When it comes to building customer trust and driving business growth, brand partnerships or partnership marketing can provide a blueprint to success. By leveraging the collective power of brand alliances, businesses can increase their market share, expand their reach, and scale effectively.
Here we explore our top ten benefits of brand partnerships.
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Business expansion has long been considered a result of traditional sales and marketing but these channels are no longer sufficient in today's climate of changing customer views and habits.
Concerns about how companies obtain, store, and use personal data; the rapid distribution of false information; and an onslaught of brand content have created a fragile relationship between businesses and their customers.
Advertising, marketers, and even companies themselves are no longer trusted. A recent PwC survey revealed that businesses are trusted a lot less than they might think. Over 87% of those surveyed claimed to have earned their customers' trust with only 30% of customers supporting that claim.
This yawning gap in trust perception poses a serious challenge. It can be disastrous for business leaders that erroneously assume that their brand commands customer trust when it doesn’t.
Increasing brand recognition and gaining the confidence of customers are therefore ever-present challenges for many businesses.
This is where partnership marketing comes in.
What is a Brand Partnership?
A brand partnership— or partnership marketing— involves forming an alliance with one or more brands to increase market reach. There are several types of marketing partnerships and approaches to consider depending on your business objectives.
The purpose of forming an alliance with other brands is to leverage the combined resources and credibility of multiple brands to place products and services in front of new audiences and offer customers extra value.
All involved parties bring something unique to the table to create a mutually beneficial relationship that stimulates growth, drives the achievement of strategic business objectives and hones brand identity.
These brand partnerships can be formed under umbrella organisations, or between several separate businesses from different industries. For the most part, collaborating brands are usually not direct competitors and might share little in common. It is, however, advisable to align business goals, set and track partnership programme KPIs and identify shared values that make the alliance viable to all parties involved.
Brand partnerships are vital to a wide range of businesses, from start-ups to large established businesses hunting down new audiences and creative ways to diversify their portfolio. With the right partnership marketing strategy, you can breathe new life into your marketing efforts and leverage a larger resource pool to stimulate business expansion.
Here are some of the amazing ways a brand partnership can help you reach your business goals.
10 Benefits of Brand Partnerships
1. Gain access to a new audience
Marketing your products and services to untapped markets is perhaps the most important advantage of partnership marketing. You can augment your outreach efforts when you collaborate with other brands to create a one-of-a-kind marketing campaign. The main objective is to offer both sets of customers added value and incentives and create additional revenue and growth opportunities for brand partners.
Partnership marketing helps businesses avoid the cost and difficulty of trying to develop a new customer base from scratch. Traditional methods of achieving the same methods are often time-intensive.
Brand partners, on the other hand, already have a meaningful relationship with the audience you want to convert. Promoting your product through them allows you to effortlessly reach and understand this new market in a way that cold marketing cannot replicate.
Loyal customers of partner brands will be open to trying your products and services, even when they might have not considered them on their own. This allows you to benefit from the value of your partner to reach a new market.
Brand partnerships also tend to generate some excitement beyond the existing audiences associated with partner brands. The unique nature of the alliance creates a distinctive backdrop that sparks curiosity and penetrates markets that were otherwise untapped by all the partner brands.
Each partner gains access to a mutual but potentially untapped audience. Brand partnerships are essential if you want to boost your brand’s perception and increases revenue generation by driving sales.
2. Cost-effective
Partnership marketing can be an effective money-saving alternative to traditional advertising such as Pay Per Click campaigns and similar marketing strategies, if you’re operating on a limited marketing budget.
Partner marketing approaches like “barter exchange” allow you to explore unconventional approaches to selling products. Bartering (exchanging products and services) is valuable for start-ups with limited cash flow.
The right partner relationship can put your products in the hands of your target audience, creating a memorable interaction with your brand at no cost.
3. Add value to your existing audience
You must always consider the extra value you can offer customers before committing to a partnership. Partnerships leverage the combined weight of expertise, experience, opportunities, and resources in alliances to create improved solutions that meet— and exceed — customer expectations.
It allows you to build your brand’s customer experience (CX) and Lifetime Value (LTV) which encourages customer loyalty and boosts retention and engagement.
Forming alliances with other brands can spur growth for your business in different ways as customers form lasting bonds with businesses over time and are happy to continue patronising beloved brands.
4. Increased brand awareness and credibility
When partnering with established and trusted brands you have an increased chance of gaining their audience’s confidence. Access to a new audience, who are more likely to convert because of your relationship with a trusted brand will have a significant positive impact on your reputation and boost your credibility among potential new customers and members, and even your existing audience.
Partnership marketing is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and discovering valuable distribution channels. This can be a life-saver for companies that want to stay relevant in their industry. This is especially crucial for small businesses and start-ups with budgeting concerns. A well-executed partnership programme is a cost-effective approach that exploits the benefits of brand collaboration to reach new markets.
With a strategic partnership in place, that loyalty can be extended to a partner brand’s products and services in a relationship both parties mutually benefit from. Endorsement from both sides involved in an alliance through partnership marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing, modern barter exchange and cross-promotion encourages the customers to explore products that they might otherwise never consider.
5. Higher market share
Brand partnerships provide a platform to help brands achieve their business goals. This often includes increasing the market share to drive growth and expansion. Partnership marketing helps you to create innovative and unique solutions to offer your customers. This could include bundling partner brand deals and offers within the packaging you deliver to your customers or offering discounts on partner offerings based on customer loyalty.
It gives all the partner brands a competitive edge in their respective industry as they can boost profits with these amazing incentives. The result is a direct increase in Return on Investment (ROI) and a higher market share.
6. Faster go-to-market speed
A digital partnership has the potential to help you reduce the delays and costs of launching offline marketing programmes. Slow speed-to-market is among the major challenges affecting the success of marketing campaigns.
With the help of technology, your partnership programme can help you to overcome those barriers via a white label platform that eliminates the need for devoting internal resources to setting up and managing your marketing campaign.
It helps you to reduce your reliance on traditional marketing channels like email and social media. Digital partnerships also facilitate long-term exposure for partners, delivering equal reciprocal value for marketing efforts.
7. Overcoming weaknesses
With the right plan in place, a brand partnership provides an opportunity for brand partners to benefit from each other’s strengths. This can be valuable in making up for weaknesses in certain areas without stretching your budget.
For instance, if one brand boasts excellent technical expertise but doesn’t have a creative, fun persona, they can partner with a brand that does. The partner brand might have these qualities but lack technical resources themselves.
Such an alliance allows each partner to benefit and downplays their weaknesses to help achieve success in the marketing campaign.
This is especially valuable for brands that have recently completed a rebranding exercise. For instance, a brand might look to switch its traditional values and identity for a more trendy outlook by partnering with a modern, youthful brand to emphasise the transition.
8. Shared risk responsibility
Projects to release new product lines, penetrate an untapped market, or switch to a new industry can be a daunting prospect with significant risks. A digital brand partnership with an established business in the destination niche or with experience with the new market can be a huge advantage.
In such cases, you share the risk of the new venture with your partner. This lessens the challenge and allows you some wiggle room if things don’t go entirely according to plan.
Brand partnerships can be executed in several ways depending on the brands involved. It can mean co-creating a new product or collaborating for an event or a marketing campaign to promote your brand. Alliances could also see businesses share technology, manufacturing resources, and even expertise.
9. Larger resource bank for accelerating brand growth
Every business is crafted uniquely, with different ideas on the best ways to invest and varying financial means. An alliance could allow you to benefit from resources that you might otherwise not have access to.
The low cost of partnership marketing is due to a variety of factors. When you combine marketing efforts with other brands, you have access to a larger resource bank which can drive business growth.
By associating with a partner with a strong and positive brand reputation, a business can leverage this to enhance their own brand equity. Partners also provide a wealth of new insights and experiences that may significantly improve your marketing initiatives.
Partnership marketing is even more beneficial if you're breaking into a new market. It often takes a lot of money to create brand awareness when entering a new market. In an alliance, you can benefit from your partner’s reputation and credibility to establish your brand as a viable option in your industry.
Collaborating with trustworthy brands endears your brand to their audience. An alliance is a vote of confidence from both sides and directly affects the way customers interact with both brands. This underlines the importance of picking the right partner to build on that good reputation and boost your brand credibility.
10. Access to a larger talent pool
It is always preferable to have an abundance of resources, whether as a large corporation or a small startup. Working with other brands can make a huge difference if you have a small firm and handle the marketing yourself. Large businesses can also get better results by including more people in the brainstorming process to deliver creative solutions.
When it comes to complicated programmes, the adage "the more, the better" is very accurate. You can do more by collaborating with other businesses and truly spreading the workload. Instead of the marketing generalist mindset you stick with at a smaller business, collaborating with a bigger brand gives you access to talented specialists.
You'll achieve more by forming alliances than you could alone, no matter what your partner contributes to the relationship. The more partners you introduce to your alliance, the better your chances of competing with the leading brands in your industry.
Key Takeaways
- What is a brand partnership?
- This marketing strategy involves joining forces with complementary brands to reach a wider audience.
- This marketing strategy involves joining forces with complementary brands to reach a wider audience.
- 10 benefits of brand partnerships
- 1. Access to new audiences
- 2. Cost-effective marketing
- 3. Add extra value to your existing audience
- 4. Increased brand awareness and credibility
- 5. Higher market share
- 6. Faster go-to-market speed
- 7. Overcoming weaknesses
- 8. Shared risk responsibility
- 9. Large resource bank for accelerating brand growth
- 10. Access to a larger talent pool
Master Brand Partnerships with the Partnership Marketing Playbook
These various types of partnership marketing are valuable strategies if you want to thrive in the modern world of business. If you’re looking to transform your business reputation, increase market share, and drive leads and sales generation, look no further than brand partnerships.
However, this marketing technique is only as effective as your planning and execution is sound. To get the best results, you can dive deeper into the secrets behind successful partnership marketing programmes with our Partnership Marketing Playbook.
Download the Partnership Marketing Playbook today for essential insights to help you build the ultimate partnership marketing programme.
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