Rapidly growing brands are three times more likely to have partner marketing among their strategies. Still, finding and acquiring new partners remains one of the main challenges and biggest expenses for brands.
The key to unlocking the tremendous potential of partnerships for business growth may lay in the well-thought-through promotion of brands’ partnership programmes. We’re going to reveal the main tactics and ways to spread the word about a partner programme.
Get your partner marketing assets prepared
Before kicking promotional activities off, make sure you’re fully prepared for the influx of potential partners. A thorough examination of your partner programme and marketing assets related to it will be a starting point in this journey.
You may begin with revising the scope of products you include in your partner programme. Not everything your company offers can be a good fit for promotion through partner or publisher resources. To determine the right products, keep in mind the potential partners’ expertise and their target audience.
The next step is the programme’s policy and rules check. They may include the allowed promotional methods, performance requirements, cookie lifetime, and other conditions. Pay special attention to payment terms – the size of commissions, payment methods, the payout schedule, and so on. All of the things listed above should be clearly and thoroughly described and explained to potential partners.
With that out of the way, you may proceed to prepare your programme for promotion with content and collateral revision. Brand guidelines, banner templates, product reviews and tutorials, high-quality videos, articles, and infographics will make your partners’ lives easier and help you keep your branding incredibly consistent. Creating partner marketing content may be a conundrum for starters. To reduce friction and get some inspiration, follow our 12 creative content ideas for affiliate marketers.
Partner programme landing page is a go-to place for aspiring publishers and partners. To hook them, you may need to include the following elements:
- A catchy headline built around your unique selling proposition, such as high commissions or the possibility to grow fast.
- The list of benefits your partner programme offers.
- Partner testimonials or other social proofs.
- Strong and eye-catching calls to action encouraging to participate in your programme.
If your programme’s missing such crucial elements as policy and rules, information about commissions, or marketing collateral, you may need to take a pause and restart it. Discover the main steps to take before launch and the best practices to achieve desired results with your programme.
Diversify your partner programme promotional channels
The surefire way to spread the word about your partner programme is by testing various promotional channels, measuring their effectiveness, and doubling down on the top-performing options. Consider starting with inbound marketing strategies, which allow you to attract potential partners natively and keep them engaged in the long run.
Aspiring partners often search for new offers and programmes to join online, which makes SEO a must-have practice for partner programme promotion. Optimise your website or landing page for industry-related keywords coupled with “affiliate programme,” “affiliate offers,” and “affiliate links.”
Content marketing is another strategy that can work magic for partner programme promotion. If you decide to lean on it, make sure the content you create provides value for your potential partners. To deliver it, explore what they want to achieve with partner marketing and help them in this journey. For instance, you may craft a video explaining how to monetise blogs or increase reach and natively promote your partner programme in it.
Another strategy that continues to deliver excellent results is email marketing. A simple announcement about the partner programme launch sent to your subscribers can bring you first partners while costing $0. You can also use a regular newsletter to remind the readers about the partner programme, add the “become a partner” CTA to your email signature, and more.
The main thing to remember when working with inbound strategies is that you’ll probably start getting results at least a couple of months after the launch. To win over some partners straightaway, combine inbound with the outbound marketing strategies or direct selling to potential partners.
One of the most common tactics is employing paid advertising. It allows you to expand the reach, get immediate results, and pay only for the outcomes you get. Test various creatives and keep the balance to make your banners flashy but not irritating to achieve the best results. Make sure your ads are optimised for mobile to avoid losing tons of traffic generated from smartphones.
Another outbound tactic is reaching potential partners directly. Create a list of the brands, content creators, or influencers you want to partner with to get the ball rolling. Sticking to micro influencers with a narrow but dedicated audience and niche brands will help you expand your partner list without breaking the bank and make each marketing dollar go further.
If you’re struggling to name even a few potential partners, industry or affiliate forums and groups may help you spot the most promising market players. We’ve collected the most useful and active affiliate marketing forums and communities to help you out.
Make use of technology
Addressing agencies or affiliate networks is another common way to acquire partners. It lets you get rid of the manual work and save time on the programme promotion. However, trusting this matter to the intermediary is not a flawless tactic.
When addressing a third party, you may encounter such challenges as the lack of control over the partner selection process, inability to build effective relationships with partners, and hindered access to data and partner performance assessment. Eventually, it prevents you from scaling your partner programme efficiently.
Having up-to-date partner programme management technology at hand can help you eliminate these challenges. Look for modern partner marketing platforms, which not only offer automation, tracking, and analytics but also provide the functionality to recruit partners and foster relationships with them. Adding such a partnership management solution to your programme promotional strategy will help you get unlimited access to various types of partners in one place, achieve the ownership of the data and partner relationships, as well as the flexibility to tweak your partner programmes and campaigns to achieve the best results.
