Our Chief Product Officer Matt Simmonds has written a two-part series in PerformanceIn detailing our new launch of Intelligent Partner Discovery. The first article focuses on our approach to finding great new partners that will drive strong conversions and revenue for brand partnership programs. Here is an excerpt from Matt’s article:

In the world of partnership and affiliate marketing, finding new partners can be a powerful avenue to growth. After all, new partners can bring many valuable benefits to a brand, including broader offer distribution, the ability to reach new audiences, new avenues to grow the buying funnel, and ultimately new incremental revenue.

That said, all partners are not created the same. Sometimes quality over quantity is a better path.

At Partnerize, we recognize both the value that additional partners can bring, as well as the enormous potential unlocked when a brand engages deeply and directly with its largest partners — instead of through an outsourced service provider like a network. We are also abundantly aware that brands don’t have unlimited financial and people resources. In such an environment of scarcity, it’s critical to place your bets on the partners most likely to deliver outstanding results.

Based on our vast experience in a variety of categories, we believe there is a better road to take versus spray-and-pray partner recruitment or focusing solely on a handful of uber partners.

We call it the ‘best next’ principle.

‘Best next’ advocates that a brand should intelligently expand its pool of partners, prioritizing those with the potential to deliver the largest possible incremental revenue and conversions. These are your ‘best next’ partners. This simple idea provides a strategy that prioritizes new partners that have the highest potential to achieve your KPIs. With ‘best next’, your goal isn’t to have a specific number of partners but rather to be supporting the mix of partners that best helps you achieve your goals.

Enter Intelligent Partner Discovery

Our team has conducted extensive research defining the key signals that indicate that a particular partner will be of great value to a brand. These include:        

• Historical partnership revenue generated by a publisher (total and in vertical)
• Target partner audience and contextual content fit
• A partner’s historical propensity to drive sales at scale for new clients and campaigns
• The similarities of a potential partner to your most successful current partners

Most brands don’t have access to all of the data necessary to assess specific partners on each of these key criteria. Further, even if they did, the interplay between these indicators can be extremely complex.

That’s why we are introducing Intelligent Partner Discovery, which uses proprietary machine learning to help brands identify and automatically invite their best next partners to their programs. Our vision is to help brands add new partners judiciously based on real data and intelligence.

Most networks and solution providers offer partner directories — some with basic search capabilities. When we created Intelligent Partner Discovery, we wanted to raise the bar considerably — to provide a partner discovery methodology powered by data and strategy rather than guesswork.

How Intelligent Partner Discovery works

Intelligent Partner Discovery analyses both historical and real-time data on the characteristics of all active partners to identify those partners with a high propensity to deliver maximum conversions to a particular brand. For the first time, brands on Partnerize can explore our ecosystem of 300,000+ partners, including affiliates, content partners and influencers — and be automatically recommended those partners that are likely to be the best fit.

Read the rest of the article in PerformanceIn.