In a world of boundless possibilities, such as the one offered by partnership marketing, your last concern should be finding business partners. It is true that finding the right partner saves you from wasting your marketing budget. We are here today to make sure that you will afterward be able to find the right partners in business so that you can enjoy fruitful collaborations.
Starting a business with a partner that is willing to promote your products or services to their target audience and therefore put your brand on the map is quite something for the beginning. Since it is fundamental to Partnership Marketing, let’s find out together how to find business partners that are suitable for your type of business.
How to find business partners suitable for your brand
Oftentimes, brands already collaborate in some shape or form with other entities. Those types of collaborations aren’t always under the partnership marketing umbrella. As their partners could also be business relationships with suppliers or agencies.
This is why the fundamental part of teaming up with another brand and finding suitable business partners is to identify with whom you have compatibility in terms of business. A common technique for finding suitable business partners is to record your brand’s internal network of suppliers and partners by creating a Partner Map.
Create a Partner Map to find potential business partners
Are you familiar with the Mind-Map concept? If you’re a business owner or leading a marketing team, most certainly are quite acquainted with this term. In a rather simple manner of speech, a mind map usually portrays and organizes information. It is hierarchical and it shows relationships among pieces of the whole.
The same goes for the Partner Map. But before piecing it together, you will need to gather all the relevant information to populate the map of existing and potential business partners. Start with your firm’s internal teams.
For instance, approach the Procurement team, as they hold all the contractual agreements with your suppliers, they are the first piece of the whole puzzle and should be able to supply you withal the company names that you are already working with and in what capacity.
Then, move to each internal department – Accounting, Legal, HR, Operations, and Marketing – to learn about their external relationships, and add those to the Partner Map. Ask your colleagues who they work with, what suppliers do they use, what agencies do they employ, and what companies do they speak to in order to have access to the bigger picture.
Once you have centralized all the existing relationships, add them to the Partner Map by splitting them into related categories. When the map has been fully populated, you should color-code each department for a clearer view:
Locating new partners in business
By now you’ve mapped all the existing relationships so you’re after new business partners, right? Whether you prefer reaching them online or offline, you have several options to identify suitable business partners.
How to find business partners online
Taking a look at your competitors should be your first impulse. Identify who they are affiliated with and reach out to similar businesses. Search for popular keywords in regard to your business niche and record all the companies that appear.
Social Media is another great tool for researching new potential business partners. For instance, LinkedIn offers the most powerful networking tool, suggesting new contacts from relating companies with whom you can start a conversation. Also, Twitter and Facebook are two other platforms on which brands are extremely active and where you can approach business partners.
How to find business partners offline
Don’t underestimate the traditional methods! Away from your laptop, you can still gain access to introductions and names from your own suppliers. Use your own knowledge of the industry and jot down your ideas, previous companies you worked for, and brands you like or use.
Visit stores to see which brands are placed alongside or that customers tend to purchase together. Maybe offline is a bit harder than online, but you should have access to each possible way of fishing new business partners.
Are you into shortcuts?
If you’re looking for potential business partners you can simply use our partnership marketing platform which is already built to find the best business partners tailored to the information you fill out for your business.
And if the ones you are after are not already on the platform, you can just invite them to sign up and start the partnership there. Possibilities are boundless with partnership marketing, are you ready to find out the whole pool of opportunities with us? Sign Up Now for Free!