Getting your partner marketing program in place is such a fun and exhilarating project, especially when it starts to yield results! Like any type of marketing or sales initiative, the goal is to always grow, improve and move forward. In regards to partner marketing, how do you grow? How do you find more partners to help leverage sales and drive revenue higher? This article will highlight 3 little tricks to put in place that will help you do just that by generating more leads through partner marketing.
1. Analytics and Insights
You need a way to track the activity and sales results of your partners, so you can easily figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve. There are a few great ways to do this that are relatively simple, especially if you have a partner marketing platform in place.
If your current partner marketing platform can track different incentives for your different channels, great, you’re already halfway there. With different partner tiers and programs, you can easily track which campaigns are working well and which need improvement. Try using different codes to track the conversion rate, and voila, you’ve created measurable metrics.
Want to know what your partners are driving from their own channels? Make sure each uses your trackable link so you can see the click count for each link. Again, being able to manage these links within your platform is key to gaining efficiency, and essentially generating more leads through partner marketing.
2. Sales and Marketing Materials
As partner marketing efforts get more sophisticated, you are going to need to think about what kinds of content your partners are producing: How are they sharing your product? How does this align with your company's goals?
In the initial stages, you should at least have an asset folder where your partners have access to basic sales and marketing materials. After that, build out a community content calendar or challenges for your partners, and continuously add new messaging, images and videos to your asset library. Circling back to point one, having one platform that provides this for you is easiest and most efficient.
Having a one-stop-shop where your partners can view content at will can help leverage your partner relationships and help you grow over the long-term.
3. Partner Distribution Channel
If you have multiple partners working with you, you must have put in the leg work to build those relationships - don’t lose them. The key to partner marketing is long-term relationships: the more you grow together, the bigger the payoff will be.
The easiest way to stay connected is to send a monthly email to all of your past and current with upcoming opportunities for collaboration. Highlight great projects, discuss upcoming opportunities and foster your relationships with these partners. You can also create different drip marketing campaigns for your partners that send at different times depending on where they are in their relationship with your company.
The key here is that you want to be able to automate this process. You have the ability to manage all 3 of these steps by incorporating one platform that manages your entire partner marketing program. In any type of initiative, efficiency is key. With all of these steps in place, you shouldn't have to manually do too much. You want to focus on scaling and growing and let your automated program do the heavy lifting for you.
In the end, partner marketing is really all about relationships. It's about nurturing, managing and leveraging your relationships with your partners to scale your program - and sales and revenue - to the next level. If you can focus on the relationships, and not get bogged down by the mundane day-to-day, you’ll be able to bring your partner marketing to the next level in no time.
