Marketing Partnerships for Profit

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Developing business partnerships or strategic alliances traditionally brings to mind mounds of paperwork, attorneys, and long legal documents. Also, the belief that these alliances could somehow limit flexibility can scare businesses away from developing these partnerships. However, by slamming the door on this opportunity, your firm could be missing out on a significant platform to grow your business and provide value for your clients.

Partnerships, at their most basic level, are simply a business-to-business collaboration and are only as complicated as you make them. If your business does not have a budget for intensive advertising or media campaigns, relying on free PR such as customer referrals from partnerships is a key channel for incremental business. According to the “Small Business Notes” website, companies in partnerships report that at much as 18 percent of their revenues come from their alliances.

Developing partnerships requires substantial effort and continuous refinement, not only to identify the appropriate partners, but to define the type and scope of the arrangement that will be most beneficial to both firms. In deciding how to reach out to these partners, try online social and business networking sites, industry groups/newsletters, advertising through your website, or networking the old-fashioned way.

Once you have started building partnerships, create a page on your website dedicated to showcasing your extensive professional network. It not only provides further credibility in the market place, but enhances the breadth of your product offering, showcasing your business as a full-service firm, and entrenching yourself further in the industry.

One immediate benefit of partnerships to your website’s Search Engine Optimization strategy is link building. By exchanging logos and website URLs, your partners can link to your website from their end and vice versa. Put simply, the more times your company name is mentioned and your website linked, the higher up you will turn up on search results.

At SnapHawk, we have spent a considerable amount of time determining certain categories of partnerships that we feel would be most beneficial to us and our clients. In the arena of online marketing, different agencies provide the various services that become pieces in a jigsaw puzzle of establishing online presence and growing revenue for your website. SnapHawk has an ongoing interest in developing creative partnerships with various firms involved in web development, strategic marketing consulting, IT consulting, traditional advertising agencies, etc., who have clients that could benefit from a well organized and executed Pay-Per-Click campaign.

On the other side, our clients may need web designers to create professional, branded, and clean website layouts; web hosting companies to host their website; web developers to setup and maintain the website; offline marketing agencies to incorporate anything from TV, radio, newspaper, magazines, or yellow pages with their website; online marketing agencies to manage anything from Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search Campaigns, banner ads, blogs, social media, email marketing; and the list goes on and on and on.

We understand that we can’t possibly offer every service that is out there; rather, we specialize in a set of services and develop a great understanding of everything else around us so that when our clients come to us with needs outside of our specialization, we can provide them with consultation and partner solutions. And because the online landscape is never static, we are constantly keeping a hawk’s eye on new potential partnerships that will help our clients keep a step ahead of the game.

Posted by: Smita Shastri