Over the past few weeks, we brought together the partnership community across Southeast Asia and Australia for our first virtual customer roundtables of 2021 on the topic of Optimizing Partnerships. We were delighted to be joined by advertiser, agency, and partner industry leaders for the collaborative sessions.
I led the Australian roundtable and our Singapore-based Customer Success Manager Gerald Lim followed with the Southeast Asian session with local marketing leaders attending in each region. The roundtables allowed us to share some of our unique insights from working with some of the biggest brands across Asia Pacific. We covered three pertinent topics; partner recruitment, building relationships, and leveraging data.
In this blog post, I wanted to share some of the key discussion topics and learnings from the Australian and Southeast Asian roundtables that can help you optimise your partner program today.
Partner Recruitment
For many partner and affiliate managers, one of their key goals for this year is to expand and diversify their partner mix. But where is the best place to start?
Australia
From an advertiser perspective, a really obvious action can be to make sure you’re visible and that partners can find you. This might be by having a dedicated page on your website or advertisements on external affiliate and marketing websites.
Leverage Partnerize’s Partner Discovery Tool and ensure you are listed and open for partnership opportunities and are proactively communicating and reaching out to new partners.
Lastly, we would always encourage you to utilise your Partnership Director to keep across new partners and what’s happening in the industry.
Southeast Asia
If you’re an advertiser looking to work with new partners, a simple place to start can be looking at who your competitors work with, and whether that’s a possibility for your brand too.
It can also be beneficial to look at partnership from a different perspective. Look through the lens of “anyone can be a partner” and you will discover opportunities with other brands or partnership types that might be out of the traditional affiliate scope.
From the get-go understand the types of partners you want to work with and the commercial expectations. Not setting or aligning expectations can often be the biggest roadblock for a successful long-term partnership.
Building Relationships
In the true spirit of a partnership, it can often come down to communication and understanding what your partner wants to achieve. Here are some of the key themes we discussed around building relationships.
Australia
Typically, advertisers are often only focusing on getting publishers live and running, but it’s important to put yourself in the publisher’s shoes and think about the whole journey the publisher takes when promoting the advertiser.
Ultimately, the more touchpoints and the more communication you have with the publisher, the stronger the relationship will be. Start by understanding the publisher journey touch points and how you can enhance communication along the way. Some of these touch points can include regular calls, networking events, newsletters and strategy meetings.
Southeast Asia
From a publisher side, they highlighted the importance of communication and aligning on goals and strategies for partnership success. Like advertisers, many publishers have set campaigns and calendars they work towards throughout the year. Regular partner-advertiser communication and planning can minimise lost opportunities.
This was a sentiment shared by advertisers who agreed that having established and trust-based relationships with publishers allow them to be more flexible and make the last minute campaign changes that can take place in the world of ecommerce, while still getting sufficient exposure for their brand.
Leveraging Data
With access to advanced data and reporting capabilities, we would always encourage our customers to let the data guide their decisions. These are the highlights from our discussion around leveraging data.
Australia
Look past revenue when looking to define top partners. Instead, by looking at different metrics such as new customer rate, AOV and monthly growth rate, a different set of partners may emerge as value-drivers for your business.
Further, the data can also guide how you optimise your time. With only so many hours in the day, we have to get smart about how we are building relationships. Understand the partners that will drive the most value and those that require your investment. This will allow you to allocate time resources to those you will work with directly and where you can automate communication. This is an important consideration, especially when you’re looking to scale your program.
Southeast Asia
Interestingly, when looking at metrics for success, some advertisers look first to the audience or market they want to target, and then seek out publishers that can deliver their desired audience. Other metrics such as revenue and profitability will follow. This is a strategy shared particularly amongst retailers who focus on brand awareness KPIs along with performance metrics.
We want to say a massive thank you to the customers, agencies and publishers who attended the virtual Optimizing Partnerships roundtables in both Australia and Southeast Asia. As with all our roundtables, it’s a great way to connect brands in the industry and hear perspectives from those in different sides of the partnership mix.
If you would like to learn more about optimizing your partnership program, you can get in contact at info@partnerize.com.
