According to Hinge’s 2021 High Growth Study, partner marketing is the 7th most impactful marketing tactic for professional services companies, surpassing other frequently leveraged marketing techniques such as event sponsorships, blogging, and email marketing campaigns. More importantly, within the sector of high-growth companies, we found they were three times more likely to use marketing partnerships as part of their overall approach than no-growth companies.
So, how do we read these results? These results will clearly show why partnerships and their marketing are really important for a business’s growth. Thus, it is equally important to identify goals so that your partnership program helps you reap optimum results.
What is goal planning in the partner marketing channel?
There are so many kinds of performance standards which you can adapt to your collaboration program. It is important at first, though, to understand why you do aim setting and its meaning in association with your core business objectives for overall growth.
Goal Setting in Partner Marketing will energize and motivate your team.
The partnership channel through partner marketing offers lots of opportunities and innovative ideas, and it can be tempting to try to do it all, but trying to set concrete objectives will let you apply clear focus and take the actions which are strongly associated with your overall business strategy and team KPIs. For instance, a broader corporate objective could be a 20% increase in new client acquisition, but your team is focusing their efforts and resources on customer loyalty. By setting a channel-specific target that aligns with the company plan, your team will be able to focus on critical activities while reducing effort on less important projects, thus ensuring optimum partner marketing.
They help in getting buy-in from business/executive stakeholders.
Nobody is in isolation, and this is particularly true for those of us in the partner channel. You’ll need buy-in from at least one CEO and many business divisions for revenue to increase, spending to be managed, and connections to develop. Any senior or company leader will need to be persuaded that your activity is important to organisational success, and well-defined and linked aims and objectives will help. After all, studies indicate that top executives typically disregard outstanding ideas from below for this reason. On the other hand, conveying successes to management and stakeholders would be difficult if you can’t describe or contextualise them.
You can assess what assets you may require to attain your objectives.
You may get top-level buy-in from senior stakeholders, but you will almost certainly need some sort of funds to deliver your goals. Whether it is more funding, staff, or technical expertise, you will almost certainly need to relate any demands to a measurable outcome. Let’s assume you have some great ideas for creative campaigns that will require sign-off from the brand team and additional funding from the accounts department but will increase AOV or booking value.
Objectives: The intention is mutual agreement with partners and setting mutual opportunities for partnership.
The most effective partner marketing collaborations are honest, engaging, and inclusive. If you can be clear with your partners about what you want to achieve, they will often have a whole list of ideas for how you might work. After all, they are the ones who are best placed to know their clients. A strategy that was once goalless may have inadvertently encouraged actions that are at odds with your company’s goals.
Maybe you have a loyalty program that rewards points for purchases or for users. Your partnerships and partner marketing strategies may be sending traffic to your loyalty pages with good intentions, such as encouraging each consumer they refer to your site towards becoming your most loyal customer. What you may not be aware of is that they have seen conversion on specific pages reduced. Ironically, you now have a target for raising your leads by a given percentage, and when you mention this to your partners, they will have a prompt answer to help you meet the target as well as your sales.
Final Thoughts
When you think about the relationship between partnerships and progress in partner marketing, it makes a lot of sense. If you can collaborate with another organisation that interacts with a part of your audience that you haven’t yet reached out to, your universe of prospective clients will grow. And, if your business partner is popular with its target audience, some of that value may rub off on your company by osmosis.
