5 step guide to Partner Advertising

If you want to elevate and grow your business, you should consider partner advertising. This type of advertising is quite simple and you with relative little work get started and best of everything, very inexpensive. Below will you find a 5 step guide to get started and some real life examples for inspiration?

1. Find out which values your business represents.

• Who are your customers? (Which demographic profile do they have and where to they live)  
• Why do customers shop with you?
• Why do they like about your product?

If you do not know this already, you should ask your customers. There are some simple yet great free survey tools, which can use to learn about what other people think of your business.

2. Start scouting for potential companies, you should look for companies which shares your:

• Brand values
• Customer target group
• Strategic targets

Say you are the lucky owner of a furniture store; you should probably look for businesses that are in the interior business. Such related businesses could sell paint, kitchens, lighting, flooring or maybe interior design consultants.

3. Consider how this company, can help your business and how to can help them. You need to think of this as a two-way deal, it has to work for both of you. You are in the market to increase your turnover, by getting more traffic and / or increasing basket size. There is a number of activities to consider, below is some examples:
• Create a referral program
• Use each other mailing lists
• Is co-branding an option
• Advertise a free sample
• Advertise the experience / consultancy of the other business
• Consider an in-shop display

4. Before you approach another company, work on your pitch, practice your story. You can use the below point, when you work on your pitch.
• Prepare a one-pager summary of the concept
• Highlight this can be done with no budget or a shoe string budget
• Do not oversell this. It will not grow the turnover from 100 to 100.000.000
• Be fact based. Share insight about your company, like displaying who your customers are to show how the two businesses match each other.
• Respect a concept like this takes time to implement and probably a couple of swings before perfected.
• Accept you are not the smartest guy in the room, be humble yet confident.

5. When you meet, ensure you act professional through the entire meeting, not just during the pitch. Show your passion.

Which partner advertising tactics to use?

When you have decided on partner marketing, is there a number of tactics you can choose from. Below are there a few examples of what these tactics are and how they work:

Referral program

The good old word of mouth method is still valid and fantastic. In a world where you as an individual are exposed to thousands of marketing impressions each day, do you as a marketer have to be very good to make your impressions last with your targets?

A good method is establishing referral program, where you lead your customers to your partners business and the other way around. It is simplest format do you simply advise your customer to go to that particular business.

You can decide with your partner how you compensate each other, do you charge back per customer or do simply trade leads.

Mailing lists

Do you have a mailing list? If not you should get one. When you have what you can discuss with your partner how you can benefit from utilizing each other’s list.

I will advise you to advertise your marketing partners products in you newsletter, write a positive recommendation about the product. Hopefully is your newsletter digital, if not get it fixed, then you can lead traffic directly into your partners website or e-shop. Or maybe you advertise the customer can pick-up a coupon or sample at your store? There is a lot of option, consider what is best for your business.

Co-branding

This format is often used by major companies where they partner up and combine their brands to create a very attractive product. So is this solely for major brands? Nope!

Get some inspiration from my local McDonalds, they partner up with the local sport team. This means on game day all McDonalds is wearing the team jersey, moreover can you purchase a meal, where McDonalds donates an amount to the sports team as a sponsorship.

This is cleaver, because both McDonalds and the sports team benefit from this. McDonalds wins on the image part, where they cultivate their local offset, get awareness and visibility in the arena. The sports team gets a sponsorship (cash), awareness and publicity.

If you translate this to your business, you can maybe probably go very local with this. Engage with a local soccer or hockey team, market one of your products as a “hockey team product” and donate a x to the team and wear jerseys in your store and let the hockey team advertise your product in the media channels (email, newsletter, arena)

What happens if you cross two channels? Say you are a florist and you partner up with a local sports team or charity.

1. Brand a bouquet of flowers with the colors of the sports team or charity
2. Each party promote the product in the email channel
3. You get awareness and trial
4. You donate an agreed portion of your turnover to the team or charity
5. You or the charity agree on a press release which the team or charity submits to the local media

I have no doubt, that this works. You get more customers to your store with very little cost. Your biggest investment is time!

4 Marketing channels on a budget

If you look at your options of marketing mediums or channels you can choose today, one can easily get confused, because there is a lot to choose from.

Say you are on a budget you can narrow down the channels some, below is an introduction to 4 channels which you could consider using.

I have on purpose not included social media, for a few reasons. There is a separate post on social media coming, moreover do social media compliment other channels very well as an accelerator.

Guerilla marketing

There is a parallel from Guerilla marketing to guerilla warfare. Guerilla warfare is concept of irregular war, where small cells or groups of soldiers use untraditional tactics, such as sabotage and ambushes to use the element of surprise.

The parallel is using some of the tactics to achieve the element of surprise. Guerilla marketing is using low-cost elements to promote products or service. Conventional marketing is typical dependent on a big budget, while guerilla marketing is more dependent on creativity, time and energy.

Below are some great examples of guerilla marketing:

These are examples, which hopefully stimulate your creativity and desire to try this out. The big idea is get people’s attention, put a smile on their face by catching them off guard, and leave the valuable impression of your brand or product.

There is a lot more examples to find on the internet, however is much content duplicated on different sites. Therefore do I advise to purchase the bestseller book by Jay Conrad Levinson Guerilla Marketing. The book has been updated several times and is a must read. It is loaded with inspirational content and matching strategy tools.

Email marketing

Sending email is an inexpensive media format, where you can distribute your messages directly to your consumers email or potential customers.

You need to have a database with some contact information and minimum the email address. You can build the database by leaving a printed excel sheet on your counter, and manually enter these names into the database. Alternatively can you obtain contact information from your website, if you build in a HTLM widget.

With a database in hand, you are now ready to send email. Theoretically can you distribute email from your outlook, Gmail or similar account, but this is not recommended. Instead should you sign a subscription with a mail service business, such as MailChimp.

The reason to use MailChimp, is that you can easily create beautiful emails with pictures, texts, links and social buttons, and get tracking on all of this. The program is very intuitive and provides several guide of how to get started. Best of all this there a good free plan to get you started.

When you add content to your newsletter, you have to post information which is relevant for the mail recipients; you can easily add links to your website, to generate traffic and sales. Consider dividing your content into two categories:

·         Hard sell: promotions, new products, services and similar

·         Soft sell: tips, guides, information about donations and similar

Next you should consider when the most optimal time for you, to send your email is? You probably need to experiment, before you get it right. Otherwise are there a lot of facts to find on the internet.

Partnerships

Forming partnership is inexpensive and can be very efficient. The sole purpose to create / turnover to both companies and create a win-win situation.

When you start looking for partners you have to be selective, it is important you select a partner which understand and respects your brand values and your business principles, or even better a partner should share those elements.

Below is 5 examples of partnerships:

• Include a gimmick in your product. Think about cereals! Big brand cereal companies do often include a branded toy. This creates desire to purchase the product and attention to the branded toy

• Coca Cola has three main Cola products, Coca Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero, each positioned for a demographic profile. Diet Coke targets the female use, and underlines it with a partnership with Marc Jacobs, both companies’ wins and get great exposure.

• Car dealers and theme parks, often share the same target group – families with kids. Car dealers can advertise free tickets, which initially drives traffic to the car dealership, secondly to the theme park, when the tickers is redeemed. Likewise could the theme park, place cars on display and host a competition of a prices covered by the car dealer.   

• Shortly before Mother’s day did 11 florists gathers together, to buy a one full page add in a big newspaper. Each independent florist, would normally never be able to get in that newspaper with such a powerful add, by splitting the cost, it became possible!

• Where I live, McDonalds support the local football / soccer team. Every time you purchase a particular product, the give x amount to the sports team as a sponsor. This is smart, because McDonald’s gets attention, the football team’s gets attention. In addition can you purchase tickets at the McDonalds counter.

Read my 5 step guide to Partner Advertising

Now ask yourself some questions and find out who can be the right partner / partners for your business.

Public Relations

Comparing advertising and public relations, there is one significant difference. Using advertising you control the content 100%, while using public relation the media´s control. You pitch them a story, they decide if they want to bring and in which format.

For entrepreneurs public relation is an inexpensive format to get your message out, find new customers and elevate your reputation.

Just like the other channels, you should know your position in the market. Start building your public relations locally, before you move to bigger regional media´s.

There are several PR agents that are working freelance and charge by the hour. You should consider this option, unless if you know how to write and have expertise in delivering the stories to the media´s.

You will typical achieve better results, using a pro, because they understand how to approaching medias with a practical approach.

Work on you credibility by focusing on smaller papers. The articles from these papers will help you get into other media, like radio, newsletters, blogs and local tv. Soon or later you will get more coverage.