One of my absolute favorite things to do in marketing is working with partners. When it comes to spreading the word about your company or your product, I can't see why you wouldn't take advantage of working together towards this greater purpose. Partner marketing can really complement and help amplify your thought leadership pograms

What are the Benefits of Partner Marketing?

I see it as a win-win: let's say it starts with a piece of collaborative content you have come together to create.​ When it comes to promote that content, you have access to each other’s networks - their social media following (both personal and of the company), email subscriber lists, employees, and more. So you are effectively each doubling the reach of your content.

1  - Make it Easy. 
While I was at Affectiva, and even continuing at the Smart Eye group, the Human Centric AI podcast that I started is a great example of this. It was designed as a vehicle to build that relationship and then promote each other on our networks. We also packaged it up so that the speaker received a sample social post to copy & paste on LinkedIn to promote their episode, a pretty graphic featuring their headshot that they can easily share and tag to point back to my source content, 

2 - Brainstorm Collaborative Offer Ideas.
You can come together via partner marketing to collaborate on new, innovative thought leadership content - podcasts are one example, but you can also consider livestreams, blog posts, eBooks, webinar presentations, or joint speaking gigs to name a few. 

3 - Map out Your Ecosystem
So, take a minute to map out who the key players are in your ecosystem. They can be partners, clients, customers, or influential people in your network.

By aligning yourself and your company with thought leaders in your industry or in companies adjacent with your own lends credibility. This also ultimately builds trust with your target audience - it's nice to talk about yourself,  but even more powerful when you can team up and talk about each other.

Learn more about thought leadership and partner marketing strategies in this recent podcast I did! 

Early in your career, especially if you are in marketing, it can be difficult to quantify ROI. However, if you have a marketing budget, chances are you will be asked to report on spend. Here's a super simple framework on how to approach measuring something like this: 

1. Make a Plan. Do not expend energy on a project without developing some way of tracking the performance of it. HubSpot is a great tool to do this, as it gives you detailed analytics on web pages, email campaigns, blogs, and even social media messages. That's just one tool, though: for hosting events, measure registrations and attendees. If you publish a blog, measure page views or leads generated. Launch a podcast? Look at number of downloads. Figure out how you want to measure your initiative, and bonus points if you can put a number to attribute to success. (i.e., I am going to aim for 10k podcast downloads before the end of the year) 
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2. Execute. This may sound obvious, but sometimes you can spend all your time planning and talking about what you COULD do without actually...doing anything. Even if it's something small to get started or to run a test, make sure you actually make something happen. It shows initiative, and regardless of success or failure, I guarantee you will learn something from it. 

3. Report on Results. Whatever you planned to measure, create a report of results. Did it perform how you expected? Why or why not? What did you learn to apply for next time? This will give you guidance for your next campaign, where you'll tweak your plan and start over again. Reporting on everything also is a good practice to get into as it will be easy to reference when needed (and you will need to report on performance eventually, whether at the end of the quarter or the year), but serve as a helpful way to update your resumé

The Bottom Line
Draft a plan, execute the campaign, then record your results. Share them with your boss (or the broader team, like colleagues or even the CEO). Not only does this quantify the value you bring to the organization, but can serve as valuable fodder for building up your LinkedIn profile or resumé.

For more tips, checkout this LinkedIn article I wrote a while back on how to be a rockstar at work based on a lecture I gave at Tufts University. 

You know that it's important to get feedback from your customers when you offer a service, or just to check in to see how your brand is performing. So you figured a set and forget automated survey after they hang up, place an order online, or having your customer rep ask if they could fill it out would do the trick, right? Wrong. 

Not sure about you, but I get absolutely pounded with these surveys. I'm busy. I barely had time to interact with your business, but now you assume I'm going to take extra minutes to fill out a questionnaire for YOU? 

Surveys are a great tool. But as a tactic, businesses need to be both realistic about expectations around them, and strategic when implementing them. Here are some things to consider if you want to start a survey, or you aren't getting the incredibly high volume of survey results that you have been dreaming of: 

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1) What's in it for THEM? For the reasons of limited time explained above, your customers are not going to take additional time to fill out one of your surveys out of the goodness of their hearts. (The exception to this is usually that the customer was unsatisfied and needs a place to vent about it)

So, what can you do to incentivize your customers to help you out a little bit? Usually finding out what motivates them can be something minor, like a promo code on their next order for a certain % off, or a complimentary services of some kind. If you are serious about investing in understanding your customer's point of view, you should be willing to set aside some budget to find out. Your ROI will be measured by valued insights to how you can improve, and can ultimately lead to time or overall cost savings in the future. 

2) Timing. Time your survey request appropriately - typically as soon after you've provided a service as possible. I can't tell you how many times I've hung up with a rep, then three days letter get a survey request on the performance of the company. I can barely remember what I ate for lunch today, you really expect me to recall details of a phone conversation and, again, take my time to answer your questions on it? 

If you are asking about eCommerce service, perhaps automate your survey on the product to correspond with their package receipt day. There's lots of ways you can optimize your requests around your customer's schedule to help you get optimal results. And if going along with an offer on point #1, give a deadline (i.e., fill out this survey in the next 24 hours to get free shipping on your next order) 

3) Length of survey. We've discussed my time. I'm just not going to sit through a ridiculous amount of detailed questions, scour through a million options in your dropdown menu to complete your survey - especially if there's nothing in it for me. 

Consider making a single goal of each survey, so you can be concise with the information you are trying to collect. This would make your survey very basic - so possibly with demographic information (see if you can automate their location by their IP address) and a question or two about what you want to know.. Then, consider tiered surveys for a different after each transaction. Develop a survey communications strategy where you collect different information each time a customer interacts with you to get a full picture of what you are looking to improve upon. Fast, easy, the customer gets a little something - everybody wins. 

4) Sophisticated technology. Lastly, nothing kills a survey like bad tech. There are plenty to terrible survey platforms out there. Don't be the company that employs one of them.. All it takes during a customer filling out a survey is a glitch with a form or a button and consider your precious data abandoned. Make sure you are making this experience as seamless as possible for your customer to up your chances for a completed survey. 

Your surveys are just another form of customer experience. Like your marketing, every interaction you have with your customer is an interaction with your brand - so make sure you are taking the time to make sure your feedback request initiatives are reflecting that to your customer. By making the process worth it, easy, timely, fast, and seamless to execute, you will see a dramatic increase in your customer feedback loop. 

If you need help developing a plan around gathering company feedback, or would like an objective look with some strategic tips on how you can improve, I can help - ask me how.