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One of the key factors in marketing a product or service is knowing your target audience. Once you know who you’re targeting, you can take that information to seek out businesses who have a similar target audience and whose product/service complements yours, rather than competes with it. Joining forces with a complementary business can help spread awareness of your product/service to their following, while offering that business the same advantage. A partnership can also allow for assistance with planning and funding certain marketing efforts. When I say partnership, I am thinking of the following:
- A joint promotional event that brings people face to face with both brands
- An agreement to share and mention each other’s content and brand
- An agreement to be each other’s ‘preferred’ brand, for example, if you are a physical trainer and you are partnering with an owner of a new gym, you could agree to bring your clients to that gym, and the gym owner could direct patrons who request personal training to you and your business
When approaching another business about a partnership consider the following:
- Make sure the business offers a product/service of quality that you would not mind having your brand associated with
- Make sure that your product/service is of high enough quality that another brand wouldn’t mind being associated with it
- Set objectives for results you hope the partnership will garner
- Establish the expectations for the partnership, for example, if you’d like the other business to mention your brand’s Twitter handle or Facebook page at least once a day, that needs to be discussed so that there is a fair and equal exchange of publicity on each brand’s part
- Develop special coupons/promo codes for the partnered promotions as a tracking mechanism
- Record your sales, social media following, etc before the start of the partnership and at the end to determine the effectiveness
Do you or have you partnered with another business? Were the results positive?
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