On one hand, it’s evident that we operate in a competitive world which values self-sufficiency. Our customers, colleagues, and peers expect us to work hard, carry our own weight, and continue to grow. No excuses. Fortunately though, it’s not all dog-eat-dog…

Charles Darwin who famously developed the concept of survival of the fittest is also quoted as saying, “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

In nature, life, and now in business, there appears to be an essential need for partnership and collaboration. And we don’t have to just rely on appearances… We have data!

According to Hinge’s 2022 High Growth Study, partnership marketing is ranked as the 8th most impactful marketing technique for professional services firms – ranking at the same level as more commonly implemented marketing techniques like presenting in educational webinars and speaking at conferences and events. 

So what are we to make of these findings? First, let’s clarify what we mean by partnership marketing so that we can understand exactly how they can help our businesses grow.

Marketing Partnerships Defined

Partnership marketing can be defined as a mutually beneficial marketing relationship between a firm and another organization. Now, this definition is admittedly pretty broad – but that is because most marketing partnerships will have their own unique attributes.

The centerpiece of a marketing partnership could include larger initiatives such as conducting a powerful piece of research with another firm or be something as small as asking a partner for a specific retweet on Twitter. It all depends on the firms involved and their current strategic goals.

Many marketing partnerships start small and grow overtime as two firms get to know one another and find what works best for each party. We’ll explore more details below but here are some examples of partnership marketing activities:

• Build do-follow links on relevant blog posts
• Social media blasts sharing new content or upcoming events
• Email swaps promoting your respective services or content
• Co-produced and co-promoted webinars
• Live events targeting the same prospects
• Conducting a new piece of research together

However, you cannot afford to simply partner with anyone. There are some important things that must be considered before entering into a new partnership with another firm.

Selecting the Right Partners

When beginning a new strategic marketing partnership there are two criteria you need to follow to select the right partner – ensure they are not your competitor and that they serve the same audience as you.

It may sound obvious… but you need to be sure that the firm you partner with is not your direct competitor. Many firms continue to diversify their service offerings making it more likely for partners to cross into your lane. So do your research ahead of time by reviewing their website, interviewing one or two of their team members, and possibly talking to one of their clients. In any marketing partnership, you want to avoid introducing any confusion about what services your firm provides. Partnering with firms that offer the same services as you simply isn’t an option.

The second criteria is that your partner needs to serve the same audiences as you do, at least in part. For example, at Hinge this means that our marketing partnerships are built with other firms that serve or are looking to serve the professional services marketplace. We receive messages on a regular basis from firms that want to “partner” with us but whose audience is different than our ideal prospects. If your firm is like ours, then you don’t have the time or resources to waste on partnerships that don’t directly put you in front of your ideal prospects.

To summarize, when considering a new marketing partnership follow these two rules:

1. Be sure your partner is not your competitor
2. Confirm that you and your partner are targeting the same audience

Marketing Partnerships and Growth

When you think about the connection between partnerships and growth, it makes a lot of sense. If you can work cooperatively with another organization that communicates with a segment of your audience that you haven’t yet addressed, then your reach — your universe of potential clients — will expand. And if the firm you partner with is held in high esteem by its audience, some of that credibility can be transferred to your firm by association.

The strongest partnerships not only give you access to another firm’s list of prospects, they can benefit your audience, too. How? By endorsing a reputable firm that offers services many of your clients and prospects need, you expose them to a high-quality provider. When they need to buy those services, your clients have a great option (your partner) already at hand. Of course for this approach to work, you must vet your partners carefully.

What Goes into a Partnership Marketing Plan

So suppose you wanted to act on this information. What would a partnership marketing plan look like? The question to ask yourself is “how could we utilize our most impactful marketing techniques in a marketing partnership plan?”

When we look at a list of the most impactful marketing techniques, nearly all of them can be rolled into a partnership marketing plan. Here’s one way you might approach such a plan:

Speaking Engagements and Conferences: If you have an annual conference, offer your partner a speaking spot and exhibit space. This helps your audience learn more about your partner and puts a face to your partner’s name. If your partner has an annual conference, you can swap these opportunities. But what if they don’t? Consider inviting your partner to co-present at other conferences that target an audience you have in common. More and more conference organizers are seeking presentations that involve more than one speaker, so offering co-presenters can give you an advantage when competing for a spot.

Co-promoted Webinars: Webinars have skyrocketed in popularity as individuals all around the world seek professional development opportunities in a low-cost forum. Measurements of successful webinars include high a registration count, attendance count, and engagement rate. Often times it is difficult to hit these higher numbers on your own. A co-promoted webinar is an easy way for two firms to utilize each other’s audience to increase the total number of registrants and ultimately attendees while highlighting each others expertise.

Publish Original Research: More and more firms are discovering the power of conducting original research. The benefits are plenty but two highlights include how original research can educate your firm strategically on your ideal prospects while also giving your marketing team material that can supercharge your marketing strategy. However, original research can be expensive. So how about finding one of your marketing partners and conduct the research together?

Downloadable Content/Email Marketing/Blogging: Email marketing and guest blog swaps are common in partnerships. For instance, you might agree to send an email to each others’ list every other month. Typically in these arrangements, firms don’t exchange lists with a partner; instead, each organization sends for the other. You might agree to write (and host) guest blog posts a little more frequently than you exchange emails — say monthly. You can make the most of these golden opportunities in front of a new audience by adding educational content to the mix. Offer a free whitepaper or research report in each email you send. End your blog posts with a link to download related content. And be sure to gate at least some of your content so you can acquire email addresses and grow your firm’s list of contacts.

Website & Online Advertising: You may want to offer your partner advertising, branding and marketing opportunities on your website. If you sell ad space on your website or newsletter, for instance, include free ads as part of your partnership plan. Consider adding a Partners page or section to your website, as well. Ask your partner to provide relevant copy and graphics. This page can also tell your audience about any special pricing or packages they can get as a benefit of your partnership.

In this post, I’ve outlined one approach to a partnership marketing plan — one based on our most recent study of high-growth professional services firms. You need to customize your plan to fit the realities of your firm and industry. At Hinge, we’ve cultivated strategic partnerships for a number of years, and they have become an invaluable way to expand our reach to new audiences. While building partner relationships and trust can take time, it’s well worth the effort. In fact, it’s one of the best ways to start growing your firm!

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The post How to Create a Partnership Marketing Plan that Drives Growth appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Strategic business partnerships are one of commercial history’s oldest strategies. Some say they even date back more than two millennia. Their relevance through the years endures because they help partners expand capabilities, exploit opportunities, reduce risk, or all three. 

For professional services firms in today’s fast-changing, largely digital business environment, partnerships play a more crucial role than before: they help firms stay relevant and competitive in a crowded marketplace. It’s no wonder the Hinge Research Institute’s High Growth Study 2022 lists partnerships as one of the top 10 techniques firms use to promote their services. 

What are strategic business partnerships?

A strategic business partnership is a relationship formed by two or more organizations whose goal is to create more value for target clients’ new or underserved needs. In doing so, it creates value for each partner firm. This goal is achieved by enhancing each firm’s access to information, resources, areas of expertise, and buyers.  

In the professional services industry, strategic business partnerships can help firms close gaps in content and capability, amplifying each firm’s visibility—online and off—and expanding their expertise. Viewed from another angle, partnerships in professional services is a matter of lending and borrowing reputations and audiences. 

But not all strategic business partnerships meet their goals. Success depends largely on finding the right partners, forging the right partnership, and promoting it.

Because partnerships can be lucrative, almost all firms engage in some form of partnership.  

Most will promote their partnership by putting each other’s logos on their website. Many will deliver a pitch together. But few will collaborate on marketing and business development throughout the pre-client and client-experience stages. They operate as though the added value they’ve agreed to deliver didn’t exist or, worse, should remain an industry’s best-kept secret. This way of thinking undermines one of the main benefits of partnerships—enhanced audience reach and conversion.

What’s a good strategic business partner firm?

A good partner firm will have the following characteristics:

• Audience: Serves the same (or similar) audience you currently–or wish to–serve.
• Compatible areas of expertise: Offers a service or product that complements–rather than competes with—yours (examples: a business law firm and an accounting firm; an architecture firm and an engineering firm; a marketing firm and a sales training firm) and is interested in your offering.
• Reputation: Bolsters your credibility with an audience and raises no red flags when you do an online search, whether on the organization or any of its team members. 
• Visibility: Has a sizable mailing list that only minimally overlaps with yours, a site whose domain authority is just as good if not better than your site’s, and as many or more followers on social media as you do. If you’ve published externally and spoken at industry events, try to find a partner who has done the same.
• Content Development: Frequently and consistently produces insightful, educational pieces in different formats—blog, video, infographics, etc.—that they distribute through integrated marketing communications campaigns (i.e., earned, owned, shared, and paid media).
• Commitment to reciprocity: Is comfortable sharing the stage (figuratively or literally) with you
• Clients: Will give you access to clients you don’t already have 

These are the characteristics to look for. But, finding the right partner for your business demands a closer look at how partnerships fit into your business strategy. 

How to find the right strategic business partner

The key to finding the right partner is to have clear objectives for the partnership. What do you want the partnership to help you achieve? Is it to reach a new audience? Extend your array of services to an existing audience?

Whether you’re addressing an existing audience or a new one, the partnership will, by design, have an impact on the buyer’s journey. The questions you need to ask are: 

• Where in the buyer journey can the partner make an impact?
• What can the partner do to make the desired impact?

The professional service buyer journey has four stages:

1. The Pre-Client Experience
2. The Client Experience
3. Between Engagements
4. Former Client

Figure 1 shows some of the roles or responsibilities partners can play at each stage. 

Figure 1: Buyer Journey: Partner Role and Responsibility Map

Some partners carry out roles and responsibilities limited to one stage. Others might stretch into the client experience stage and beyond. 

Pre-client experience

In the pre-client experience stage partners can collaborate through joint promotion, each firm providing a warm introduction of the partner to their audience. The partnership’s success rests on how well the firms’ efforts move marketing qualified leads from the top to the bottom of the funnel.

If your partner’s role is to expose you to their audience, you might consider the following activities:

• Guest posting on each other’s blogs.
• Sending each other’s content to your own lists.

To build engagement you could:

• Co-promote and co-present at a webinar
• Conduct market research together
• Collaborate on a book

To convert prospects into clients:

• Submit a joint proposal to a shared prospect
• Co-deliver consultations or demos

Partnership marketing offers partners several key benefits. One, it allows them to fast-track building relationships with a new audience or expanding their reach into an existing audience. Two, it provides a forum for testing the partners’ compatibility before moving from joint promotion to service or product integration. 

Client Experience, Between Engagements, and Former Client

When partnerships reach the client experience stage, enough trust and confidence have been built for partners to collaborate on offering a service to a single client. The success of this more complex, longer-term partnership hinges on effective, continual joint promotion and business development. 

Continually promoting the partnership and each other’s service capabilities are key to winning more of a client’s business. Yet the 2020 Inside the Buyer’s Brain Study indicates that less than 40% of clients are aware of their professional services firms’ breadth of offerings. If partners don’t educate clients about their services, those clients will likely switch to competitors who do. Keeping your clients informed of your offerings at key points of the engagement reduces the risk of losing them. In many instances, the “former client” stage is avoidable, not inevitable. 

Understanding what role potential partners will play is not enough. You’ll also need to consider what you bring to the table. Assuming your potential partners are also mapping out roles across the buyer journey map, think about what content and capabilities you can offer to close their gaps.

Where to find the right strategic business partners

Once you have a vision of how you and your partners can collaborate, you can start looking for prospects. A few good places to start are:

• Other Visible Experts or thought leaders
• Industry-specific LinkedIn groups
• Sponsors and speakers at industry conferences
• Members of industry associations
• Business journal lists
• Industry publications
• Google searches

How to probe for prospective partner information

Once you have a list of prospects, it’s time to do the research on each one. Start with their website. Next, sign up for their newsletters, attend their webinars, and follow them on social media. Then ask yourself:

• Do their services meet your clients’/audience’s needs without competing with yours?
• Do any of your services meet their clients’ needs?
• What new value proposition can you offer clients by joining forces?
• Do they develop high-quality educational content? 
• How do they promote their services? Through what channels?
• Is their brand a good match for yours—ie, is their reputation, values, and style in sync with your firm’s?
• Do they partner with your competitors?
• Do they have an engaged audience on social media?
• Do they externally publish and speak at conferences?

It’s crucial to know whether prospective partners have the digital marketing chops, service capabilities, or both to help you reach your business goals. 

Equipped with a shortlist, you can start reaching out.

Partner meeting agenda

Once you make contact and agree to meet, plan what you’ll cover in your conversation. Here are a few items to consider:

• Ways your firm could help theirs. Remember, this initial conversation has to be focused on what you can do for them. So come with several specific ideas in mind.
• Ask about their target audience (company sizes, demographics, job titles, etc.)
• Ask how they market to their prospects, and what they think their audience
  needs most. (You will already have some idea of what their campaigns are like if you’ve signed up for their content, followed them on social media, etc.)
• Ask how they’ve conducted joint promotions or joined-up services with partners before
• Ask how they usually measure success

No matter how thoroughly you vet your partner and negotiate your agreement with them, you won’t know if you’re compatible until you start collaborating. To ensure success, clarify the roles, goals, and measures of success to everyone. 

Start with a small, discrete project, such as exchanging guest blog posts or hosting a joint webinar. Take a hard look at what results you produced together and what it was like to collaborate. Does it look like a good fit? Would you want to move forward with more joint promotions? Was it so good that you’re considering going beyond the pre-client experience?

However, if the results fall below your targets and the collaboration is difficult, be willing to walk away. Not every partnership will end up meeting expectations. When it doesn’t work out, it’s in both parties’ interest to move on. 

But don’t burn bridges unless the experience was abysmal. Sometimes, partnerships are a matter of timing. You just might need that firm’s help down the road—and vice versa.

The post Business Growth Through Strategic Business Partnerships: Where to Start appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

• Affiliate
• Agile
• Behavioral
• Content
• Direct
• Drip
• Inbound
• Local
• Mobile
• Multichannel
• Word-of-mouth

The list is seemingly endless and trying to keep up with the growing list of techniques can be challenging. Hone in on the types of marketing that will be most beneficial for your firm and the goals you’re trying to reach. One lead generation idea that’s often overlooked by professional services firms is partnership marketing.

Partnership Marketing Defined

Partnership marketing is a strategic collaboration between two or more firms that helps each firm reach its respective business goals. Goals could include:

1. Increasing brand awareness and reach.
2. Generating more website and social media traffic.
3. Growing your number of conversions.
4. Customer acquisition and retention.

Partnership Marketing: How to Find the Perfect Marketing Partner

Before you begin your search for potential partners to collaborate with, nail down the goals you want to achieve from these relationships. This will help inform your search.

Look for firms with similar target audiences and ones that offer complementary products or services. It is crucial that there are no conflicts of interest by working with these firms. 

It’s also a good idea to find firms that have a similar set of values—this will make the actual partnership much more enjoyable for both parties.

Then, look for mutually beneficial partnership opportunities. Some possibilities include:

• Hosting a joint webinar.
• Exchanging content with your respective audiences.
• Conducting a research study together or sharing research findings.
• Producing a premium piece of content together, like an eBook.
• Referring prospects to one another when appropriate.

Don’t expect there to be a one-size-fits-all partnership template because the right opportunities can vary drastically from partner to partner.

Building the Relationship

Upon identification of potential partners, take the leap and reach out.

If email is your initial approach, keep it short and concise. Make the intention of the email and the value of a partnership clear. Show that you’ve done your research. As you begin piquing interest and getting responses, focus on building relationships. Partnerships are a big investment for all parties—don’t rush into it.

Initial discussions should be focused on getting to know one another and assessing fit. If circumstances allow, phone calls or video conference calls are preferable to email chains. These interactions are more personal and will better indicate what it’d be like to work together.

Keep in mind that not everyone you speak with will make a good strategic marketing partner. Fear not. At the very least, you’ve made a connection, and opportunities to collaborate may arise down the road.

Setting Proper Expectations

Not all partnerships will look alike—so, identify the specific collaboration opportunities that all firms are comfortable with and begin planning. With multiple parties involved, it’s essential to begin the planning process well in advance of an actual event. Be sure to discuss all potential snafus upfront and set proper expectations.

Let’s illustrate with an example. If you’re conducting a joint webinar, here are some details to iron out before committing:

• Who are the presenters and who are the main points of contact at each firm?
• Which firm will host the webinar and set up the registration page?
• Who will be creating the presentation slides and what will the editing process look like?
• How will each firm promote the webinar, and when?
• What are the deadlines to keep things on track?
• Will the list of registrants be shared?
• Are there any follow-up activities that each firm will conduct?

Determining all the details from the get-go will make the partnership process smooth and help ensure a positive experience for all parties involved. Meaningful strategic partnerships are all about expectations and planning. Set out with a firm grasp on your goals. Build trusting relationships with firms that can help you reach those goals, while you help them reach theirs as well — and elevate your marketing to the next level.

The post An Introduction to Partnership Marketing appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

And by partnership marketing, I’m not talking about simply sponsoring events. While sponsorships can certainly get you in front of the right crowd and may even generate a few leads here and there, they are more costly and less effective than partnership marketing that is more project oriented.

Download The 2021 High Growth Study Executive Summary

For example, you might consider conducting a research project with your partner or starting a special educational program. An innovative, high-profile project is more distinctive than your logo on a crowded sponsorship banner — and is a far more compelling when it comes to explaining to people why they should be doing business with you. Large, well-known businesses, trade associations or universities are all good partnering candidates.

At Hinge, we either do this ourselves with our own partners or walk our clients down the path of strategic partnership marketing. Here’s a list of the top most effective strategies that have actual results.

1. Write the definitive book on your signature topic.
This requires that you and your partner know your stuff. We always recommend that a book written in this spirit should be written for clients, not fellow professional practitioners. Probably the most time consuming of the top tactics, if you can manage to make a complicated topic easy to understand and appreciate, you and your partner will be seen as leaders by the people who matter most.

2. Produce quality webinars.
You and your partner can generate an entire webinar series around the content of your book. Webinars are a known commodity in the world of lead generation and brand building. Leverage the hard work that goes into a substantial thought piece like a book and tell the story with a compelling webinar series.

3. Conduct a groundbreaking research project.
Does a major question remain unanswered in the industry you collectively serve? Do people understand their competitors, or is perception foggy at best? Industry players rarely conduct research on their own, and when they do, they usually keep it proprietary. As service providers to the industry, you and your partner have more freedom. Do the research, share the results widely, and count the leads that come your way.
The research might be the foundation for other types of content, such as a book, a webinar series, or smaller pieces like joint white papers. The point is that research produces data, and data grounds the intuition upon which so many strategies and recommendations are built upon.

4. Develop a guest blogging strategy.
Posting your blog posts on your partner’s site accomplishes two goals in one. Having someone else pitch your expertise catapults your credibility and visibility with an audience much bigger than your own. It is also beneficial for SEO as guest posts drive traffic directly to your site and increase your search engine visibility. Just as with your own blog strategy, make sure the blog you’re pitching to your partner’s site is something that potential clients and referral sources want to read — having a blog just to have one won’t cut it. And it isn’t the time for your sales pitch.

5. Organize a specialized program.
While the bulk of the most effective strategies are going to have a digital component to them, more traditional means work too. Conference participation is a proven way to build credibility around your expertise and generate leads. Speaking and sponsorships are both tried and true. But you want to be a leader.

Why not be bold and develop your own specialized conference with a known partner? Let’s say your IT firm handles cloud computing security, and you have customers in the health care industry. Instead of presenting a panel at a health care conference, organize an entirely separate event centered on your topic. Set a clear focus on an emerging niche that is not currently addressed. Keep the conference small and specific at first, bringing in as many partners as needed to make it successful. As the conference grows, so will your audience.

Download The 2021 High Growth Study Executive Summary

Another type of highly effective program is a high-profile interview series. Let’s say that you market your services to CIOs. Imagine that you set up video interviews with the most visible CIOs from the entire industry you serve. Now all these high-profile CIOs know your firm. Other CIOs are interested in what the leading CIOs have to say; now they are also exposed to your firm. Everyone assumes that your firm knows a great deal about CIOs (which it does). In short, you generate leads through the promotion of others’ credibility and visibility. Make sure to share the full videos, excerpts, summaries, etc. in a variety of formats to maximize your overall visibility. Whether on your own or with a partner, educational programs deliver the goods.

Not convinced or think these are too time consuming to actually make happen? Like anything, once you get past the exploratory phase, things can fall into place surprisingly fast – as long as you’re aligning your partnership marketing strategy with your core capabilities. The above strategies are really about jointly promoting your expertise so that you can spread the marketing work load when it comes to the nurturing and promotion that needs to happen for an effective lead gen campaign. They also allow you to leverage each other’s customers, contacts, and other partnerships that might be in place, and lastly, your own customers can benefit from an expanded referral pool of trusted resources.

The post 5 Ways to Generate Quality Leads through Partnership Marketing appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In this video blog, Liz Harr is going to be talking to you about a practice that is widely utilized by high-growth professional services firms, and that is partnership marketing.

TRANSCRIPTION:

In this video blog, I’m going to be talking to you about a practice that is widely utilized by high-growth professional services firms, and that is partnership marketing. What I mean by partnership marketing is aligning your marketing and your business development efforts with a non-competitive organization that serves the same audience you do.

And by aligning these efforts, you are tapping into that resource to bring in more qualified leads. So I’m going to talk to you about five ways that you can leverage partnership marketing. And the first way is to write a book together on a signature topic. Now, if you have a well-developed content strategy, this is something that you should consider.

Because if you have a well-developed content strategy, it means you’re known for specific things. And when you’re known for specific topics, writing a book together is a no-brainer. Second is to consider webinars. Co-produced webinars is not only easier on the budget and easier on people, but it’s more engaging for the audience to hear from a couple different perspectives.

Third is to consider conducting some kind of research together. And when you do this, just like with webinars, it’s much easier on the budget. But if you have the right partner, you’re able to tap into the perspectives of your target audience and then produce research that is very meaningful to them.

Fourth is to co-market each other’s blogs, because think of this as guest blogging where you each produce blogs for each other’s websites, but you also promote each other’s blogs through social media, and generate lots of visibility that way. Now, the first four strategies that I talked about are really around producing content.

The fifth one is to organize a specialized program. And what I’m really talking about here is a specialized way that your target audience can experience the services that you and your partner provide. Perhaps there’s some sort of online learning or training that gets combined with the consulting services that you provide.

But a specialized program with your partner can really help you compete in the marketplace and help you stand out above competitors who are doing the same thing that you are. Now, if you’d like to learn more about how you can leverage partnership marketing, I encourage you to check out the marketing training we’ve designed specifically for firms like you in Hinge University.

I hope to see you there.

The post 5 Ways to Generate Quality Leads through Partnership Marketing [Video] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.