Strategic alliances have always been an integral part of human history. From personal to political, and of course between businesses. After all, the power of partnership brand marketing to utilize new distribution channels and gain marketing exposure is not only a wise choice but also an essential tool in today’s evolving marketplace. This is one of the biggest reasons why businesses of all sizes are waking up to the innumerable advantages that brand collaboration can bring.

Congratulations! You’ve started your dream company, launched your products and services, and are now ready to share them with the world. There’s one problem though – you don’t have the skills, budget, or time to get your products and services to market effectively and efficiently.

The solution: Business partnerships.

How To Use Strategic Partnerships To Grow Your Small Business?

Business partnerships are strange. On one hand, you want to value self-sufficiency while operating in a competitive world. Your employees, customers, and peers expect you to carry your own weight. Fortunately, though, it’s not all dog-eat-dog…

In the world of Charles Darwin, “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

There appears to be an essential requirement for collaboration and partnerships in business. And you don’t have to just rely on appearances… There are available data to prove!

Hinge’s 2021 High Growth Study revealed that partnership marketing is ranked as the 7^th most impactful marketing technique in the favor of professional services firms. It was also revealed that partnership marketing ranked above popular marketing techniques like email marketing campaigns, blogging, and event sponsorships.

According to Forrester, more than three-quarters of businesses today view brand partnerships as pivotal and integral to their sales and marketing strategy. For small businesses, specifically, brand partnerships present an effective yet simple route to growth. A successful brand partnership not only strengthens your brand’s reputation in the minds of existing and potential customers, but it also gets your brand in front of new audiences and helps you explore previously unknown or unexplored growth opportunities and markets. Furthermore, working toward a common goal better serves customers and improves overall productivity.

Tips To Build Your Business And Brand Partnership Muscle

You can reap the advantages of partnership marketing activities such as:

• Creating do-follow links on related blog posts.
• Email swapping to promote respective content or services
• Sponsoring local charity events
• Offering raffle prizes as a fundraiser for local organizations
• Sharing new content or upcoming events via social media blasts
• Targeting the same prospects with live events
• Co-produced and co-promoted webinars
• Providing improved experiences at every stage of the transaction to deliver a customer experience advantage
• Conducting a new piece of research in collaboration

Let us understand the success stories behind brand partnerships with the help of an example. A partnership between Buzzfeed’s Goodful and Macy’s meant 100 Goodful products (such as kitchenware, appliances, and other home products) will be offered by Macy’s online and in its stores. This provides the brand with a better-than-ever distribution platform and increases brand awareness. Meanwhile, Macy’s gets access to the 45.2 million consumers of Goodful reaches every month — many of whom are millennials.

In today’s era of rapid digital transformation, brand partnerships emerge as the most innovative and profitable way to help businesses keep up with the surging pace of change. Whether it’s about improving user experiences across devices and channels or collecting and analyzing consumer data, brand partnerships can help businesses tighten their focus on core business objectives, save money and resources, and bring their technology solutions into closer alignment with the individual and collective objectives.

For instance, the partnership between Google Cloud and Atos will help both gain access to shared facilities, technology solutions, and human capital. While Google’s machine learning platform will be leveraged by Atos to develop “industry-specific solutions across multiple verticals”, Google Cloud will benefit from Atos’s new collaboration tools and tightened security.

However, it’s important to select the right partner. The right partner should serve the same audience as you, at least in part, and should not be a direct competitor.

Don’t Do It Alone

Working with the right partners can help boost your business’s overall growth. It can help you build a strong list of interested customers and prospects. This will help you tap into these audiences via strategic brand partnerships. Also, you can expect to get easy access to an existing audience, get your product out to market faster, create a stronger impression on new and potential customers, and grow your reputation by leaps and bounds. Brand partnerships can also help you fill any competency gaps, attract a larger share of the market, and beat the competition.

Want assistance to address any limitations your business might have, understand your market, or share your vision with brand partnerships? Feel free to connect with Dana Sacco now!