Lesson 4 – Constructing Joint Ventures and Building Marketing Alliances

In the last lesson we discussed the advantage you gain in building a customer contact database or list.  We talked about the fact that to build and maintain a successful database that a company needed to capture, communicate and reward.  A company with a good contact database will be able to make sales even when they are low on money to spend on advertising.

One of the best ways to start building that contact database if you don’t have one with lots of customers and prospects is to gain leverage from those who already have a list.  In other words, you will be building strategic alliances with other companies.  In other circles this kind of arrangement can be called a joint venture or an affiliate marketing relationship.

In this marketing alliance, you will build relationships with companies that do not compete with you but have similar customer bases.  For instance, a dentist may build a relationship with an orthodontist or oral surgeon.  A gas station’s owner may build a relationship with the owner of a car wash.  Perhaps a music store’s owner could build a relationship with a music instructor.  These would be very compatible potential joint venture partnerships.

In a marketing alliance, the partners would use their contact database in order to mail for each other.  For instance, the music store owner could mail or email their customers on behalf of the music instructor.   The music instructor could do the same.  If both parties were savvy they would use the mailing to build their contact database, not only to sell products or give discounts.

The most important part of the mailing is the endorsement by the writer.  In other words, in the letter or email, the music instructor would personally endorse the music store.  The same would be true when the music store owner sent out their message.   If both parties use email, this could work extremely well because both parties would expand their database with customers and prospects that they did not have before.   Of course, this kind of relationship can be duplicated wherever the company finds compatible non-competing businesses.

In our next lesson, we will move from listbuilding to discuss media advertising.  You will not want to miss that discussion.  However, building a marketing alliance or JV should come before that. Call us today so that we can help you to establish these relationships both from your website and/or from your location.