Strategies to Get New Clients

The best part about developing joint ventures is the ability to create unique strategies to get new clients from the existing client base of the joint venture partner or through new marketing activities together. Some companies mistakenly, simply create a basic press release and expect the new partner to come up with all of the strategies and marketing materials to market the partnership. If a business wants to maximize each joint venture partner it’s best to be active in the marketing decision making process as well as develop creative offerings such as product bundles, free sample offerings, partner promo specials and other strategies to get new clients. If a business commits to being open to new marketing strategies regardless of past marketing campaigns and focuses on developing a complete new channel, great things can happen. At the heart of the strategies to get new clients should be the overwhelming focus to provide customers a great product or service for an affordable price. When developing consumer related joint ventures having special pricing and product promotions is critical.

Product Bundles

Identifying whole solutions or product bundles that can deliver to a customer an entire solution or package that at the same time saves the customer money over buying each component separately is a strategy to get new clients. When marketing to a new potential customer base with a new joint venture partner many of these customers may already be using a competitor’s product or service so there needs to be a strong incentive to use a different company. Product bundling is an excellent way to handle all of a customer’s requirements and give them this great deal. Include a product or service from the joint venture partner into the product bundle if applicable and jointly market the product bundle. This also increases the buy-in that a partner may have in assisting with promoting the partner product bundle.

Free / Lite Version to Partner Customer Base

Depending on whom a joint venture partner’s customer base includes, developing a targeted free or lite version or product samples that can be provided free to the customers is a well proven strategy to get new clients. Often just getting customers to try a product out for the first time is the hardest challenge a business can encounter. This is seen most especially when launching a new product to market. Working in conjunction with a joint venture partner to distribute product samples, free versions of a product or service to identified target customers, will get the product in the customer’s hands quickly and efficiently. This provides potential customers the opportunity to get to know your product before making a buy decision. Depending on the structure of the joint venture partnership a free product demo sent to existing customers can be included in the agreement between the two businesses. Small businesses developing a new joint venture with a much larger company may have the product samples subsidized by the larger corporation because it is in both company’s interest that the target customers become acquainted with the products and the smaller companies brand. These types of joint ventures can really launch a new product into market rapidly. This is a strong strategy to get new clients that all businesses should evaluate if it would work for them.

Partner Promo Specials

Developing unique partner promotions helps differentiate the deal that a customer gets by having an existing relationship with a business that is now a joint venture partner. This is important for businesses that develop multiple joint venture marketing relationships. Depending on the level of a joint venture partner’s commitment, special promos can be developed so that they can offer their customer base a unique offer that is not being provided elsewhere in the targeted market. This allows a business to structure partnerships accordingly. Those partners that do the most for driving new business and spending resources on marketing the partnership can receive better discounts and promotions for their customers. Promotions can set up as just a single offering with a company or have a new monthly promo, whichever makes sense for the partnership. Using partner promo codes is always a great way to organize business leads in a CRM system as they are coming in through the defined sales channels. Being able to record a promo code can help you track leads and determine which sales rep those sales are coming from, which can be great data for managing the partnership.

There are many great strategies to get new clients through joint venture marketing campaigns with partners.  Be active in identifying the right strategies for marketing the partnership.  A few of the ways a business can reach out to existing customers is to offer them a special promotion, product bundle or even a free product sample to provide the required incentive to try a new product.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.

How to Track Joint Venture Activities through Online Tools

How to track joint venture marketing activities is the most important element of executing a successful joint venture marketing relationship. Without being able to understand what successes are achieved and where failures may be occurring it will be difficult to improve your joint venture marketing activities and it will also be next to impossible to hold your partners accountable to the agreed upon terms of the relationship. There are several online tools that allow anyone to quickly set up and execute a joint venture relationship as well as manage the relationship over the long haul. It’s important to clearly identify all of the ways that the joint venture marketing will happen and sales will occur to ensure everything is accounted for and easily track able. It is vital that through the tracking solution deployed metric based reports can be crafted to analyze activities to know what to focus on in the future and what can be avoided.

Affiliate Marketing Sites

If the majority of the joint venture sales activities will be delivered through online referrals than it is extremely important that that an affiliate network program has been established for the JV partners to utilize. This can be achieved through several different methods. One model is to simply sign up with one of the large affiliate marketing sites like Commission Junction, this not only provides access to the tools necessary to create a tracking system for referrals and sales, but also will help market JV opportunities to website owners that are seeking additional partners that fit well with their customer demographics.

Choosing to not create a presence in one of the large affiliate marketing databases is more than acceptable as there are several solutions available to develop the same capabilities in house, that provide tools for tracking marketing activities of joint venture partners, whenever they are promoting your brand online whether on a website or in an email. A few of the more popular affiliate marketing tools available are LinkTrust, HitPath, and DirectTrack. Each of these services allows a business to create unique ads that will track the clicks and actions that a user makes when clicking on one of these ads. This is vital for a joint venture and will ensure all actions can be tracked back to who is achieving the goal of successfully selling products and services and how much they have earned from their activities. Failing to track leads and sales successfully will quickly harm joint venture marketing relationships and potentially loose a business a valuable partner.

CRM

While online sales may be an important element to a joint venture it also may not be nearly as important as personal introductions and more traditional marketing efforts that may occur from a joint venture marketing relationship. If a business specializes in larger priced items, it is much less likely that a sale will occur from a website click, therefore having a Customer Relationship Management “CRM” system in place to track the lead from the initial referral all the way to closing the sale will be able to provide the data necessary to track, evaluate, and reward marketing partners. A few of the popular CRM solutions are Salesforce, ZohoCRM, and SugarCRM each has the customization capabilities to fit the requirements of almost any business and sales process. These systems can be set up quickly. Joint venture partners can be invited into the system to enter potential sales prospects and follow the sales cycle, all the way to closing of the lead as well as seeing the final closing amount for the client. This will help track and calculate the monthly or quarterly referral checks that need to be issued to each joint venture partner as well as keep them in the loop about the progress of any deals that may be closing.

Promo Codes

Setting up a promo code and assigning it to an individual person or to a specific company or marketing campaign will help track joint venture activities. If a business wants to be able to measure the success of a specific marketing activity just including a simple promo code will ensure that customers will actively assist in gaining the knowledge required to know if they came in through the marketing brochure, radio ad, or were just flipping through the yellow pages and decided to call. By utilizing promo codes it’s easy to put together raw reports of how many people are responding to a specific message, to refine your marketing pitch, or to identify which sales people in a company that you have a JV relationship are really pushing the products and services and who is not.  Being able to reward those that are selling products is vital to make them feel appreciated and this data point is easy to set up. Make sure you create a field in your CRM system called promo code and instruct everyone processing sales leads to always ask the customer if they have a promo code and include the details in the field. Since it will be a field in the CRM then you can run a report just for that individual code or look at the results of several codes.

Use online tools to track joint venture marketing activities and ensure that energy and resources are dedicated to the right partners and channels. Make sure that when structuring a new joint venture each party clearly understands the expectations of the agreement concerning reporting and tracking all activities and that everyone is fully capable and trained to meet the requirements. Failure to track a joint venture properly can lead to many problems in the future and create more hassles then overall benefits.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free report on Joint Venture Marketing.