At CloudApp, we love our brand partners.
In fact, we’re pretty obsessed with teaming up with our customers and colleagues to help inspire, educate and motivate our joint audiences to live happier, more productive lives.
Brand partnerships are second to none, they can help small startups scale quickly, turn a struggling marketing strategy into social gold and even create new, marketable products with two-times the eager audience.
But just like with any relationship, there are some major Dos and Don’ts when it comes to collaborating with and picking out the best brand partnerships that pack a serious mutual punch.
Here’s what we (and our friends) have learned when it comes to leveraging brand relationships into the powerful brand and sales growth tools that they are.
Create a Mutual Product
Nothing excites customers quite as much as two of their favorite brands (or favorite + a new favorite) coming together to create something exclusive just for their followers.
Creating a mutual product or service helps you reach new and exciting audience pools, learn how to directly serve an audience you otherwise weren’t familiar with and expose your brand to an entirely new customer-base who’s excited to buy, and willing to give your contribution a try! Brand-partnerships that create joint-products (or bundles) create buzz, and establish their partnership as a long-term relationship worth investing in.
Consider Charity
Companies that care are only surpassed by TWO companies that care.
In 2017, charity and social consciousness matter more to marketing than ever before. Nearly two-thirds of Millennials want to work for companies that give to charity, and 88% of general consumers are more likely to buy products from companies who have the giving spirit.
Brands that create partnerships around charitable causes evoke compassion from joint customers, attract new followers who are passionate about the cause, and foster a sense of empathy while helping the public feel more connected to your brand.
Bottom line? Companies that give together, succeed together.
Make It A Long-Term Relationship
So often we see companies swap guest blog posts, or start a joint campaign on social media — only to never mention the other brand again, for anything else, EVER.
While guest blogging is an effective way to begin to leverage each other’s audience, it is just that, the beginning. “One and done” brand partnerships leave a lot of potential (and money on the table) because the longer your respective audiences see you working together, the more content you create, the more creative you are — the more effective the new customer conversion rate from these efforts will be.
Many times, brand partnerships are seen as an ER marketing effort. The blog is already dying, social is stalled and forming a good brand partnership seems like a great way to revive your presence. To fully engage your audience, help establish your partnership and get the most out of your goals, consider what kind of long-term campaigns and content you can create together throughout the year.
Remember, sometimes customers may be “meh” about the first campaign you try, and that doesn’t mean you’ve failed, it just means you need leeway to go back to the drawing board, which a long-term partnership has the bandwidth for.
Select The Right Brand Partner
One of the most important aspects of a successful brand partnership is selecting the right partner. Since you want to try and make this relationship a long-term collaboration (see above) making sure that the partners you choose are the perfect fit is critical to making the investment of marketing campaigns together pay off.
Here are a few things to consider when selecting your brand partner(s) :
- Is the partnership exciting? You want your partnership to make sense, but you also want it to turn heads. It’s important that the two brands together evoke interest and curiosity — while helping each other accomplish set goals
- Does your audience share common ground? Diversity is important, especially if you’re going to tap into a new audience you haven’t had much influence in (or has been unreachable to you) but your audiences also have to have a common interest, financial status, or goal. The last thing you want is for your audience to not care at all about your brand partner’s products or service
What is their KARMA? Alan Casey, a partner at Prophet a brand and marketing agency, suggests that the brands you choose to work with need to either be KNOWN, ADDITIVE (meaning they bring unique qualities you don’t have to the table) RARE, MATCHING, or ATTRACTIVE for you to consider partnering up.
Outline Goals and Expectations
Just like any healthy relationship, brand partnerships work best when each party clearly states what they hope to get from the collaboration, what their immediate and long-term goals are and what expectations they have for the partnership. This means having clear conversations around marketing budgets for joint campaigns, the amount of work and money each party is willing to put in and specifically outline who responsible for what deliverables.
Even the most-likely to succeed brand partnerships will fail with wobbly boundaries and unclear expectations.
We’d love your feedback
We’d love for you to share with us some of your brand partnership stories. Have you tried it? If not, what’s holding you back? You can check out some of our favorite brand partnership blog collaborations (like with our pals Zapier) here.
As always, feel free to drop us a line at support@getcloudapp.com and follow @cloudapp news on Twitter.
-The CloudApp team
