This article appears in Customer Think online.
The average business spends 12.3% of its revenue on marketing. Let’s pretend that’s what you spend, and you want to launch a marketing partnership to help share the cost while engaging a broader customer base. Before selecting that partner, ask: Does this company have good bones for growth?
Marketing partnerships are now so common in business that it’s rare to go it alone. Nearly nine in 10 organizations participate in some form of a partner marketing strategy, according to research by Foundry. However, of those nine in 10 organizations, 74% face challenges executing within their partner’s financial timeline.
If a potential partner lacks the funding to keep up, then there’s a good chance they would fall short in other areas, including staffing. Should your company be poised for a growth spurt, a stunted partner could hamstring the entire initiative.
You gather KPI data to achieve goals, but also to inform decisions. Use it in combination with other performance data to measure the effectiveness of your partner marketing efforts and to identify areas for improvement. You can gather highly instructive information by tracking lead generation, conversion rates and pipeline contributions from each partner. The resulting insights can spotlight which partners are generating the most value, and which strategies work best.
Tipping the scale: Tools such as Google Tag Manager can track conversions on your website, but ensure you and your partners have implemented the right tracking tags (or UTM parameters) to reliably monitor the source of conversions, such as a campaign or piece of content. MonsterInsights offers a guide on setting up UTM codes.
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