automatically a good match for yours. Every offer for collaboration must be studied carefully and analyzed for its viability and the returns you will get. If you don’t, you might end up with a raw deal, where your company is getting far less and the collaborating one is reaping all the benefits.
4. Set and keep the terms of your deal
Be clear with the terms of the deal; evaluate state laws on promotions, create a detailed schedule for campaigns, and get clear with which party is expected to deliver which promotional products. At the negotiation stage, you should already know how much you are to receive from the partnership, or you might end up working so much for so little. If the terms of your agreement are broken, be ready to walk away.
Conclusion
Brand partnerships are a good way to create associations in your audience’s minds. A collaboration that does its job will help companies expand their market will keeping their core customers engaged.
If you need help in crafting a promotional campaign, get in touch with our US experts at Akby. Our digital marketing services cover a wide range of channels online!
