Joint Venture Marketing: Creating Momentum and Getting Started Quickly with Small Steps

If you are the owner of a small to medium sized online business, chances are you’ve heard of joint venture marketing or a joint venture marketing partnership in passing, but weren’t sure if it was the right choice for your business. You may even be a little intimidated by the fancy-sounding professional name, but a joint venture marketing partnership is really a simple and straightforward business strategy that even the smallest companies can easily employ to boost their exposure and, ultimately, their profits.

Getting started with an online joint venture marketing partnership is much easier than you might think. Often, the most difficult step to take of starting something new is the first one, and some people don’t get past the “thinking about it” phase because the prospect seems so daunting. But there is really nothing to fear with embarking on a joint venture marketing partnership. It is quite a straightforward process and simple to execute.

Brainstorming

The first step of a joint venture marketing partnership, and often the most difficult, and the one that tends to stop people in their tracks, is to come up with a list of companies with whom you would like to partner.

In order to do this, you will want to think of the types of companies that would make good joint venture marketing partners, and then go about making a list of specific companies from your first, more general list.

Be Creative

When composing your lists of types of companies, it is important to be open and creative to ideas that pop into your mind that upon first assessment may not seem appropriate. If for instance, you have a wedding cake business, some of the first companies you think to partner with will probably be wedding planners, caterers, and photographers because these businesses are likely to have clients with similar interests to your potential customers, without being direct competitors. But you may also want to think about talking to some local bakeries or party accessories stores. Neither suggestion may be at the top of your list, but they are still potentially profitable joint venture marketing partners.

It may seem counterintuitive to contact bakeries if you have a wedding cake business and this initially seems like it would be direct competition. But not all bakeries offer a wedding cake service, and these are the ones you will want to target. Small neighborhood bakeries often have a loyal clientele, but may not specialize in making wedding cakes. Chances are that the majority of their customers know someone who at some time or another is getting married and will need a wedding cake. It is also likely that these customers will ask their favorite bakeries for suggestions, which is where your joint venture partnership comes in.

Party accessory stores are another good option for a joint venture marketing partnership, and one that may not come immediately to mind. These types of party stores often have wedding accessories, but it is not their main focus. However, even if a wedding clientele is just a small portion of their business, you gain exposure to this niche. It is a great way to boost exposure for your own business.

The thought of embarking on a joint venture marketing partnership may seem daunting, but it need not be. The first step is to brainstorm, and you can even enlist the help of your friends and family for a fun way to get some work done. Invite people over, order pizza and ask everyone for a few suggestions. You’ll have a productive evening, as well as not feel so alone and overwhelmed when embarking on this new phase for your business.

Joint Venture Marketing: A Pathway to Faster Profits

If you are the owner of a small to medium sized online business, embarking on a joint venture marketing partnership can be a pathway to increased success and profits.  Joint venture marketing is a proven tactic for increasing the exposure of your products and services, which leads directly to increased profits.

In these difficult economic times, you may think such a proposal sounds great, but not for your business. You don’t have a lot of excess cash to pump into a new marketing platform and no matter how potentially profitable it promises to be. But the beauty, and genius, behind a joint venture marketing platform is that it doesn’t need to cost a lot and often, it costs nothing at all!   Thus, you can amplify the exposure for your company, with almost no upfront investment.

Too Good to be True?

Most business owners are wary of anything that sounds too good to be true.  Everybody knows that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and “you can’t get something for nothing” are standard American mottos. A way to potentially increase your profits with little to no upfront costs may sound too good to be true, but indeed it is not – not with a joint venture marketing partnership!

The difference with a joint venture marketing partnership is that you aren’t exactly getting something for nothing . . . you’re getting something for what you already have – your business. With a joint venture marketing partnership, you are leveraging your existing assets, and combining them with the existing assets of one or more companies to mutually benefit both entities.

Exchanging Experiences and Customers

You have more to offer with the cards you currently hold than you think. Joint venture marketing is about employing the resources you already have, and getting to them to work for you in a new aspect. This new aspect involves a mutual sharing of knowledge, expertise and an important asset you already have: your website.

The easiest and most standard method for embarking on a joint venture marketing partnership is to create an arrangement where a reciprocal relationship of company website use is established. This may sounds overly complicated, but it is really quite simple and completely safe. You are not going to turn over the administration or control of your company’s website to your partner – you merely allow them to use existing space on your website for them to advertise their products and services, in return for space on their website to market and advertise the products and services of your company.

Choosing the Right JV Partner

The biggest key to a truly successful joint venture marketing partnership is to choose a company to engage with, who is not a direct competitor of yours. You also don’t want to try to forge a joint venture marketing partnership with a company that is in a completely different realm from yours – that would be largely unproductive. The goal is to have the customers who go to your partner’s website to be potentially interested in the products and services you have to offer, without taking any business away from your partner or being in direct competition with them. This will greatly increase the exposure of your company, and potentially lead to greatly increased profits.

Joint Venture Marketing: A Better Investment than the Stock Market

If you run a small online business, joint venture marketing is an excellent way for you to raise awareness for your business and its products, while boosting sales and gaining new clients – all often without any monetary investment. Joint venture marketing is also a psychologically positive marketing platform because it is based on mutual trust and respect, and symbiotic business relationships where the growth of all involved parties is fostered.

The Fundamental Basics of JV Marketing

A joint venture marketing partnership is a formal or informal business arrangement between one or more companies, where all parties involved benefit from the experience, knowledge and expertise of the other parties.  Joint venture marketing is a subset of a relationship marketing platform, where client relationships are the center focus of your marketing scheme.

In joint venture marketing, your business partner relationships are on par in terms of importance with your client relationship. This elevates the importance of relationships to include those of your businesses associates, as well as your clients.

Help During Difficult Times

Aside from many business advantages, such as shared information and marketing costs when applicable, joint venture marketing also has a positive psychological impact on the participants who enter into such an agreement. Both the businesses entering into the partnership, as well as the clients and customers who are touched by these relationships benefit in a positive way.

From a business standpoint, a joint venture marketing partnership relays a sense of security to its members because there are others to fall back on. Having a network of business owners that you trust and have developed a strong relationship with can be extremely important during a difficult time for your company. Most businesses have been affected by the recent economic crises. If you are operating a solo marketing strategy, these global difficulties can leave you feeling frightened, frustrated and alone.

A joint venture marketing partnership allows you to share the burden of a difficult time, and get advice from your fellow partners who may have ideas on how to proceed with your business. These angles and opinions are something you would not be privy to without this type of partnership.  Certainly you can always ask another business associate for advice or an opinion. But a joint venture marketing partner will be invested in how your company performs, and most likely you’ll develop a strong personal and professional relationship over time. A joint venture marketing partner of yours will give you more thoughtful, true advice since the success of your business may potentially affect theirs.

There is also the added piece of a personal feeling and relationship that has most likely developed with your joint venture marketing partners. People are always more concerned for and willing to help those people that they care about and have developed a personal relationship with—it’s just human nature. A joint venture marketing partnership will give you increased business security, as well as increased psychological security because such a partnership will provide you with other experts to fall back on in times of market unrest.

Joint Venture Marketing: Gaining More Exposure and New Clients

If you’re looking for ways to take your business in a new direction, but not sure where to start, consider a joint venture marketing partnership. A joint venture marketing partnership is one of the fastest growing and most effective ways to infuse new life into an already successful, but perhaps stagnant business.

To stay on top in the business world, even if your current business is a success, you must always be looking for new ways to gain exposure and new customers. Building and maintaining a solid base of loyal and regular clients will be the bread and butter of your business, but continually gaining new clients and exposing your business to new customers will be central to the future of your success.

A joint venture marketing partnership is created when one or more business get together to share marketing strategies, ideas, plans and expenses. A joint venture marketing partnership can be so successful because it incorporates experience and expertise from various members of the business community. You may be at the top of your game in your niche, but there is always more to learn, and partnering with another successful business can help give you the extra edge you need.

The Next Step

If you run a small business, it may be difficult to conceive who to approach to enter into a joint venture marketing partnership, or even how to get started. And, if you run a small, online business, chances are that you don’t have a large marketing team or budget to go to for opinions and guidance, so it is likely you’ll have to do the brainstorming on your own, or with one or two other top officers in your company.

Joint venture marketing partnerships are easiest to handle when your business is small and when you’ll approach other small businesses for potential partnerships.
If you are taking this next step on your own, what you’ll need to do is to think of businesses that have a similar client profile to your own, but who will not be offering the same products and services.  You want to seek out businesses that have an existing client base of customers with similar needs, wants and lifestyles to your own clients.

If, for instance, you are a small company that offers pet care products, your client base will obviously not target people who are not pet owners. What you will want to do is to find a company or series of companies that have an existing customer base of pet owners, but whose company doesn’t sell pet care products, or at least not the same pet care products that you do.

In this particular instance, you might want to form a joint venture marketing partnership with dog walking agencies, animal hospitals or veterinary clinics. The idea here is that you would share marketing campaigns with these other business, since each of your existing client bases may have use for the others products and services. Just forming a joint venture marketing partnership with one company has the potential to exponentially increase your client base and website traffic.

Joint Venture Marketing: Your Marketing Solution for a Recession

The economic turmoil that has unfolded in recent weeks has begun to trickle down to the consumer arena. In difficult economic times, people hold onto their money, reserving it for essentials.  If you run a small business, you have less revenue turnover than your larger counterparts, and you are likely to feel an economic pinch more quickly than larger competitors.

Developing a joint venture marketing strategy with one or more businesses is a great way to gain market exposure and visibility, as well as reach out to new potential clients, even during difficult economic times. This type marketing partnership is a savvy move to make because it can be a way to gain exposure without putting forth any capital.

Chances are that an economic downturn is not the time you want to be pumping large amounts of money into a new marketing campaign. But to maintain your current clients, which is your company’s bread and butter – and to attract new customers, which is your company’s future – marketing is necessary. A joint venture marketing strategy can be profitable without sinking into your profit margin, effective even during economic difficulties.

Shared Client Lists

One of the most basic ways to engage in a joint venture marketing partnership, which is also extremely cost effective because it has no real costs, is sharing client lists with your partners. As a successful business, you have a number of loyal clients with whom you regularly do business. The best free marketing is to share your client lists with your joint venture marketing partners as they will gain access to your loyal customers and vice versa.

Email Advertising

Email advertising is another joint venture marketing gem that goes hand in hand with shared client lists. Once you have a list of clients from your JV partners, you may not simply want to contact them out of the blue as people are bombarded with sometimes hundreds of emails a day, and a new email from an unknown company may just slip through the cracks or be filtered directly into the junk folder before the recipient ever sees it.

A more effective way of utilizing your joint venture marketing partnership is to use the emails that your partner companies are already sending out to your clients as a vehicle to advertise your company, and vice versa. Customers are much more likely to read an email from a company that they already do business with or purchase products from. These emails are also virtually guaranteed to reach the recipient and not be sent to the spam folder because the client is a repeat customer, and emails from this company have already been sent to and received by this client.

An extremely effective method for gaining exposure through your joint venture marketing partnerships is to attach an advertisement onto the end of the emails that your partners send to their clients, which advertises your company, and vice versa. This creates a win-win situation that costs nothing for either party!

All members of the joint venture marketing partnership will enjoy increased exposure via a trusted source, with absolutely no up-front costs. This type of joint venture marketing partnership is something that will be music to everyone’s ears, even during these difficult economic times.

Joint Venture Marketing: Economic Turmoil Turned to Your Advantage

The economic turmoil that has unfolded in recent weeks has begun to trickle down to the consumer arena. In difficult economic times, people hold onto their money, reserving it for essentials.  If you run a small business, you have less revenue turnover than your larger counterparts, and you are likely to feel an economic pinch more quickly than larger competitors.

Developing a joint venture marketing strategy with one or more businesses is a great way to gain market exposure and visibility, as well as reach out to new potential clients, even during difficult economic times. This type marketing partnership is a savvy move to make because it can be a way to gain exposure without putting forth any capital.

Chances are that an economic downturn is not the time you want to be pumping large amounts of money into a new marketing campaign. But to maintain your current clients, which is your company’s bread and butter – and to attract new customers, which is your company’s future – marketing is necessary. A joint venture marketing strategy can be profitable without sinking into your profit margin, effective even during economic difficulties.

Shared Client Lists

One of the most basic ways to engage in a joint venture marketing partnership, which is also extremely cost effective because it has no real costs, is sharing client lists with your partners. As a successful business, you have a number of loyal clients with whom you regularly do business. The best free marketing is to share your client lists with your joint venture marketing partners as they will gain access to your loyal customers and vice versa.

Email Advertising

Email advertising is another joint venture marketing gem that goes hand in hand with shared client lists. Once you have a list of clients from your JV partners, you may not simply want to contact them out of the blue as people are bombarded with sometimes hundreds of emails a day, and a new email from an unknown company may just slip through the cracks or be filtered directly into the junk folder before the recipient ever sees it.

A more effective way of utilizing your joint venture marketing partnership is to use the emails that your partner companies are already sending out to your clients as a vehicle to advertise your company, and vice versa. Customers are much more likely to read an email from a company that they already do business with or purchase products from. These emails are also virtually guaranteed to reach the recipient and not be sent to the spam folder because the client is a repeat customer, and emails from this company have already been sent to and received by this client.

An extremely effective method for gaining exposure through your joint venture marketing partnerships is to attach an advertisement onto the end of the emails that your partners send to their clients, which advertises your company, and vice versa. This creates a win-win situation that costs nothing for either party!

All members of the joint venture marketing partnership will enjoy increased exposure via a trusted source, with absolutely no up-front costs. This type of joint venture marketing partnership is something that will be music to everyone’s ears, even during these difficult economic times.

Joint Venture Marketing: Increasing Profits Through Human Nature

Joint venture marketing is a subset of the relationship marketing family philosophy, but applies relationship marketing principles in a different way, which ideally helps to stimulate growth and strong relationships. Where relationship marketing focuses first on customer relationships, joint venture marketing increases the focus to include business partner relationships, which will ultimately foster and further customer relationships.

To be sure, joint venture marketing focuses as much on customer relationships as does traditional relationship marketing, but takes this focus to another realm with the idea of forging new and even stronger customer relationships.

The Fundamentals of a Joint Venture Partnership

In a joint venture marketing partnership, your company or business will join forces with one of more companies to facilitate stronger marketing practices and strategies for each member of the partnership. These new marketing practices and strategies include ways to organically produce solid customer relationships that will potentially yield long-term relationships.

With a successful joint venture marketing partnership, one of the first steps to creating a larger customer base is to work on building strong relationships with your partners. The stronger your partner relationships, the stronger your customer relationships will be. There is a trickle down cause and effect relationship between strong joint venture marketing partnership relationships and strong customer relationships. This is what the principles of joint venture marketing are built on, and what differentiates joint venture marketing from relationship marketing.

Trickle Down Effect

The idea behind developing a joint venture marketing partnership is to benefit from the mutual experience and expertise of your partners. You may have a great and loyal customer base, but unless you extend this customer base, your business is unlikely to grow. Partnering with other businesses to share marketing strategies and ideas, and to implement these ideas as a group, is an extremely effective way to expand your customer base.

But in order to develop a new customer base that is as loyal as your current customer base, you must develop strong relationships with your joint venture marketing partners. The strength of relationships with new customers that you make as a result of your joint venture marketing partnership is a direct reflection of the strength of your business relationships. If you form a joint venture marketing partnership, and do not put much effort into developing relationships with your partners via working together for a common goal, this will be evident to your new clients, and these relationships will ultimately not grow to their full potential.

Part of this reality is determined by something extremely simple: human nature.  People tend to go out of their way to help people they feel like they share something with, and someone they feel close to.  This is just as true in business as it is in personal life. But, this also cannot be fabricated.

You may not actually “like” all of your joint venture marketing partners, or want to be friends with them, but you can take an interest in them and their specific business, which will open the doors of communication. Once you’re established a solid professional relationship based on mutual respect, your partners will be more willing to go above and beyond the call of duty to help you succeed. You may want to be the first one to step up to the plate and take the extra step or provide additional information or help to one of your partners, and this will certainly be reciprocated.   A happy well functioning relationship with your joint venture marketing partners will translate into stronger customer relationships, and eventually, a bigger bottom line.

Joint Venture Marketing: Partnering for Mutually Profitable Gains

Developing a joint venture marketing partnership can be a great way to raise the exposure of your business and increase your sales, and these partnerships are becoming an increasingly popular way to do business. However, when you do engage in a joint venture marketing partnership, it is important to realize that the focus of your vision must naturally shift. The business for your specific and individual company will remain largely the same, but you will have to incorporate a partnership view and partnership execution into your mode of operations.

The Perspective of a JV Partnership

If you are used to being a solo business and calling all the shots yourself, it may be difficult to make such an adjustment. Your business and your company will still be yours, but the marketing aspect of your business will undergo a change. Although this is most likely to be a positive change, it is still a change that may be difficult to assimilate, and it is worthwhile taking stock of your situation and coming up with a concrete plan of what specifically your goals are for a joint venture marketing partnership, and what you hope or expect to get out of such an arrangement.

At the beginning stages, it is crucial to keep in mind that your marketing focus, or at least part of your marketing focus, will be shifting from a single idea to a joint idea – a “mine” perspective to an “our” perspective. Given this shift, it is important to make sure that your partners and others in your group share your vision, and are committed to working together. If you don’t share the same vision as your joint venture marketing partners, you may have a very difficult road ahead of you.

In order to assess whether you have the same objectives as your potential partners, there are a few questions to consider that can help get you started and point you in the right direction for a potentially successful joint venture marketing partnership.

Important Questions for Collective Goal Assessment

The following questions will help you pinpoint your goals for pursuing a joint venture marketing partnership and deciding upon the best partners for your project.

• Do we share a common vision and goals for our enterprise?
• Will this be a win-win situation for all parties involved?
• How many partners are needed to successfully implement this strategy?
• Are the people needed for success involved in this process?

Contemplating and discussing these questions with your marketing team will put you on the right road for an ultimately successful partnership. If you operate a small business and don’t have a marketing team, go through these questions with your operations manager, creative director or at least one other person in your company whose experience and opinions you trust. It is important to come to a collective agreement within your own company regarding how to proceed with your joint venture marketing plan, before going ahead with the plan. If members of your own team are on the same page, it will help to execute a smoother and more successful joint venture marketing partnership.

Joint Venture Marketing: Hire a JV Consultant To Help Build Profitable Relationships for You

A joint venture marketing partnership is an excellent way to potentially expand your business and move it forward. The specifics of a partnership can vary, but the essential idea remains consistent, regardless of how the partnership is executed.

Sharing Resources to Boost Profits

A joint venture marketing partnership is an agreement or formal contract between two or more businesses, which agree to combine their individual resources for the mutual benefit of each company involved. This may be an arrangement where your company shares its client list in exchange for access to your partner’s client lists.

This sharing of existing clients is one way in which these kinds of partnerships are most frequently executed. If this is the kind of joint venturing marketing partnership you choose to develop, (and it is often the most simple and straightforward one to pursue) it is important to note that you should seek partners who are not in exactly the same business as you are. You don’t want your partners to be in direct competition with you for clients – these would be competitors, not partners, and there are enough competitors out there already that you don’t need to go looking for them!

How to Find Synergistic JV Partners

Now that you’ve decided that developing a joint venture marketing partnership may help take your business to the next level, how do you find these wonderful partners? If you are already running your own small business and tapped out in terms of time and resources, it may be difficult to fit in the research necessary to find good potential partners. You may be well versed in who your direct competitors are, but identifying tangentially related businesses may prove to be more difficult and not companies that come immediately to mind.  Working with consultants that are experts in your industry is a great way to help identify potential joint venture marketing partners and to streamline your process in setting up these partnerships, ultimately saving you precious time.

Employing Industry Consultants

Industry consultants work with a variety of companies within the realm of a specific industry. These consultants are often experts who are hired to execute a specific task, and they are not necessarily on staff at any one specific company. Thus, they have exposure to and contact with a number of different companies. Because of this exposure, these consultants are a valuable resource to help you identify potential joint venture marketing partners.

Joint Venture Marketing Partnership Consultants

Once you identify and decide to work with industry consultants, their specific role can take a couple of different directions. You may want to use an industry consultant to simply help you identify other companies that might be a good match for a joint venture partnership. These consultants can provide valuable information that would be difficult and time consuming for you to track down on your own. You would then reach out directly to these companies and work on sorting out an agreement on your own.

There are also professional consultants who can be used to officially broker your marketing partnership agreements and deals for you. Some businesses feel more comfortable with this type of arrangement and have the resources to spare to hire such a consultant. However if you decide to proceed with your joint venture marketing partnership, employing the resources of a consultant can be hugely beneficial.

Joint Venture Marketing: Quickly Taking Your Business to a New Level

Joint venture marketing is an important branch of relationship marketing, where the focus of marketing tactics is on both customer and business relationships. You cannot have a strong and successful business without prosperous relationships with your clients and business associates.  Embarking on new marketing partnership can help you build even stronger client and business relationships, help you deliver better customer service, streamline your practices, and ultimately help take you business (and profits!) to the next level.

Why should I Consider a Joint Venture?

To understand why a joint venture is such an effective technique, it is important first to understand what a joint venture is. A joint venture is a marketing partnership, which gathers one or more businesses together for each party to mutually benefit from the strengths and expertise of the other members of the partnership.

If you are starting a new business, or even if you have a successful, established business, a joint venture marketing partnership is a highly beneficial technique to growing your business, increasing your customer base, building strong customer relationships, and ultimately boosting your company’s bottom line. Sounds too good to be true, right?

Not Too Good to be True!

It may sounds like magic, but the benefits of a joint venture marketing partnership are truly attainable, and not necessarily for a large investment of time or money. The idea behind developing a joint venture marketing partnership and reaching out to potential marketing partners is to first identify companies and businesses that you admire and that are successful, who are in a complimentary industry. When identifying these potential partners, you don’t want to partner with someone whose products or goods and services will be in direct competition with yours. For instance, if you have a wedding planning business, you will not want to partner with other wedding planning businesses – you would be competing for clients rather than benefiting from mutual contacts and clients.

Taking the wedding planning business, an appropriate choice for a joint venture marketing partner might be a catering company or a photographer. Either a photographer or a caterer will have clients who may be in need of your services, and vice versa. Virtually every wedding requires a catering company to handle to the food for the event, and a photographer to document the memorable occasion. Thus, if you develop a joint venture partnership with a photographer and a catering company, you will share clients with them, and mutually inform clients of the other businesses services. Weddings are not the only event for which catering and photography services are required – holiday parties, birthday parties and other special occasions often require these services. Therefore, if you have a joint venture marketing partnership, it has the ability to inform future business both in your standard category, and to expand to reach new clients.

There are a variety of forms a joint venture marketing partnership can take – it can start out as simple as advertising and providing links on your website to your partners websites. This is an excellent first step for a joint venture marketing partnership that can help take your business to the next level.

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