Partnering with other companies or individuals for mutual benefits can help you grow your business. However, for your efforts to be effective, you must first establish strategies for measuring your partner marketing campaign ROI, which will tell you whether your profit outweighs the cost of the partnership.

Learn how to measure your partner marketing ROI and use it to improve your strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Partner marketing allows you to reach a broader audience and access new expertise outside your business
• Partnerships can lead to data silos and unaligned goals without proper communication and reporting
• Use software to ensure you can accurately track and measure your partnership ROI

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Why Should You Use Partner Marketing?

Partner marketing B2B campaigns are when you collaborate with another business to reach a combined audience. For example, companies might use partner marketing when they don't have the resources or staff to expand as large as they want. Businesses also use tech partner marketing when the partner has the expertise they might be missing.

For example, a partner might have access to a niche within your IT audience or hold authority that you can use to reach that audience in a campaign like a webinar.

Partners are a valuable source of revenue, with over half of businesses saying their partnerships bring in more than 20% of their revenue.

What Are Some Examples of Partner Marketing Campaigns?

Partners can be long-term collaborators, like affiliate partners, that bring in leads and traffic. You might also choose a partner for a short-term collaboration on a single campaign. For example, you might sponsor an event, like an ActualTech Media tech webinar.

The Challenge with Measuring Partner Marketing ROI

Marketing partnerships involve several different parts that work together. However, whenever you deal with various partners, you’ll also run into issues with data silos. Without access to all the data on your marketing campaigns, you might not have an accurate picture of your ROI.

Measuring ROI is one of the top challenges marketers face today in all areas, not just partner campaigns.

Another common challenge is tracking the customer's journey. A customer rarely travels down a single path from the first touchpoint to the final sale. Instead, their journey takes several turns and might even backtrack or overlap. Therefore, you can't always know what efforts contributed to the final sale and might struggle to assign value to your marketing efforts.

5 Tips for Measuring Partner Marketing Campaign ROI

Use these five tips to calculate your partner marketing ROI.

1. Combine Your Data

An accurate calculation of your ROI starts with data. Collecting and organizing the correct data so you can gather insights from the information is key to your total.

Some of the data you'll want to collect include:

• Customer touchpoints
• How customers interacted with your partner's campaign
• How many customers they converted
• The cost of the campaign

Centralize your data as you collect it to eliminate silos and ensure you have a complete picture of each buyer's journey.

Your CRM might not be enough for collecting all the necessary data. You may need to add new software to your marketing stack that works specifically to connect your CRM platform to your partner campaigns to mesh your marketing results together seamlessly with their contribution. Some of the best tools for tracking partner campaigns and results include partner portals and relationship management tools.

Working with ActualTech Media removes many of those data silos as we provide a full report on how your sponsored webinar or other partner event performed.

2. Align Each Partner

You and your partners must work toward the same goals with a consistent message to ensure you're reaching your objectives.

For example, you want to ensure your partner is marketing to a new audience instead of reaching leads you’re already nurturing. You also want them to work with an audience that matches your ideal customer profile, so the leads they bring are quality.

To keep you and your partners working toward the same goals, offer marketing materials, training tools, and resources to equip your partners with what they need to run a successful campaign that complements your efforts.

Working with ActualTech Media allows you to target a specific audience with your partnerships and ensures you’re generating a list of net-new leads that match your ideal customer profile.

3. Establish Marketing Benchmarks

Your marketing benchmarks include the KPIs and metrics you’ll use to measure your success. You’ll know your partner marketing campaigns were successful when you’ve reached or surpassed your goals.

One example of a marketing benchmark includes a specific number of new leads you want to generate within a set time frame. Then, as you run your campaign, you'll collect data on your leads, which you'll use to track how close you were to reaching that goal.

Some examples of what you can measure in your partner campaigns include:

• New leads from partner campaign
• Average deal size
• Content marketing results
• Engagement rate from your partner's efforts
• Traffic that comes from partner content
• How many leads signed up for an online event
• How long does the audience stay at their webinar

4. Monitor Your Partner's Engagement

Your partner marketing campaign's success depends on how engaged your partner is. Since many partnerships aren't legally binding contracts, they don't always have any obligation to perform well in the partnership or meet a specific standard.

If they feel ill-equipped, dissatisfied, or lose interest in the partnership, they won't put in the necessary effort to bring in the results you need. Less than 15% of partners use a business's resources.

How can you tell which of your partners are investing in the campaign?

A few metrics to consider include:

• How often they visit their partner portal
• What assets or resources they access and download
• How involved they are in the campaign
• What training they joined

Establishing easy means of communication ensures your partners have a way to reach out to you with any questions. They also have a way to voice their concerns so you can address them quickly.

5. Track Your Long-Term Value

Your ROI doesn't just depend on short-term conversions from a single campaign. You won't fully realize some of your partner's results until months or years after you nurture those new leads, and those leads turn into loyal customers. Therefore, a customer's lifetime value is essential when calculating your ROI.

What Is Your Partner Marketing ROI?

Working with a partner for your marketing campaigns can be very rewarding when you have the right partner. At ActualTech Media, we offer webinars where you can partner with other tech experts to reach a mutual audience of tech professionals. In addition, you won't have to worry about how to calculate your ROI as ActualTech Media provides a full report on the results of all the virtual events and campaigns we run.

Contact us to learn more about our partner marketing campaign opportunities.