Using Strategic Partnerships in Direct Marketing
Once you have a strong strategic partnership you can look at direct marketing as a great avenue for leveraging this partnership and sharing information about both/all of your companies. There are many ways strategic partners can approach marketing. If you have complementary goods or services you can put those products together to offer prospects a packaged deal on items. Some great examples of this are flight and hotel deals, or flight and auto rental packages. You can also work together to offer your clients and customers a special deal from your strategic partner and visa versa. When a consumer has a level of trust and comfort with one brand it can be very beneficial to utilize that trust to offer the consumer a product or service of your strategic partner. An example of this could be; you have a marketing agency and utilize your customer email list to offer your clients a special promotion from a local VOIP provider that could save your customers hundreds of dollars per year on their business phone service. The VOIP provider also promotes your marketing services to their customer base and in turn both sets of customers get to reap the savings that are being offered by the strategic partners. Co-op marketing is another form of direct marketing where strategic partnerships are leveraged. With co-op marketing a company that is promoting a specific brands product or service will often receive marketing funds from the manufacture or producer of the product that they are able to utilize to promote that product being offered by the end sellers business. This type of marketing is often used via email and direct mail marketing channels and will include logos and promotions specific to the product being offered by the manufacturer. The advantage of this type of marketing for the end seller is that they are able to promote both their company and the product they are offering by utilizing the manufacturer’s funds. The manufacturer is able to promote their product on a local level through their dealer/sales network.