5 Tips For Creating Successful Strategic Marketing Partnerships

Fostering strategic partnerships that benefit both brands while achieving defined marketing objectives can be challenging. Here are five tips to help you get started.

1. Define Your Marketing Objective

Every marketing exercise should start with a defined objective. After all, every step should be in the direction of your end goal. Objectives that benefit from marketing partnerships are broad, but increased exposure is a common target because partnerships can leverage the audiences, brand equity and marketing budgets of both parties.

2. Identify How A Partner Can Help You Achieve Your Marketing Objective

Not every marketing objective warrants a strategic partnership initiative. Before deciding to build out a partnership, make sure you know how a partnership can scale your marketing success. If increased exposure is the goal, perhaps a partner can help launch your brand into a new audience. If the partner already has strong brand awareness within that audience, it may be easy to generate buzz from a partnership announcement.

3. Tightly Define Your Target Audience

Make sure you know exactly who you want to be communicating with to achieve your marketing objective. Define the demographics of your audience, but also dive deeply into the behavioral attributes. Any brand you partner with must align with your audience’s wants and needs as they relate to your products or services.

4. Identify A Brand With A Target Audience That Overlaps Yours

Once you feel like your road to marketing success is mapped out, it’s time to find a brand to take the ride with you. Because the brands on parallel paths are often competitors, pay close attention to brands on intersecting paths. Look for brands that will be advertising to your audience when you’ll also be advertising to your audience. 

5. Determine How A Partnership Can Benefit Both Brands

There are many ways to create a win-win partnership. In some cases, both brands labor equally toward a joint objective. In other instances, there is an exchange of money, product or media space. As long as the objectives and audiences of both brands align and the interchange is equitable, the partnership should be set up for success.

Strategic Partnerships Can Create And Expand Marketing Achievements

In many areas of life, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When it comes to strategic marketing partnerships, this holds true. From expanding brand awareness to sampling and from overcoming hurdles to creating buzz, strategic partnerships built for success often lead to victory.