Explore the latest B2B partner marketing strategy and partner marketing trends. Discover how partner marketing expands audience reach and increases brand awareness through strategic collaborations.
1. Introduction
2. Importance of Partner Marketing Trends
3. Trends Shaping Partner Marketing
4. What Next?
1. Introduction
Partnership or
partner marketing is a strategic collaboration between businesses or
individuals to achieve mutual objectives. Partners are enthusiastic champions, driving increased brand visibility, generating valuable leads, and expanding audience reach. The evolution of this approach can be attributed to remarkable technological advancements, the rise of social media, and improved digital literacy, which has empowered the implementation of sophisticated tracking, personalized strategies, and optimization techniques. The article explores emerging partner marketing trends, offering insights on leveraging innovative partnership models, influencer marketing, and artificial intelligence for mutual growth and success. Partner marketing also aims to achieve mutually beneficial marketing goals, such as expanding audience reach, increasing brand awareness in specific demographics, attracting new customers, and fostering customer loyalty.
2. Importance of Partner Marketing Trends
Partner marketing provides access to new customers by leveraging a partner's curated audience, increasing visibility, and enhancing the likelihood of conversions. It offers cost-effective marketing by combining the strengths and resources of both partners, enabling a comprehensive B2B partner marketing strategy that reaches audiences through various mediums. This synergy extends the marketing budget and capabilities, leading to more impactful campaigns. Additionally, partner marketing reduces risks by collaborating with established and successful brands, leveraging their expertise, and avoiding potential pitfalls associated with new ventures. It also fosters greater customer trust, as partnering with a reputable brand inspires potential customers to associate a brand with quality goods and services, leveraging the trust and loyalty already established by the partner.
3. Trends Shaping Partner Marketing
Great opportunities are emerging in 2023 for partner marketers who are ready to be creative, find new opportunities, and keep up with industry trends. The article explores the latest partner marketing trends and strategies to help professionals stay ahead of the competition.
3.1 Data-Driven Marketing Enhanced by AI and Cloud
In contemporary partner marketing strategies, data-driven marketing has emerged as an essential component, offering valuable insights into consumer preferences, sales figures, and product details. Businesses extensively utilize data to create intricate consumer profiles, accurately forecast future traffic & purchases, and enhance the customer experience across various platforms and devices. Integrating AI and cloud-based technologies is expected to expedite the data collection and analysis process in the future, empowering businesses to efficiently store, manage, and access data in a more organized manner.
3.2 Brand-to-Brand Alliances
A notable increase in brand-to-brand partnerships is anticipated as organizations actively pursue innovative strategies to target specific segments and demographics. These alliances entail the collaboration of two non-competing companies, jointly providing partner marketing strategies to a shared target audience. Distinguished from conventional B2B relationships, such partnerships are designed to be mutually beneficial, resulting in advantages like heightened sales and conversions, increased brand awareness and reputation, and cost-effective marketing solutions.
3.3 Embracing Performance Marketing
Amidst the current economic uncertainty and volatility, businesses and customers are grappling with the effects of rising inflation and energy costs, as evident from shifts in consumer purchasing habits. Companies are actively seeking ways to optimize budget structures and ensure cost-effective and efficient marketing strategies. Performance marketing emerges as a viable solution, allowing brands to pay for digital advertising based on pay-per-click or pay-per-sale models, thereby eliminating wasteful spending. Partners must proactively adapt their strategies to offer performance-based marketing opportunities to businesses, catering to the growing demand for more accountable and results-driven approaches.
3.4 Metaverse Partnerships
Virtual shopping is steadily gaining ground, manifesting in diverse approaches such as virtual reality and augmented reality environments like the metaverse, which still need to be explored regarding partner marketing opportunities. By establishing a partnership marketing plan within the metaverse or related platforms, businesses can seize an advantage in collaborating with brands venturing into this unexplored territory, potentially leading to an innovative revenue stream. Additionally, video selling through robust eCommerce platforms presents another lucrative avenue for partners to capitalize on. Delving into live product broadcasts to engage the audience and providing recommendations, promo codes, and guidance opens up another promising partner marketing niche. As the e-commerce industry continues to flourish, active involvement in this domain grants access to fresh products, brands, and potential collaborations, creating a pathway to new opportunities.
3.5 Exploring Online Community Partnerships
In partner marketing, community-based strategies are gaining momentum, capitalizing on the foundational concept of online communities that have played a pivotal role in shaping the internet. From their early manifestation in forums and message boards to their current dominance on social media platforms, these communities pose challenges and lucrative prospects for partners. Online communities typically revolve around specific themes, drawing in a knowledgeable and engaged demographic. Partners who skillfully target these communities can tap into an untapped market of potential clients. As businesses and partners increasingly embrace organic marketing approaches, marketers focus on these communities, recognizing and harnessing the unique opportunities they offer for partner marketing.
3.6 Navigating a Cookieless Future
In the world of partner marketing, businesses are confronted with the imminent reality of a cookieless future, as the phasing out of third-party cookies has been announced. Marketers must now adapt their audience targeting strategies, prioritizing first-party data campaigns and contextual targeting that will soon undergo significant changes. As they gear up for this new phase, marketers rely on on-page analytics, conversational marketing, and social listening to engage their desired audience effectively. In a consumer-dominated market, a comprehensive understanding of the target demographic is crucial for creating engaging and precisely tailored advertising campaigns.
3.7 Leveraging Micro and Nano Influencers
An increasing number of small and midsize businesses recognize the benefits of partnership marketing as the pandemic-driven shift to online operations prompted them to engage with affiliate marketers and influencers. Despite having little partnership marketing budgets, these companies have found value in this strategy, yielding a commendable return on investment. One practical approach involves collaborating with micro (10,000 to 25,000 followers) and nano (500 to 10,000 followers) influencers, enabling brands to enhance brand awareness and reach a broader online audience without hefty campaign expenditures. The advantage of influencers with smaller subscriber bases lies in their superior engagement and closer connections with their audiences, who often belong to specific niches. This focus allows for highly targeted ads that resonate with their audiences, leading to higher conversion rates.
3.8 Boosting Engagement with Video Content
One of the prominent partner marketing trends in 2023 revolves around the growing importance of video content. Videos have become the most engaging format for connecting with potential customers, outperforming text and images in retaining viewers' attention on the subject matter. As this trend gains traction, platforms respond by supporting longer video durations and promoting short-form clips. E-commerce brands are recognizing the potential of this trend and seeking to collaborate with more video-specialized affiliates and content providers to drive sales.
3.9 Hyper-Personalization in Partner Marketing
In 2022, companies focused significantly on the hyper-personalization of the partner experience (PX), with increasing investments in system upgrades to provide channel partners with frictionless interactions. Taking cues from user-friendly apps, companies aimed to offer value and convenience to channel users, regardless of their roles as vendors, distributors, or partners. They successfully aligned the partner experience with the customer experience, resulting in a winning formula for success. Companies achieved their corporate objectives by incorporating improved core components, such as enhancing partner user personalization and implementing interactive user-journey workflows to guide users through the entire sales and marketing process. They gained a competitive edge in the market. A positive partner experience fostered loyalty, retention, and growth within marketing channels.
3.10 Rise of Automated Marketing
Marketing automation is expected to experience a surge in pre-configured marketing workflows in the near future, seamlessly integrating data, creative assets, marketing tools, and intelligent scheduling. This integration will enable vendors and partners to leverage customer data collected during and after-sales transactions. Despite amassing substantial data, many partners need help utilizing it to enhance their marketing automation processes effectively. At the same time, vendors possess analytics and machine learning expertise but need access to localized end-customer data. As a result, an increase in investments is foreseen from both vendors and partners in systems and solutions aimed at promoting data sharing and collaboration. Additionally, implementing a high-quality Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) platform will safeguard user privacy and ensure compliance with local regulations.
4. What Next?
Channel marketers can follow the abovementioned partner marketing trends to gain a competitive advantage in the long run. Implementing these strategies will enhance the competitiveness of their marketing programs and make them more appealing to potential partners. Closer collaboration between channel marketing teams, their CMO office, and channel marketing management is also recommended, as it can leverage corporate strategies and practices within channel marketing. Emphasizing automation, collaboration, personalization, and syndication will pave the way for a successful future. Despite the uncertainties of 2023, the emergence of a global economy that values sustainability, supply chain diversification, prudent financial management, partner diversity, and activity-based loyalty and rewards infrastructure is becoming evident. The enablement of cloud ecosystems will serve as a model across various industries. Focusing on driving this transformation will lead to a bright, exciting, professionally and financially rewarding future.