Five Tips For Building Brand Partnerships

By John Brackett, the founder of Smash Balloon, the world’s leading social media feed plug-ins for WordPress.

We often start out thinking that we can grow our brand without partnering with other companies. For many people, this is how they run their business for the first several years. It’s not easy to find a brand partner when you barely have 100 sales under your belt. 

But once you hit a certain growth point and start building brand recognition, you’ll likely begin to think about ways you can spread your reach and build influence with other experts in your industry. 

Today, we want to focus on several helpful strategies you can use when it’s time for you to seek out brand partnerships. Our advice will help you prepare to reach out to other brands, build rapport and measure your campaign’s progress.

Let’s get started.

Align your target audience. 

The key to building a solid brand partnership is to work with companies that have a similar target audience or customer segments. If your customers don’t care for your partner’s products and their audience doesn’t care for yours, you’ll both see lackluster results on joint campaigns. 

We suggest reviewing your customer personas so you can find brands with products that align with your audience’s goals and pain points. For example, if you are the owner of an email marketing software-as-a-service (SaaS), you may want to run promotions with a hosting company. Odds are, someone who needs help with an email list will also want to find a hosting provider for their website. 

Think about products or services that complement your own and seek out businesses that offer these items to customers. You’ll have an easier time forming successful partnerships if you start with an aligned target audience.  

Look for social media influencers.

When you think about connecting with other brands, you likely think about finding companies that sell an actual product. The reality is social media influencers have proven time and time again to be highly effective business partners for brands across all industries. 

You’ll want to make sure your desired influencer and collaborator has an audience that would show interest in your product or service. Websites like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are full of influential social figures who would likely enjoy promoting your business. 

There are plenty of marketing options to choose from when establishing an influencer partnership. You could send them your latest product and ask them to write a review. Similarly, you could sponsor their video and get a shoutout halfway through, which is ideal for maximizing visibility. 

Personalize your outreach.

Whether you’re contacting an influencer or an established business, your outreach can make or break the deal. The main thing to remember here is a little personalization goes a long way. We all receive hundreds of emails every month that start “Dear Sir or Madam.” If you’re like most of us, you don’t even bother with these messages. The sentiment is if they can’t bother to learn your name, you’re not going to bother to read their message. 

Before you write your pitch:

• Learn everything you can about the brand.

• Check out their top-rated content and make sure their ideas and values align with your own.

• Take a few seconds to learn the name of the editor or representative.

In many cases, this information can be found on the contact page. 

While writing your pitch, reference their posts, experience and benefits of partnering with your business. People appreciate this little bit of extra effort. As a result, you’re more likely to find a suitable business partner. 

Establish expectations.

The next tip we want to talk about is setting expectations. As a business owner, the biggest mistake you can make when you start a partnership is failing to set expectations for both parties. This is a common trend among new entrepreneurs who just landed their first deal. The excitement of securing a partner can lead to both groups getting ahead of themselves and signing a contract without establishing ground rules. 

For instance, you should determine your contract’s length, conversion expectations and types of promotions. If you start working on these details after officially partnering up, conflict can get in the way of a smooth campaign. 

Before you agree to work with another company, sit down and clearly explain what you hope to achieve by joining forces. Encourage the other party to do the same. If you get this step out of the way early, you’ll have more time to focus on your marketing campaigns. 

Keep track of your progress.

Finally, we recommend keeping an eye on the progress of your partnerships. If you followed our previous advice and established expectations, use this data as your baseline. So, if you both decided that the goal is 50 conversions per month, keep track of your weekly and monthly sales and signups to see if you’re meeting the quota. 

Use unique links for each partnership so you can effectively measure results over an extended period of time. If you’re tracking the progress of your contracts, you can make informed decisions about extending agreements and the direction of future campaigns.

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