Startups are a nightmare to handle and a struggle to manage, but they’re also one of the most fulfilling accomplishments you can ever make as a newbie entrepreneur. Nothing comes close to the thrill and rush of adrenaline that pumps through your blood when you’re about to close a huge deal, sign with a major company, or sell your business for over a hundredfold of the invested capital. You reach a state of euphoria and an everlasting feeling of satisfaction, knowing you’ve built something from the ground up and made it worth more than you started.
However, all success stories start small, and the majority of startups even struggle to make the first few steps work, let alone maintain consistent and sustainable business performance. As a result, some even succumb to the cutthroat nature of the business landscape in as little as the first four weeks of operations. So, today we’ll be going over the potential saving grace you’re glossing over — partnership marketing.
Strategic Alliances Drive Success
As the name suggests, partnership marketing refers to the process of collaborating with other companies to achieve a mutual goal or objective that benefits both of you. It is a strategic alliance that will result in profit for both businesses. It can be something as simple as introducing your brand to a target audience you don’t typically encounter or something more direct like providing you materials and raw ingredients. In fact, we see this level of collaboration present in restaurant chains and franchising companies, where you get to see merchandise from movies and the like.
- Learning From Each Other: One distinct feature that allows strategic partnerships to drive success for a company is the opportunity to learn from each other. Whether you’re working in the same industry or your businesses are better-off supporting each other, you get an in-depth look into the processes you don’t typically consider in your analysis. This gives you a stronger grasp of the market and helps you both to pivot and adapt.
- Proactive Partnership Management: When engaged in partnership marketing, there’s an inherent pressure and incentive to observe a standard of performance and results because your partner will hold you accountable. Therefore, a sense of proactive partnership management is born out of the necessity to provide quality output for each other.
- Builds An Extensive Network: Last but not least, engaging with one partner doesn’t mean you’re limited to that specific company alone. As a matter of fact, you get to meet other companies that are in your line of industry, and you start to build an extensive network of B2B relationships that will help you in the future.
Improved Supply Chain Management
Engaging in partnership marketing also leads to opportunities of improving your overall supply chain management, and during this global pandemic wherein logistics issues can do a number to your effective cashflow, partnerships will be necessary to address them. Typically, the process of supply chain management falls under three categories, namely, (1) materials management, (2) manufacturing management, and (3) distribution. And partnership sourcing the work can efficiently optimize your costs for production.
- Procurement And Supply: For companies that create products, procurement of quality raw materials and ingredients is an initial step of the entire process. Plus, maintaining a consistent flow of supply is also necessary to meet the constant demand and stay afloat. Partnership marketing with local companies that supply the materials needed can optimize your expenses into competitive fixed costs.
- Collaborative Innovation: Partnership marketing can also lead to opportunities for collaborative innovation wherein both companies allocate resources to researching and developing a more effective means for their products to support each other. This could also come in the form of streamlined manufacturing processes to reduce the waste generated by operations.
However, It’s But One Aspect Of Your Business
Never forget that marketing is but one aspect of the business, and you’re going to need more than just marketing if you want your startup to succeed and see the light of the day in this ocean of titans. So, before you get the fancy idea of relying solely on partnership marketing to do all the heavy-lifting, then think again.
- Still Work On Your Brand Image
While partnership marketing exposes your brand image to a wider audience, it doesn’t do much in improving your brand image unless your partner is already gaining traction and attention. So, do your due diligence in improving your brand image and don’t try to overshadow it with unbalanced partnership marketing. - Improving Your Cashflow
Although partnership marketing can help reduce and optimize costs, it doesn’t increase your overall cash flow, an important resource for both growth and recovery. Therefore, don’t be too lax on product development and improving your overall sales performance as well.
Leverage With Partnership Marketing
We strongly recommend leveraging your company’s capacity with partnership marketing and engaging with other companies that are eager to gain an edge. Now’s not the time for you to implore a lone-wolf persona, so be open to making strategic alliances that improve your company’s competitiveness.