Strategic Partnerships – The Best Kind of Marketing

In today’s economy, strategic partnerships between brands are more than added value – they’re now a necessity. Strategic partnerships are formed when brands with similar demographics partner to share in the budget of a marketing campaign, as well as extend their reach by tapping into their partner’s customer base.

I’ve noticed that a lot more of our clients are asking us more and more about partnering them with other brands. It just makes sense promotionally and economically. When forming a strategic partnership, make sure to cover these bases in your cross promotional campaign, tying in all elements for one large marketing push:

Retail displays or on-pack marketing: Whatever consumer brand you are partnering with, tap into their retail displays or packaged goods. Get creative when promoting within their retail locations: have store employees don pins featuring your product and a website to enter a cross sweepstakes, get trailers to play on their in-store televisions, tag their retail displays featuring your products and endorsers interacting with theirs. If your partner is a consumer packaged goods company, place coupons inside the product, tag the outside of the box announcing a cross sweepstakes between brands, or have consumers send in the product UPC code to redeem points for your products.

Radio and television promotions: Design a substantial prize package including your products and your partner’s products to give away on top radio and television stations. Find creative ways to run these contests within top programs. Examples for radio giveaways include having radio DJs mix top 40 hits into one song, and listeners have to call in, naming all of the songs in the mix mash up in order to win; or listeners have to call in whenever they hear a featured song of the day – the 100th caller wins. An example for a television giveaway include having viewers “watch-and-win”: when viewers see a specific item on the station, they enter the name of the program onto a dedicated website and those with the correct answer are entered into a pool. Winners are chosen at random. Further, all radio stations have guerilla marketing teams that attend events around that market. Have these promotional teams hand out product samples and coupons at targeted events.

Online cross promotions: Online exposure is one of the most easily measured return-on-investment. Through number of hits and impressions, it is easy to justify spending marketing dollars promoting online. The most cost-effective tactic is to tag your partner’s website with a banner ad, and have them do the same to yours. If there is a little more money in the budget, you can both set up a microsite to promote a cross sweepstakes. This is a great way to capture your audience’s data (name, age, phone number, postal address, email address) to add to your mailing lists.

Sweepstakes: Depending on the type of brand you are promoting, find a great way to tie in both yours and your partners’ products into a great sweepstakes that creates buzz and captures a lot of attention. For example, our good friends at Konami partnered with quick service restaurant chain Subway. Konami publishes a video game called “DanceDanceRevolution”, where players dance on a real dance pad and follow steps on the screen. It’s a great way for kids to exercise while still enjoying playing their video game. One of this video game’s big initiatives is to help fight childhood obesity. Konami partnered with Subway because of Subway’s cause to help encourage children’s health. They ran a great cross promotion together where children were encouraged to record the number of hours each day they spent exercising, which they recorded on a dedicated website for the promotion. Those that participated were entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win prizing from both Subway and Konami. What a fabulous way to promote both brands, to their target demographic, through a creative and press worthy way.

Joint Press Release: If partnering with a major brand, work with their PR team to issue a joint press release announcing the partnership and the details of the promotion, as well as the promotional dates. Even if neither of your companies have official PR reps, write up your own press release and post it on your company website and distribute via a free press release service, such as www.pr-inside.com. You’ll be surprised how many other outlets pick up the feed and re-post the press release on additional websites and news sources.

And of course, think outside the box in discovering new ways to partner your brand with others! Nothing is worse than just following a formula – find your own creative partnerships and make them work for you.

Happy partnership hunting,
Gail