Growth through trust

We’re living through an era of information overload. We have a world of information in the palm of our hands at any given second, day or night. Yet, that volume of information comes with its challenges: how do I process it all and which information should I trust? 

This dilemma is also changing the customer journey. With so many brands in the market, customers need more than glossily produced websites or marketing prose to convince them to make a purchase.  Instead they’re turning to a cohort of trusted sources to help them discover, compare and purchase products and services.

This means marketers must adapt to a world in which people are less tolerant of brands talking about themselves. Instead they must open new pathways for people to talk to their own trusted networks about the brand - with referral partnerships being the ideal vehicle to do so.

Virgin Australia: more partners, 71% growth

Partnership programs today no longer have to be anchored around traditional affiliates. This is because partnership management platforms make it easy for brands to work with their own customers, content creators, brand ambassadors, influencers, charities, publishers and other brands at scale - and a diversified program can yield impressive results.

This was certainly the case for Virgin Australia, which achieved a 71 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase in revenue after increasing its number of active partners by 168 per cent. 

Before turning to impact.com and partnership marketing agency Silverbean, Virgin Australia had an over-reliance on set partner types. As Kate Clements, Digital Media Advisor at Virgin Australia explained: “This prevented us from tapping into new revenue streams and realising the true potential of our partnership channel.”

By using impact.com’s automated Discovery tool, Virgin Australia was able to be more strategic in its partner recruitment efforts.  Kate continued; “We were able to create a more diverse partner mix, adding partnerships with strong brand affinity, including publishers and social media influencers with a large travel audience.”

For example, Virgin Australia collaborated with Points Hack to tap into the niche points-savvy audience to promote its Velocity Frequent Flyer Program and help travellers move through the four tiers of Velocity status. Influencers with an audience interested in a specific destination also helped drive bookings to desired routes.

Sephora and Elite Supplements: Going global

When Elite Supplements looked to expand into the US, their marketing strategy was a partnership-first one. As Jye Beckett, Elite Supplements Chief Marketing Officer explained: “We needed to seed creator content to create evidence-based and authentic product reviews before even considering a brand campaign”.

The right type of partnership can create an authentic connection with customers to drive trust and credibility within a new market. Indeed, the majority of social media users¹ trust user-generated content more than brand-owned creative. Importantly, partnerships, like those Elite Supplements forged with US content creators, now work at all stages of the marketing funnel from awareness and consideration, through to purchase. Fortunately, partnership management technology makes it easy to reward and optimise a limitless range of nuanced KPIs.

French beauty-retail powerhouse Sephora understood the full-funnel power of partnerships, but their global partnership team was struggling to recruit diverse partners to drive regional growth. Relying on traditional affiliate players in each market meant it was stymied by lack of visibility into the recruitment and contracting process and made access to all but the most basic metrics impossible.

This all changed after Sephora onboarded impact.com. The platform’s Discovery tool helped Sephora directly recruit non-traditional partners across multiple markets, including Australia, and was able to achieve a step-change in optimising performance.  This resulted in a 101 per cent increase in partner growth which drove a 3x increase in revenue, generating $7.4 million from 293 partners.

With results like these it's no surprise that brands are making partnerships a more significant part of the marketing mix. Nor is it a surprise that publishers are also responding to this shift in consumer behaviour and introducing new commercial opportunities that work with their audiences' natural media consumption behaviours versus interrupting them. This year News Corp’s Total Commerce bundle was announced, introducing “headless commerce” which allows its audience to complete a purchase inside video or text content without being moved off platform, whilst rival Nine expanded its e-commerce solutions and affiliate marketing capabilities across its entire editorial portfolio. Meanwhile, in September Are Media announced its transformative push into becoming an omnichannel content commerce company.

In a world where no one wants to hear you talk about your brand, partnerships are becoming the channel of outperformance when it comes to new customer acquisition.