When you effectively brand your company or product, you create something truly memorable and lasting. But when you pair that memorable brand with another, you create a partnership that can take both brands to the next level.

Brand partnerships are a great thing in the marketing world and can play a notable role in company growth. A co-branding opportunity could be just the thing you need to refresh your image and boost your business’s growth. When done right, a brand partnership can help you increase visibility and tap into new markets — and you only have to do half of the work. Below, we’ll detail the benefits of brand partnerships and share some tips for building them.

Why You Need to Build Partnerships

Marketing is a competitive sport. And while it’s mostly done solo, there are some big advantages to bringing on a teammate every once in a while.

A brand partnership helps strengthen your influence through third-party credibility, allowing you to make a strong, positive impression on a new audience. In turn, it opens the door for more referrals and leads and can help you expand everything from your email list to your customer base.

There’s a ton of opportunity in partnerships. Join forces with your partners on co-branded efforts like promos, webinars, and social media campaigns and add value to both your voice and your product or service. You can also create partnership programs by offering each other’s services to your respective clients, thereby instantly boosting your referral traffic.

It’s clear that a successful brand partnership opens up a lot of doors. So let’s talk strategy.

How to Build a Brand Partnership

Impressive brand partnerships aren’t created overnight. From the outset, you’ll want to be sure to put a lot of thought into your partnership building blocks and convey the value that you bring to the team.

Find Your Partner

You want your partner to be a brand that you trust and admire, and whose audience is similar to yours. To narrow it down, ask yourself a few questions:

• Who’s creating a lot of high-quality content in your space?
• Who’s getting published online frequently?
• Who’s hosting webinars?
• What are the other products and services that your clients are using?

Create a list of brands that check off the right boxes, but keep in mind that there should also be some comparability in terms of size and brand strength. You’ll need to convince your potential partners that they have as much to benefit from teaming up as you do, so you’ll want to make sure the brand you attempt to partner with isn’t significantly larger than yours.

Start Sending Outreach

Once you have your list of brands, you can start pitching. To get in touch, fill out forms on their websites or send emails asking for a blog swap or partnership discussion. While you’re at it, make sure that there’s a clear-cut way for other brands to reach you with partnership queries, such as a form they can fill out on your site to contribute to your company blog.

Need some help getting your foot in the door? Ask the leaders at your company if they have any connections they can introduce you to. Likewise, test the waters on LinkedIn, joining industry groups and messaging others in the group who it might make sense to partner with. Reach out via other social sites by sharing potential partners’ content, tagging them when you do, and initiating a chat.

Don’t forget to personalize your outreach. For each brand you reach out to, you should be sure to reference specific content they’ve written or produced, and to give a clear cut reason for why you think you should partner together.

Be a Strong Partner

We’ve all worked in group projects where one person does everything while the other person just tries to reap the reward. Don’t be the latter.

When you lock in your new brand partnership, live up to the expectations that you’ve set and done your part to make the partnership work. This means delivering on-deadline and on-promise, divvying up work equally, and ensuring any content or materials you’re creating are co-branded. Being a reliable brand partner means you’ll get the most out of the partnership and be closer to meeting your intended goals.

When you form your partnership, be sure to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with concrete ideas for how you might do so. From there, the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can achieve.