As per Hinge’s 2021 High Growth Study, partner marketing is the 7th most influential marketing method for professional services organisations, ranking ahead of more regularly used marketing tactics like event sponsorships, blogging, and even email marketing campaigns. Furthermore, when we looked at the sector of high-growth organisations, we discovered that they were three times more likely than no-growth firms to employ marketing partnerships as part of their overall strategy.
So, how should we interpret these findings? These findings clearly demonstrate the importance of partnerships and partner marketing in the growth of businesses. Thus, it is also important to define goals to ensure that your partnership program helps you achieve optimum results.
What is the significance of goal planning in the partner marketing channel?
There are several sorts of standards of performance that you may incorporate into your partnership program. However, before you begin, it’s vital to consider why you’re defining aims and what they imply in the context of your overall business goals.
Goal Setting in Partner Marketing will energize and motivate your team.
There are ample opportunities and creative ideas available through the partnership channel in partner marketing, and it can be appealing to try to do it all, but setting concrete objectives will allow you to apply clear focus and take the actions that are strongly associated with your overall business strategy and team KPIs. For example, a wider corporate aim may be a 20% increase in new client acquisition, but your team is focusing their efforts and resources on increasing customer loyalty. Setting a channel-specific target that matches with the company plan will allow your team to focus on vital activities while reducing effort on less important projects, leading to optimum partner marketing.
They assist in obtaining 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, spend 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.
Achieving high-level buy-in from senior stakeholders is one thing, but you’ll almost certainly need funds of some form to achieve your objectives. Whether you require more funding, staff, or technical expertise, you’ll almost likely need to relate any demands to a measurable outcome. Assume you have some fantastic ideas for creative campaigns that will require consent from the brand team and an extra funding from the accounts department, but will enhance AOV or booking value.
Objectives are to form mutually satisfactory connections with partners and to create chances for partnership.
Honest, engaging, and inclusive partner marketing collaborations are the most successful. If you can be explicit with your partners about what you want to accomplish, they will frequently have a plethora of suggestions for how you might work. After all, they are the ones who are most familiar with their clients. A formerly goal-deficient strategy may have unwittingly promoted actions that are contrary to your company’s aims.
Maybe you have a loyalty program that awards points for purchases or for users. Your partnerships and partner marketing startegies 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 mindful of is that they have noticed a decrease in conversions to certain pages.Ironically, you now have a target of increasing your lead generation by a particular percent, and when you share this with your partners, they have an instant answer to assist you in reaching your goal and increasing sales.
Final Thoughts
When you consider 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 reach — your universe of prospective clients — will grow. And, if the business with whom you collaborate is well-liked by its target audience, some of that value might be transmitted to your firm by association.
