Engagement and Measurement Keys to Partnership Investing

In my most recent post, I discussed the need for marketers to shift from being buyers of sponsorship to investing in partnerships and shared one of the three critical questions a company or brand should ask to determine which side of the coin they are on: Do you know what you want to do and with whom to do it?”

One of the best examples of a corporation that asked that question and subsequently re-engineered its approach to partnerships was Xerox about 15 years ago. Prior to 2009, the company bought sponsorships to access customer and prospect hospitality and entertainment assets.

But upon an assessment of how to take its brand to the marketplace in a “big, loud, noticeable way,” it switched its sponsorships from tactical purchases of benefits to a lynchpin of the corporate branding strategy by 1) incorporating partnerships into brand advertising in disruptive, innovative and unexpected ways; 2) developing business back from sponsored properties and 3) providing elevated VIP hospitality experiences that surprised clients.

Beyond aligning partnerships with larger business objectives, brands that invest instead of buy also ask themselves two other questions, starting with: Are we truly engaging?

Of all forms of marketing, partnerships are at the top in delivering engagement—the interactions that strengthen emotional investment in a brand.

Partnership investors understand that:

• Engagement extends far beyond awareness and positive attitudes
• Engagement is critical for generating response, whether creating a memory trace, instilling loyalty, driving purchase or any other positive movement in perception and behavior
• Engagement is the best indicator of a partnership’s current and future performance
• Engagement requires real insights into the target audience—What are their passions? Why and how are they involved with the partner? What is the appropriate role for the sponsor to play in their experience?
• Engagement is driven by the investor’s activation of the partnership, which must be continually revitalized to stay meaningful and relevant

The third question is: Are we measuring results in a meaningful way?

Partnership investors understand sponsorship is not a medium and thus it cannot be evaluated using media-centric constructs like reach, frequency and efficiency.

Partnership evaluations must go not only deeper, but broader. Partnerships are powerful catalysts to enhance and improve the performance of media—paid, owned and earned—as well as directly impact other areas of the business from sales to staff retention to brand health.

Partnership investors find ways to evaluate everything that is meaningful—both inside and outside of the marketing mix—and ignore measures that are easy to tally but worthless unless connected to outcomes further down the trail.

Beyond having the right tools to determine their return, partnership investors use those results to make the right decisions about future direction. They are able to analyze what the data is telling them to determine course corrections, revised activation plans, re-allocated resource deployment, etc.

All in, investing in partnerships requires more time, more thought and more expertise—and involves more people, departments and resources—than buying sponsorship benefits.

But the success of brands and corporations that have evolved into partnership investors proves that adopting this new way of thinking leads to more meaningful and fruitful relationships with partners, consumers, customers and stakeholders.