Tips & Guides — 03 Jan 2022
Boost Your Customer Acquisition With Partner Marketing
Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and many marketing efforts aim to attract them. But what can you do to succeed in it? By diversifying channels and investing in new strategies such as partnerships, you'll create business opportunities to engage and provide value to your target audience during the acquisition process.
Building partnerships is a great strategy to increase awareness, improve performance, save time and resources. By teaming up with influencers, content creators, or companies, more and more brands are expanding their audiences and results. In this article, you’ll learn more about why you should work with partners and develop effective brand tactics together. To start with, below, you’ll find:
Image source: Freepik
We can say that customer acquisition is a set of activities and actions that a business performs to attract a new customer. In short, it encompasses the entire customer journey. By attracting new leads who are genuinely interested in learning more about a product or service, a business can grow its audience and increase the chances of having new customers. Let’s briefly outline the steps to build a customer acquisition strategy:
Acquisition costs are the biggest concern for marketers today, rising 50% in recent years. In short, this cost (CAC) is determined by how much you have to spend to acquire a new customer. This should include all your efforts and investments related to the channels and strategies you use in your campaigns. For this reason, it is essential that you know precisely your tactics and the marketing trends that will take your business to the next level.
In recent years, customers seem to have grown weary of the traditional form of ads. In response to this change, marketing efforts focus on generating leads through various channels, such as influencer marketing and native ads in their customer acquisition strategy. HubSpot’s latest research shows that influencer marketing is a growing trend. One reason is that many businesses have bolstered their confidence in this tactic, as influencer marketing is proving to be effective when it comes to improving ROI.
Image source: HubSpot
In practice, brands can gain their target audience’s attention, traffic, and potential sales by working with an influencer, content creator, or a marketing partner who has earned trust and experience in a particular industry. And, it’s not a strategy only for big and stable brands: today, the available resources in the marketplace have made this strategy accessible to small businesses and startups.
Another point is that brands will be testing Native Ads, which are more cohesive with the page content and not straightforward. Thus, they can introduce your brand to a new audience that might otherwise never hear about it.
While native ads have a better chance to hook the target audience, which usually doesn’t focus on traditional ads, marketers will invest more in them, as the HubSpot report says. One way to start is by creating compelling and engaging ads for your audience by working with partners, influencers, publishers, and others.
Partnerships provide many opportunities for a brand. Among other benefits, it is one of the easiest ways for a brand to increase its visibility by presenting offers to potential customers across different marketing channels.
As partnerships are based on performance marketing, marketers can take their product promotion to another level and pay the promoters involved for their results, making it a cost-effective and low-risk strategy. And, partner marketing allows brands to build credibility, even if they don’t have a stable online presence yet. Let’s see how partners can practically work:
Attract more customers through new channels: imagine an industry or demographic interested in your product but is not reached by your current advertising/marketing channels. Partners can help break down that barrier and find a new way to get customers outside the areas or zones you are already familiar with.
Lower acquisition costs: undoubtedly, all strategies and ads are welcome to help you reach a larger audience for your business, but the point is that they also quickly add cost over time. This means that you will initially pay a certain amount for an ad, but soon that amount will increase. When you choose to work with partners, you can set up your offer and only pay for an action, for instance, clicks, views, or conversion.
Increase the value of your offer: when you work with a partner already trusted by their target audience, it increases the product or service’s value. When people see your product on their preferred channels, they are more likely to engage and try it if the offer meets their needs.
Image source: Freepik
You will undoubtedly need to find the right partners to launch your partner program. However, the search begins first and foremost with defining and understanding your target audience. And why? You need to make sure that your partner has a similar target audience, shares the same values, and has the same goals. Many services help you get demographic information about your audience and monitor traffic to a website, and one of them is Google Analytics.
Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Instagram also provide data that you can use to identify and monitor your audience. The idea is that you use the information to understand your audience’s behavior and use segmentation to improve your offerings in a much more personalized way. Plus, the next step, finding the right partners, will be much easier if you know your audience.
Partners, of course, are the lifeblood of a partner program, and to find them, there are many ways. First, remember to take into account your audience preferences and demographics. Then, we recommend you use multiple methods to recruit your partners, and below, you can see what they are:
Influencers: This method has become increasingly common for building profitable partnerships for both sides. Practically, one of the ways is by giving special codes and coupons to an influencer who will share them with your audience.
Partners landing page: Consider creating a landing page to attract your future partners by optimizing your website and landing page to drive more traffic and views of your offers.
Paid advertising: Sponsoring ads about your partner program is a great way to promote your offer. It’s also one of the easiest ways to get your program out to more partners.
Your best customers: Happy customers are one of the best ways to encourage your future customers to buy. They show a real example of using your product or service, which helps to raise conversion rates. So when creating your partner program, think about how to include your best customers.
The next step is to decide how to launch your program and pay for promotions. Think about how the offer can be competitive and motivating for the company and your partner. To start with, have in mind that the commission rate can be set as a percentage or a fixed amount of money for each partner sale. As we will see, payment options are directly related to your choice of strategy. Let’s see what the most common ways to pay your marketing partners are:
Cost per action (CPA): this is the most common payment method among offers, as payment is based on the number of clicks. This option is prevalent among websites with a high volume of clicks. In this case, the aim is not to sell a product but to bring visitors to a website. It usually involves conversion actions, such as downloading apps or a customer filling out a subscription form.
Cost per sale (CPS): It’s when a brand sets a percentage of the total revenue of a conversion.
Cost per conversion plus cost per sale: You’ll set up a fixed payment for each percentage of partners’ sales by choosing this option.
Cost per click (CPC): It’s not just conversions affected by your payment structures. Clicks are also critical to an offer, and each click can mean paying for a partner.
Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM): It’s when, for instance, every 1,000 impressions, markets can set payment and track impressions.
Image source: Freepik
Ideally, you want to create an offer that your partners will be excited to promote. To achieve this, there are a few points you should keep in mind:
Provide the necessary information: One of the most critical goals in creating an offer is to break down the barriers that a lack of communication creates. Thus, investigate what data or information your partners need – or are missing – to work efficiently.
Define KPIs and measure website performance: This tactic will allow you to assess whether results are within expectations. It also allows you to find the points that need improvement to improve your offer’s performance.
Check if your links are working correctly: To ensure that your offer is working, check the preview link that directs the customer to a landing page. Make sure it works appropriately because this preview is one of the first elements to be seen before partners choose to promote an offer.
Best offers include not only descriptions of the product or service and conversion flows, but also creative marketing materials such as logos or banners.
Partners can create content, but they do not have to. By following your guidelines and the content you have already created for them, partners will adequately promote your brand to their audience; it will be easier for them. Here is a list of content you can provide to make your partner’s work easier:
Pictures: Good images are a great way to reinforce your brand, showcase products, and help users get to know the company.
Videos: By 2022, online videos will account for 82% of all internet traffic, making them 15 times more important than in 2017. Make your partners want to promote your products on many different social media channels by providing videos of your products or short videos explaining your services.
Blogs: How about using your blog to improve your communication with partners? One of the ways to do that is by publishing blogs that answer common questions, give advice, or educate your partners about your brand and offers.
Reviews: Collecting reviews from your customers not only leads to them identifying with your brand but also builds trust between partners.
White Papers and EBooks: These provide even more value to potential customers while reinforcing your authority. These are long-form versions of the content for audiences that prefer in-depth information, searchable data, and reliable statistics.
With all this material, marketers can also make their offers more attractive from the partner’s point of view. Undoubtedly, a partner will trust a brand that provides images and promotional materials to support its offerings.
Image source: Freepik
To be successful, you need to ensure your partners are engaged in your program. One of the most common ways to do this is through emails. In this case, we recommend sending a welcome email or newsletter with all the necessary information about a partner program. Here is what you can include in your email:
Newsletters should also include first-hand discount coupons, offers, promotions, or launches. By offering them a benefit, such as an exclusive code, marketers motivate their partners to promote products. One of the most common ways is a public discount code that the partner can share with their audience on social media.
Another form of incentive is tiered commissions. In this case, you should create a plan that includes tiers that partners can unlock based on their revenue. You can also create a recognition program to reward the best-performing partners.
Whether you prefer, investing in regular communication with your partners is always a good strategy. Be ready to help them with tips, additional materials, or answering questions. You can also initiate a conversation with your partners from time to time to strengthen relationships with them and keep them engaged.
Let’s imagine you are running your partnership program. That’s exciting, right? When it comes to managing partnership marketing, statistics play one of the most critical roles. That’s why marketers spend most of their time analyzing statistics, and the end of a campaign is the ideal time to measure the performance.
One easy way to do this is with Affise, a partner marketing platform used throughout the campaign tracking process. Affise Analytics allows you to get detailed reports and advanced analytics to improve campaigns with accurate data. Besides, you can integrate data from other analytics platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, or TikTok for Business.
Another good point is that you can measure offers performance with an intuitive and straightforward statistics design; it’s flexible and allows you to customize or sort the data columns in the way you like. The same goes for the metrics: you can concentrate on unique formulas.
As an alternative to increasing marketing costs to attract new customers, partner marketing is a low-risk and cost-effective strategy with numerous benefits for a brand, as presented in this article. To review your plan, make sure you:
To learn more about this topic, we recommend downloading our Ebook. In it, you will find the necessary information on how to take the following steps and build a solid and effective partner marketing program.
Written by
Andressa is a Content Marketer passionate about art and technology. She is curious, ambitious, creative, and motivated to learn new skills. She wants to write good stories that inspire businesses and also people. When she's not writing, she loves to travel and discover cultures from around the world.
See all articles →Stay on top of the competition. Let us keep you updated with news, insights, and more
