Everything You Need to Know About Partnership Marketing (Guide)

Want to know everything about partnership marketing?

Have you ever wondered how businesses grow so fast? Think of it this way. If you’re not a jack-of-all-trades in business, what do you do? You either learn the skills you lack or find a partner who has them. With partnership marketing, you get the best of both worlds.

In this blog, we’ll learn what partnership marketing is, exploring its types, benefits, and potential pitfalls.

Let’s begin!

What is Partnership Marketing?

Partnership marketing is when businesses collaborate, pooling their skills and resources to boost their reach and sales.

Right from the start, you can team up with skilled marketing partners, enhancing your business while improving your abilities. It’s an effective approach but not as straightforward as it might seem.

Even the biggest brands in the world do this from time to time. 

Think about McDonald’s Happy Meals. They’re always teaming up with other businesses like Disney for marketing purposes. Or, on a more niche level, Adidas working with Allbirds to create a sustainable running shoe. 

These are great examples of businesses coming together to gain skills or resources they don’t otherwise have. 

But this strategy isn’t just for big players like McDonald’s or Adidas; it’s equally valuable for smaller businesses and individual entrepreneurs.

We constantly see merchants working with affiliates and influencers to harness their marketing skills and reach their target audience. 

Now, let’s talk about some common types of partnership marketing.

Types of Partnership Marketing (With Examples)

Let’s look at the different types of partnership marketing and understand how each one works.

Here are some common types of partnership marketing:

1. Affiliate marketing

This is a classic example of partnership marketing. In affiliate marketing, a person or a website (the affiliate) promotes a company’s products or services. In return, they earn a commission for each sale made through their referral.

For example, a blogger might write about a new kitchen gadget and include a special link to buy it. If a reader buys the gadget using that link, the blogger earns a commission from the sale.

2. Content marketing

Content marketing involves creating and sharing online materials like blogs, videos, or social media posts that subtly promote a brand.

For example, a cooking blog might create recipes using a specific brand of spices and link to where readers can buy them. This way, the partnership benefits both the blog and the spice brand.

3. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing uses popular individuals on social media to promote products or services.

These influencers have a large number of followers who trust their opinions. For instance, a well-known fashion influencer might post photos wearing a certain brand of clothing, encouraging their followers to buy from that brand.

4. Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs reward customers for their continued business. For example, a coffee shop might have a card that gets stamped each time a customer buys a coffee. After ten stamps, the customer gets a free coffee. This encourages customers to keep coming back.

5. Distribution partnerships

In a distribution partnership, one company uses another company’s network to sell its products.

For example, a small organic tea brand might partner with a supermarket chain to get its teas into more stores and reach more customers.

6. Sponsorships

Sponsorships are when a company pays to support an event, team, or individual in exchange for advertising.

A common example is a sports drink brand sponsoring a football team. The brand’s logo might appear on the team’s jerseys, exposing them to fans.

7. Strategic Brand-to-Brand (B2B) Partnerships

This type of partnership is about businesses in related fields teaming up to help each other grow.

For instance, Shipt, an online grocery delivery service, works with various partners like meal planning services and health blogs. These partners promote healthy eating, while Shipt offers a convenient way to buy fresh groceries.

This partnership helps Shipt attract more customers, and the partners get paid for their help.

8. Co-branding

Co-branding is when two brands work together on a product. Take the example of Adidas and Allbirds creating sustainable running shoes.

Both brands contribute their expertise and market the product together, appealing to their customer bases.

Each partnership marketing type offers unique benefits and can be used to reach different audiences and achieve various marketing goals effectively.

Why are Partnerships Important in Marketing?

Very few businesses do absolutely everything well. They each have specializations that they use to create a competitive advantage. 

However, that doesn’t mean you can get away with not doing the things you aren’t so good at, and this is where partnership marketing comes in. 

Let’s look at this from an affiliate marketing perspective. 

You’re a merchant selling homes for bees. You make amazing bee homes, and your website is great at converting, but since you just got set up, you don’t have the tools or skills you need to reach your target audience. 

You can solve this issue with partnership marketing, piggybacking off your affiliates’ marketing skills to grow your audience and reach new customers. The same goes for influencers and social media.

When you factor your partners into your marketing campaigns, you can grow your brand awareness immediately. 

Of course, there has to be something in it for your partners, which we’ll get to in a little bit. 

Benefits of Marketing Partnerships

We’ve already touched on some of the benefits of partnership marketing, but let’s dig a little deeper. 

The ultimate goal of strategic partnerships, like virtually anything else, is to grow sales!

To make this happen, your partner needs to have something you don’t, and this will normally come down to:

• Reach 
• Influence
• Products 

In most marketing partnerships, one party trades their reach and influence and the other their products. Affiliate marketing works and is cost-effective: you’ve both got something the other needs. 

Your affiliate has access to a large audience, but they don’t have products to sell. 

You have great products to sell, but you don’t have access to the target audience that you’d like. 

You solve each party’s problem to grow revenue with initiatives like affiliate marketing and influencer marketing. 

Drawbacks of Marketing Partnerships

The greatest drawback of partnership marketing is that you give up some control over your brand. Whether you work with affiliates and influencers, use someone else’s distribution, or go in on a co-branding project, if they mess up, so do you. 

Your marketing team can put in a ton of work to present your brand in a certain light, but one misjudged tweet from an influencer can unravel all that effort. 

This is why you’ve got to have a clear partnership marketing plan that sets out exactly who you want to work with and how you work with them. You’ll never have complete control, but if you’re aware of the pitfalls and understand your needs and those of your partners, you’re giving yourself the best chance of success. 

There’s an element of risk, but the ability to reach new audiences in new markets is a huge incentive. 

Once you find the right partner, you want to hang on to them and ensure continued success, so make sure you’re investing in the partnership.

Selecting the Right Marketing Partnerships

How do you make sure you’re working with the right partner brands?

It’s a mix of having some things in common and others where you’re very different.

• Similar brand values
• Diverging skill sets
• Similar budgetary expectations
• Willingness to create a win-win relationship

One of the first things to look at is brand values. 

You work hard to build your brand image, but the wrong partnerships can have a big impact, alienating existing customers in the pursuit of potential customers. For example, a law firm partnering with an edgy, anarchistic influencer probably isn’t going to work (even if they might be followed by the law firm’s target audience).

The one area where you want divergence is in your skill sets. You both want to be able to bring something to the table that the other requires. You might have an amazing marketing manager, but they need a wider range of content to work with (podcasts, webinars, white papers, etc.) in this case, a content partnership could be the ideal option. 

When you bring different skill sets to the relationship, that’s when you create win-win partnerships that can make a big difference. 

Measuring the Success of Partnership Marketing

You need to show a return on investment from your partnership marketing. 

Unless you have clear KPIs and the right software in place, it can be hard to measure the effectiveness of your collaboration. This is commonly experienced in influencer marketing, but it’s also true for partnership programs as a whole. 

We’re lucky in digital marketing that we have so much access to data, but when you add another stakeholder, it sometimes doesn’t get tracked properly. 

To overcome this, you need to decide on the key metrics you need to track:

• Referrals
• Customer retention
• Market share
• Customer base growth 
• Website Visitors
• Conversion rates

This will depend greatly on the nature of your partnership, but if you’re not prepared to track results, it will be a big problem further down the road. 

Then, the key is to have high-quality referral-tracking software that gives you access to all the data you need.  

Cut Your Learning Curve with Partnership Marketing

If you’re a small business, you have to prioritize sometimes. 

That might mean focusing on product development and sales at the expense of marketing or some other combination of things you must give up. 

However, partnership marketing gives you a solution. It allows you to focus on what you’re good at and work with other businesses (or individuals) who are good at the bits you’re not so good at. 

Perhaps the easiest way to get started with this is affiliate marketing, where it’s possible to expand your reach almost overnight. Setting up an affiliate program with AffiliateWP couldn’t be easier, but it’s not a passive income like some say; it is a partnership on both sides. 

Don’t worry; we’re here to help you every step of the way and ensure you’re working with the best partners out there. 

Get started with AffiliateWP today!