How Professional Services Firms Benefit from Partnership Marketing Strategies

For your organisation to thrive in the long term, you have to reach new audiences continuously and reengage existing customers. Doing so means navigating in an increasingly competitive, fast-paced, complex world. You have to meet rapidly changing customer expectations and somehow find solutions for what seem to be insurmountable challenges.

Fortunately, no one ever said you had to do it alone…

As the famed naturalist, Charles Darwin noted: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”.

Forward-thinking professional service brands are increasingly looking beyond their traditional domains. They are seeking new partnerships that integrate customer insights and digital platforms to serve customers more holistically.

What Is Partnership Marketing Strategy?

Partnership marketing strategy (also commonly referred to as fusion marketing or co-marketing) involves a collaboration between two brands that share similar values. Each company remains independent, but they pool resources. Doing so allows them to accomplish mutual marketing goals they might not reach on their own.

There are many types of partnership marketing practised in the B2B world. Some of the more common types include:

• Affiliation – Affiliation is a digital marketing strategy where a business partners with a publisher/content creator with a similar target audience. The publisher promotes the brand’s products or services on their content channels in return for commissions.

• Charitable – There are various ways in which a brand and charity can collaborate, for example, exhibitions, public events, and sponsorships. The charity benefits from access to brand resources. Meanwhile, the brand can further build its reputation and show its social values.

• Content – Content marketing partnerships involve brands collaborating to produce relevant content that is shared with their respective target audiences. Content types can include industry research, case studies, co-authored blog posts, infographics, videos and podcasts. Content partnerships can also aid search engine optimisation (in the form of link sharing and authority building).

• Distribution – In a distribution agreement, one partner integrates the other partner’s products or services into their own distribution channels to expand reach within target markets.

• Joint products – in this type of arrangement, two brands agree to create a new product (or hybridise an existing one) to provide additional value to a mutual target customer base.

Other fusion marketing tactics include licensing, product placement, and shared stores.

Realise that these various types of marketing models are fluid and you can alter them to fit the needs of the specific partnership. While one form might be successful for one collaboration, it may not fit a different project.

One example of B2B fusion marketing is the graphic design and printing service Moo.com. They offer reseller, affiliate and custom partnerships and collaborate with businesses in a variety of industries – including online media, events, and real estate.

Why Should You Consider Strategic Partnerships?

Strategic alliances create opportunities for growth by helping you to re-imagine what is possible in terms of capabilities, brand, customer experience and ecosystem. They encourage you to take an unconstrained view of your offerings and expand who you serve and why. Doing so helps you grow your audience and find new ways to connect with your existing client base by partnering across industry boundaries.

Collaborative marketing efforts can provide an outside perspective to help you uncover and address organisational biases. They generate insights that help you predict and respond to evolving trends, expectations and demands. This allows your brand to lead by innovating instead of reacting to circumstances.

For instance, during the pandemic, a huge number of businesses have experienced financial difficulties. By listening to customers, Lloyds Bank recognised business owners didn’t just need practical solutions (like a loan payment extension). They also needed support and guidance. In response, Lloyds Bank expanded its partnership with Mental Health UK to offer resources on dealing with the negative mental health impact of financial stress.

There is also an economic benefit. The cost effectiveness of being able to access each other’s resources, industry knowledge, and expertise is of enormous value to both brands. Each partner can make use of the other’s digital marketing and distribution networks instead of having to build such channels from scratch.

How Do You Create a Partnership Marketing Strategy?

When looking for opportunities to collaborate, it is important to go beyond serving customers with products and services. You need to think a level deeper to understand the needs of your audience in a more fundamental way.

For this reason, your sales and marketing team will be invaluable for developing these collaborations as they are the closest to your audience. Drawing on analytics, industry knowledge and their personal relationships with client accounts, they can identify innovative ways to serve customers.

When looking for opportunities to collaborate, it is important to consider:

1. Select the right partners.

You want to identify a partner brand that compliments your organisation, makes sense for your audience, and helps you meet your customer’s needs. Don’t just limit yourself to partners in your wider industry; also consider brands from other industries who appeal to your specific audience demographics.

Your collaboration should be something your respective customers will find beneficial and engaging. Consider what you and your potential partner can each bring to the project. What needs does the other brand’s audience have that you can fulfil? How can your potential partner serve your client base?

2. Work out how you would form and coordinate a partnership successfully.

A partnership marketing plan is all about cooperation. Work together to identify how the collaboration can help each partner accomplish at least one business goal.

Ensure you have a written agreement that clearly details the terms of the relationship, including roles, responsibilities, ideas and implementation. For example, how will you track performance to ensure your partnership is fulfilling the needs of your audiences? How will you coordinate communication between the two marketing teams? What will each brand commit to in terms of email marketing and social media posts?

3. How can you combine your customer insights to both deepen your understanding of your consumer and strengthn the partnership.

It's more difficult to get a comprehensive view of your customer when your data is limited to a single industry. Working with a brand that provides a complementary view of your audience gives you a more complete picture of behaviour and underlying needs.

For this to work, you need to have a robust, cross-compatible platform that can integrate customer insights across industry boundaries. To capture the full landscape of customer behaviour, it should be able to handle passive data (e.g. social listening) and active customer participation (via surveys, UGC, etc). Such insights provide a unique opportunity to learn what customers really need from the partnership, which can drive further innovation.

Why Do Strategic Partnerships Fail?

With successful co-marketing, participating brands can learn from one another, develop innovative solutions, and increase their audience reach.

However, this isn't the case with all collaboration attempts. 

While two brands might seem to have synergistic potential, several factors can create the conditions for failure. Some common partnerships mistakes include things like communication breakdown, brand misalignment, and the lack of digital infrastructure.

One famous example of a failed partnership was between Starbucks and Kraft Foods (now Kraft-Heinz). What started as a successful distribution agreement ended in a three-year dispute.

If you're going to partner with another brand, make sure that you both are committed and in full agreement regarding your respective responsibilities. A poorly planned and implemented co-marketing strategy can do serious damage to your reputation.

Customer Driven Data Insights

Like any other type of marketing, the driving force behind partnership marketing strategy should provide real value to your audience. 1827 Marketing’s digital marketing solutions help you go deeper and identify opportunities for creative ways to serve your customers. Contact us today to learn more.