Why Partnerships are the Hot New Performance Channel

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In the hyper-competitive performance marketing game, finding an advantage is becoming more and more difficult. Typical consumers see thousands of ad emails every day, and they have less and less confidence in those emails. As a consequence, marketers of performance are eager to discover creative methods of connecting and increasing numbers are investing in partnerships.

Why are partnerships taking place? First, partners can participate customers in a manner that willingly circumvents their anti-ad defenses and drives action. Second and more convincing, Forrester Consulting’s 2019 study demonstrates that businesses that are fully invested in the partnership channel are growing income twice as quickly as their colleagues.

What exactly is the partnership channel?

Relationships with social influencers, charity-based partnerships (such as BarkBox), content publishers (such as Ziff Davis ‘ PC Magazine), traditional subsidiaries, and strategic B2B alliances (such as Airbnb and Qantas) are just a few of the kinds of players that fuel the partnership economy.

What they provide is a way for a company to engage or obtain a client and act through a consumer trusts third party. Remarkably, the partnership channel has quietly exceeded paid search as the largest generator of income in an increasing amount of organizations.

Mature partnership programs drive twice the revenue

To learn how partnerships contribute to company development and competitive advantage, the Forrester survey surveyed over 450 businesses worldwide. They developed a “maturity measure” that correlates program characteristics to company results to characterize the most effective partnership programs. What they found was striking.

Compared to low-maturity peers, companies with the highest maturity scores:

  • Get more revenue from partnerships—28% of overall company revenue on average
  • Collect an average of $162M more revenue from the partnership channel
  • Report nearly 2x faster revenue growth at the company level
  • Exceed stakeholder expectations on other key business metrics, including stock price and bottom-line profitability
  • What does a high-performing partnership program look like?

    The researchers found that partnership program maturity is anchored to several characteristics. According to the study, the most mature programs:

    • Embrace organisational agility, capitalize on diverse partnership models, and leverage technology to optimize partner management
    • Invest in people, processes, technology, and partnership breadth (measured in volume and diversity)
    • Leverage multidisciplinary tools, including organisational best practices and automation to optimise program execution and measurement

Technology is a main differentiator among these high-maturity characteristics, as building a solid and varied partnership program needs instruments to effectively hire, vet, measure and pay for your marketing performance partners.

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