Partnerize
Partnerize delivers the software platform and expert service that help the world’s leading brands create operating leverage by turning their partnership channels into profit centers.
One of the key benefits of the digital era for marketers has been to give them a greater supply of data sources for finding clearer links between their investments and their returns.
Once mastered, these data capabilities become critical tools for helping marketers better demonstrate the contribution to their organisation’s financial performance and placing them on par with other functions where the costs and benefits are clearer cut.
This has been especially helpful for marketers’ relationships with their peers in the finance function, who hold the purse strings.
However, not all digital marketing channels offer the same levels of granularity in the data they provide. The linkages between investment and return can become harder to follow when it comes to tracing the impact of upper funnel spending activity, such as for brand building, compared to when dollars are put into performance channels to drive quick outcomes.
Affiliate or partner marketing is one channel where it has been difficult to quantify incremental revenue impact, and its contribution to the marketing mix for reaching, engaging, and influencing target audiences. This has been due in part to ineffective measurement solutions and siloed channel data that has been hard to view side by side with data from other digital marketing channels.
But new tools and services are enabling partnership marketing strategies to better demonstrate their value, and often with surprising results.
Many marketers already have a strong appreciation of the value of partnership, with the Partnerize report Partner and Affiliate Marketing for CFOs finding that, 54% of the 1200 brand leaders surveyed said partnership drove more than 20% of their company’s total sales.
Furthermore, according to a 2019 Forrester study commissioned by the affiliate marketing solutions provider Pepperjam, which was acquired by Partnerize, 20% of the marketers surveyed ranked affiliate marketing first among their top three digital marketing channels for customer acquisition – ahead of display advertising, paid and organic search, or any other channel.
The value of partnership can be demonstrated at different points in the marketing funnel, with numerous studies pointing to a strong showing for short term measures such as return on ad spend (ROAS) for performance marketing campaigns. The integration of partnership into performance marketing activity delivers the added benefit that compensation for the partner occurs only after the customer has made their purchase, bringing maximum spend efficiency.
Partnership can also be critical for driving long-term returns through using progressive software solutions that enable brands to identify and recruit partners whose audiences may be akin to the brand’s desired customers. This creates a greater propensity to acquire both profitable and loyal users. This is especially true when working with comparison and review sites, which are a key starting point for many customers on their buying journey.
This is supported by a 2021 study produced by IDG Australia, which reported that 32% of marketers surveyed found partnership to be a cost-effective means of driving brand reach, while 30% said it offered a valuable method of acquiring new customers.
These factors explain why in a 2020 Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2020-2021, 65% of senior marketers revealed that they would be increasing their spending in partnership marketing in 2021.
Understanding the benefits of partnership however requires having a platform that empowers brands to effectively manage programs, with data views and insights that help them to truly understand performance and effectively optimise the channel.
The Partnerize platform delivers these capabilities across multiple aspects of partnering, starting by providing a data-driven method for finding suitable partners whose audience and performance meets desired criteria, coupled with a service capability to educate marketers on the channel, effective optimisation, and proper measurement.
Partnerize incorporates attribution and commission management tools which consider the partner’s true role in sales, with marketers able to track every customer interaction from first click through to conversion. This means marketers can reward partners for their role in the consumer journey, regardless of was first or last click, or anywhere in between.
Additionally, these same tools offer marketers the ability to compensate partners not just on short-term measures such as revenue growth, but also based on longer-term goals such as customer acquisition, lapsed user reactivation, and lifetime value.
By bringing a data-driven approach to partner and affiliate marketing, marketers gain the evidence they need to support their investments, building confidence both within themselves and amongst their peers within the finance function.
And they do this in the best possible way – by assisting their company to grow.
Ultimately, this makes life easier for marketers in their day-to-day actions, but also provides a solid basis of data from which to create forward-looking strategies and ensure that marketing’s contribution to business growth remains solid for the years to come.
To learn more about how Partnerize can support your growth goals for 2022, get in touch at contact@partnerize.com.
In the third and final episode of our 3-part CMO50 video series exploring modern marketing and why it’s become a matter of trust, we’re delighted to be joined by Telstra’s former CMO and now digital services and sales executive, Jeremy Nicholas, and Adobe VP Marketing Asia-Pacific and Japan, Duncan Egan.
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