Introduction

While it is a proven factor in the success of your partner program, managing and coordinating the elements of your partner marketing operations can be stressful.

Manually handling all the moving parts of your channels, campaigns, and partnerships can become overwhelming. The bottom line is that you won’t achieve the same success with your campaigns as you would with the help of a software to automate and organize your marketing activities.

In this article, we will discuss the role both PRM platforms and partner marketing software can have in your partnerships, as well as the top 5 partnership marketing software solutions you can use to boost your marketing efforts.

Partner Marketing Review

Channel partner marketing is the strategic, mutually beneficial collaboration of two brands. Partnerships can take the form of large-scale projects like co-producing an entirely new product or smaller projects like link-sharing blog posts.

Regardless of the size of the campaign, it should help both companies achieve their individual goals, whether it's increasing eCommerce conversion rates, awareness, brand equity, revenue, or market share.

Partner Marketing vs Partner Relationship Management

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is software, methodologies, and tactics that companies use to foster productive working relationships with those who sell their products and with whom they collaborate on marketing initiatives. PRM includes both simple methods for managing co-marketing relationships and more complex programs with sophisticated software and data management.

Partner marketing, on the other hand, is a component of partner relationship management and involves strategic collaboration between two or more companies that helps each company achieve goals, such as:

• Generating more social media and website traffic
• Brand reach and awareness
• Increasing conversions
• Customer acquisition and retention

Common Types of Partner Marketing Software 

Partner relationship management is becoming increasingly customized and automated, with more options for business intelligence, and template-based workflows. Companies using these tools can gain an edge over their competitors who do everything manually. That's because partnership marketing software enables companies to maintain fruitful relationships with numerous partners and manage those partnerships continuously and efficiently.

PRM Software 

PRM software  solves a number of typical management problems in an indirect sales channel. These powerful platforms can foster interaction and collaboration between managers and partners in partner marketing. PRMs provide partners with a portal to request or access marketing and training materials, and channel managers can monitor their partners' progress and needs.

PRM can be helpful for joint marketing efforts with your partners. Partners can be very important in getting the word out about your company and products, especially to new audiences. Your PRM software enhances this opportunity while building barriers to prevent misrepresentation.

It also makes it easy to distribute and organize marketing content. Content marketing is the cornerstone of any successful partner program when done correctly. Creating content is a great approach to improving your program and giving your partners useful resources.

Partner Marketing Automation Software

Partner marketing automation software takes away all the man-hours spent on monotonous manual tasks so you can focus on value-adding activities. Campaign planning and other related tasks, content creation, and analytics are typically delivered through an automation solution.

This helps you manage, track, analyze, and optimize campaigns in real-time. If you measure your efforts properly, you can make data-driven decisions, which is essential for success.

Pros & Cons of Partner Marketing Software

Advantages

Cost-effective: You can cut your sales and advertising costs by using partnership marketing software that assists your business with marketing. For instance, when reaching out to potential customers, you can collaborate with well-known brands to benefit from brand awareness.

Growth Pathways: By establishing new connections, you could reinvent your business and look into fresh possibilities for growth. Additionally, you can practice new marketing strategies in a secure environment. Another benefit is that you can grow your business by reaching new markets and audiences by leveraging your partner's reputation.

Better Tracking: You can plan your partnership efforts based on channel and data information. Partner marketing software tracks key metrics, such as engagement activity, which you can use to determine the true value of the campaign. You can make smart decisions by leveraging this data across the ecosystem.

Disadvantages

Expensive: More and more, companies are looking to increase efficiency and cut costs. Partner marketing software requires an upfront investment that some companies may not have or be willing to make. Ultimately, manual processes cost companies more. Take a step back and estimate how much money your manual processes are really costing you.

Training: Certain marketing automation solutions are powerful, but not necessarily easy to use. Without training, some companies may find it difficult to use the new tool. However, the time you invest in training is worth it because eliminating manual processes will save you time in the long run.

Best Software for Partner Marketing 

Partnership marketing software includes many features and tools designed to maximize your campaigns, and therefore, your partnerships.

Here are the top 5 partner marketing solutions that can catapult partner marketing efforts.

OneAffiniti

Founded in 2008 in Sydney, Australia, OneAffiniti is a service-enabled technology platform built to help you scale your through-channel marketing programs by enhancing growth for brands and their partners. Their combination of technology, people, data, and services drives more than 80% monthly partner participation and an ROI of 22:1 on attributable sales.

Users can benefit from the six-step channel marketing solution that is easy and valuable for both brands and partners:

1. Campaign Creation
2. Campaign Review & Approval
3. Campaign Deployment
4. Lead Generation
5. Campaign & Lead Insights
6. Lead Qualification

Impact.com

Impact.com is a platform that allows you to easily monitor and improve your partner's marketing metrics. It does this by establishing a direct connection between the affiliate networks you use and your personal analytics program.

Impact.com tracks every click on an affiliate link or every purchase and sends the information directly to your analytics program, where it is displayed in real-time. Impact.com's method increases efficiency by eliminating redundant data entry from the mix and is platform independent, meaning it works with any network currently on the market.

Everflow

Everflow is a cloud-based performance marketing platform that provides affiliate tracking and affiliate management services. It streamlines the daily tasks of affiliate marketers and offers some of the best analytics and automation tools.

Everflow is best known for its multidimensional analytics and data visualization features that help evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and generate effective reports. The focus of this software is on affiliate marketing, but it also offers features for influencer marketing and mobile marketing. Affiliate tracking & management, commission management, payment tracking, email marketing, and fraud detection are some of the key features of the software.

Affise

Affise is a platform that enables advertisers and marketers to track and analyze their web-based advertising campaigns in real-time. 

The platform is user-friendly because everything, including changes and payments, is right where you need it and can be easily managed thanks to the intuitive interface.

Thanks to the referral rewards feature, affiliates are encouraged to refer more relevant people to earn rewards. With just one click, the software can perform all calculations and settlements. Moreover, you have the option to add your own unique tracking domains. You can choose a default domain for each offer after adding one or more tracking domains.

Channext 

Channext is not exclusively software for partner marketing, but it is one that can significantly impact channel marketing efforts.

It is a channel automation platform that aims to expand the indirect sales funnel. Channext creates an online connection between vendors and resellers to automate channel marketing by publishing campaigns and content directly to regional reseller websites and marketing channels.

This allows users to effectively market together to the end customer and measure key performance metrics across multiple channels.

Conclusion

Companies cannot ignore the value of partner marketing. It is by no means the answer to all problems, but it will help you grow your ROI, attract new customers, and boost your business if you learn to use the right partnership marketing strategy.

Partnership marketing software can give you an edge over the competition. It allows you to grow faster, become more visible, enter new markets, develop innovative products, and increase your customer base.

Ultimately, it increases the success of partnerships.

Whether you choose a partner marketing software or a PRM software like Kiflo, automating your marketing efforts will save you time and effort, and ultimately, strengthen your partnerships.