As a marketer, there’s nothing more exciting, and at the same time, more challenging, than a rebrand. Whether the rationale comes down to modernizing your brand, targeting a new audience or needing a better name to communicate your story, it’s important to utilize all of the channels you have at your disposal to ensure your customers are aware of your re-brand and ultimately understand your new messaging.
Enter the partner marketing channel. When planning a rebrand, marketers often focus their attention primarily on core comms tactics: PR, social media, email campaigns etc. Often, the partner channel gets overlooked. Yet, partnerships with other brands can not only help to increase exposure, they can also open up new groups of customers to your brand. If you’re planning your organization’s rebrand, here are five key ways you can utilize partnerships and the partner channel to achieve success.
- Incentivize Partners During Relaunch
The first opportunity is a simple one, and it involves better incentivizing your partners during the rebrand launch. By communicating to your partners about your rebrand, and then offering them incentives and higher commission rates during this period, they are more likely to promote your brand and its new messaging. This stronger incentive program could be increasing commission for the partner, or offering a bonus if the partner reaches a certain conversion target. It’s a win-win situation: Your new branding is strongly promoted, and your partner drives more conversions, resulting in more revenue.
- Deploy New Rebranded Creative
The second opportunity the partner channel represents centers around creative. If you want your partners to better promote your new brand, you need to provide them with a range of creative options to do so. By providing partners with a range of creatives (e.g. text, html, image etc.) you give them options that fit in all areas of their websites. When running visual creative, you can design partner-specific visuals or create variations that you can A/B test for different partner types. And by utilizing stronger creative with your partners, you’ll be able to deliver your new brand imagery and gain more exposure with potential customers.
- Partner Rebrand Communications
With a rebrand, you need to ensure your customers are aware of the changes. Partners can help here in a big way. Your partners often have large databases that they can finely segment, meaning the most direct way to promote your rebrand is through partner EDMs. Working directly with your marketing partners means you can co-design communications to ensure you’re not only educating people of your rebrand, but potentially attracting new customers as well.
- Landing Pages & Deep Linking
A common rebranding activity involves offering an exciting promotion around the launch of your new brand. The fourth opportunity in the partner channel centers around these promotions. When your partners promote your new offers, they facilitate customers clicking through to your website. However, to promote your rebrand promotion, you can get partners to deep link to specific promotion/product-based landing pages, or even co-branded landing pages. Rolling this out will reduce the number of clicks your consumers need to take, thus shortening the purchase process. This increases your likelihood of converting end-users.
- Pre-Launch Campaigns
The fifth and final opportunity, is that the partner channel allows you to run exclusive pre-launch campaigns. There are two key benefits to this:
- Firstly, consumers are likely to be more excited at an exclusive campaign so conversion rates increase.
- Secondly, your brand gets the opportunity to A/B test creative before the actual launch.
A great way to utilize this opportunity is to offer an exclusive promo code to consumers. The best part about it is that the majority of your partners are likely to be on a CPA model, so it’s easy to report back on which campaign variations were most successful pre-launch, and apply these learnings to actual launch campaign.
Conclusion
These five opportunities only scratch the surface when it comes to the benefits of utilizing the partner channel for rebranding. By building on the basic rebranding plan, and testing, you have the potential to achieve success with your rebrand, whilst attracting some new customers as well.
One final piece of advice: communicate with your partners. The earlier you start the rebranding conversation, and the more involved your partners are, the better your opportunities for promotion are. If you’d like to learn more about all of the opportunities partnerships can offer you, reach out to the Performance Horizon team today.
