#PartnershipMarketing – It’s hot, it is right now, and it is where businesses are finding the most marketing value in 2021. It could be the answer to your aggressive growth targets.
First, What is Partnership Marketing
Quite simply, partnership marketing is when two businesses collaborate and deploy a marketing campaign that is mutually beneficial, and helps both parties reach their objectives.
Why Partnership Marketing is Trending in 2021
Silos in a team or organisation are out. We use tools, apps, strategies, team building events, you name it, to eradicate siloed operations within a business. For good reason – collaboration is good; good for productivity, good for innovation, good for business, good for the bottom line.
In the same way, #PartnershipMarketing and B2B #collaborations are on the increase and for good reason. Brands that work together utilise each other’s scale and brand equity to help one another grow.
The reason this marketing practise has not been significantly higher on the agenda in South Africa to date, is in part due to the perceived complexity of working with potential partners and in part because direct marketing made up the numbers.
Why Direct Marketing is About to Hit a Significant Hurdle in South Africa
Direct marketing has served many brands very well for many years. However, some have used it without consideration for consumer privacy and this is going to impact the channel more and more with the advent of POPIA.
Most brands need lead generation at scale to hit aggressive growth targets. New prospects have been easy to reach in South Africa through direct marketing because consumer data has been fairly freely available in this market.
But this is about to change. Are you ready? What is your strategy post POPIA?
For this reason, South African organisations are leaning into the value of Partnership Marketing now already to generate the growth required for a long term, more personalized, less invasive marketing strategy.
How To Do It Properly
Partnerships are like dating – you need to know who you’re partnering with before you take the next step. At Omnisient we have worked hard to make Partnership Marketing simple and easy to execute:
- Blind date. Because you don’t know if you’re going to find a mutually beneficial partnership with every organisation, we have created a smart, intuitive AI platform that allows potential partners to meet in a safe, trusted space without compliance or privacy impact. Our intersect.ai platform keeps your customer data private. It also enforces trust, because you don’t send your data to your partner, so no IP is leaked in the process.
- Show me yours. Intersect.ai is technology that helps each brand anonymize their data on premise before loading only de-identified data to the cloud. Here, the intersect.ai platform matches the partner data sets, so that you can evaluate each-other (as one would on a real date) with the embedded business intelligence capabilities on the platform.
- There’s potential. When comparing audiences, the biggest challenge for a brand is to understand their potential partners’ customers. Identifying the “growth zone” (your partners’ customers that are not your customers) is the audience that is most appealing because it can generate new customers for your business. Most businesses can’t supply each other with insights about the audience they don’t have in common, as they mostly don’t have the consent to do so. And even if they did, their own data is not that meaningful to the other party (retail behaviour and telco behaviour for example are hard to reconcile).
- Evaluate. At Omnisient we have partnered with 3rd party data providers to ensure you and your “partner” can use the 3rd party data in the cloud, as a common currency to better understand each-others “growth zone”. By adding demographic and socio-economic data to the mix, both parties can evaluate what each-other’s customers look like with metrics that are easy to analyze.
- Playing it safe. And when the time comes for selecting the best audience to target in your partners customer base, Omnisient helps execute the selection without any customer personal information changing hands.
We call this capability ACE (Anonymised Campaign Engine).
If you want to stay ahead of the curve, it is time to prepare ahead of the crisis. Explore partnership marketing made easy and effective with Omnisient.