The pitch: Team up to get more bang for those promotional bucks

By DAVID TSE

Much of today's theory around the use of marketing to expand your business is about investment in advertising, new promotional activities or other such initiatives.

While these are all worthy of consideration as part of your overall marketing mix, one often-overlooked strategy is through the leveraging of partnerships.

Companies that are in growth mode face the dilemma of whether to buy, build or partner to achieve their short- or long-term growth aims.

Partnering can often be the quickest and most cost-effective way to achieve those growth objectives and greater overall marketing effectiveness.

Let's take an example. You own a company called Plants2U that specialises in selling, hiring and maintaining indoor plants for corporates.

You have several clients throughout the city whose plants you regularly maintain.

As a growth strategy for your business, why not approach other non-competing hire companies, that are also servicing the corporate market, with a partnering proposition?

Such hire companies could include those involved in desktop technologies (phones, PCs, printers, scanners), vending machines, water coolers, espresso machines, photocopiers, projectors, audio-visual and multimedia systems and so on.

Even take into consideration the bigger office items - card access systems, security alarms, air-conditioning, fire suppression systems ... the list goes on.

What sort of partnering proposition? Well, there's everything from the informal referral or lead-passing relationship where no money changes hands, to the more formal finders-fee or ongoing commission-based business relationship.

As a proposition, there are many promotional opportunities - special introductory offers, coupons, giveaways, loyalty deals.

You could carry each other's business cards or marketing collateral with you. You could have hyperlinks to each other on your websites.

You could establish an affiliated network and meet regularly to share leads, news and ideas.

As a group, you could join your services and pitch for larger business. And because you're acting as a group, it is quite likely that you will realise some savings in overall marketing costs by doing so.

The key to the success of any partnering proposition (assuming the two companies get on with each other) is that there is a clear mutual benefit from any proposed relationship and that these benefits are worth the effort involved.

Because of each company's non-competing position, there is likely to be greater trust and motivation to make the relationship succeed.

By pro-actively partnering with other companies, usually non-competing but not necessarily complementary, you can vastly improve your overall marketing effectiveness.

Partnerships offer economies of scale and can give great exposure via your partner's customer base.

Perhaps most importantly, these opportunities come through personal or word-of-mouth referral, the most credible form of marketing around.

* David Tse is the managing director of Voltage, a specialist channel consultancy and sales and marketing services company. david.tse@voltage.co.nz

* The Pitch is a forum for those working in advertising, marketing, public relations and communications. We welcome lively and topical 500-word contributions.
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