Why Partnerships Are The Ultimate Growth Hack
By Naser Alubaidi
In the marketing world, ‘growth hacking’ is probably the most misused and overused buzzword of all time.
Everyone is looking for that one hack, that one win that’ll solve all their growth problems.
The sad reality however, is that there are no magic bullets when it comes to growth. A magic button color or an exit pop-up is simply not going to cut it.
Real growth is sustainable. Real growth is also scalable. Real growth is a mindset. Most importantly, real growth is a process, a hypothesis-driven iterative process for everything you do; from developing new ideas, to reaching a new audience and finding product-market fit.
Growth comes from winning a thousand tiny battles, not one quick ‘hack,’ and partnerships are the best way to accelerate the process of winning these battles, with the result of accelerating growth.
Before we jump into how you can use partnerships to hack your growth, let’s start by looking at the most important part of your strategy: your ultimate goal.
I like to use an analogy here, which I learned from author, David Deida. David compares life to an onion. He says, “at the core of the onion is every person’s ultimate purpose or goal in life, and to reach your goal, you need to align EVERYTHING in your life to that onion: diet, friends, career, network etc. and by doing so, you slowly peel layer after layer of that onion which brings you closer and closer to your ultimate goal.”
In a lot of ways, growth operates in exactly the same way. Let’s call it the ‘Growth Onion’.
At the core of that ‘Growth Onion’ is YOUR ultimate business goal and to reach that goal, you will have to align ALL your strategies and experiments with it. There are no ‘one-size-fits-all’ goals when it comes to growth. Your goal will depend primarily on the nature of your business, the stage you’re at and what you are trying to achieve.
The key is to choose a goal that is specific enough to allow you to align everything to it, and general enough that you’ll be able to pivot as you experiment and test different strategies.
Once you have your goal set in stone, it’s time to shift to how you can use partnerships to hack your growth.
“At the core of that ‘Growth Onion’ is YOUR ultimate business goal and to reach that goal, you will have to align ALL your strategies and experiments with it.” #TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay
Why Partnerships are the ‘Ultimate Growth Hack’
I have to admit, I also fell victim to the lucrative promises of growth hacking, desperately searching for that one hack that’ll solve all our growth problems. I kept searching and trying.
I tested tens, if not hundreds of growth hacks, from SEO hacks, getting reviews on G2Crowd and Capterra, exit popup hacks, gamification, pop-ups, viral loops and various tactics other marketers raved about.
Some of these tactics did actually work temporarily but quickly proved not to be scalable and sustainable or simply weren’t good enough.
The problem was, we didn’t have the customers, the revenue, the brand, or even the network. Nobody knew who we were.
That’s exactly why partnerships were perfect for us. Not only did they help us get exposure and generate leads we needed in the short-term, they also influenced our growth in so many different ways:
Thankfully, I was able to successfully duplicate the same partnership tactics we used in different SaaS startups, all who needed to grow very quickly and didn’t have the budget to do so.
The secret is the compounding nature of partnerships.
The ‘Partnership Compounding Cycle’
In the finance world, compounding is the process whereby an asset generates earnings, which are reinvested to generate their own earnings. With compound interest, the longer you invest your money, the higher your earnings are going to be every year.
In the marketing world, we found that partnerships have a nature similar to ‘compound interest’, which is exactly what makes partnerships the ultimate growth hack.
The compounding cycle of partnerships goes something like this:
  1. You partner up with Company X.
  2. This partnership gives you access to Company X’s audience.
  3. You nurture those leads and turn them into users.
  4. The exposure and association with Company X help build your brand’s credibility.
  5. The credibility you built helps you attract better partners.
  6. Repeat.
Simply put, the more partnerships you have, the more exposure you’ll get, the more users and more social proof you’ll have and as a result, you are able to partner with better brands for better exposure, and the cycle goes on and on.
Choosing the right partners
It’s important to note there is no “one-size-fits-all” manual for partnerships however, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to identify who the right partners are for you:
  1. Do they have a similar type of audience to what my company has and wants to grow?
  2. Is there a competitive overlap, are we offering the same services or targeting the same keywords?
  3. How many leads am I getting from this partnership and is the number large enough to be worth my time?
  4. Does this brand have a good reputation?
  5. Are the people you’re working with enjoyable to work with?
These questions will help you identify if a certain brand or company is the right partner for you. They are likely to be a great partner if they:
  1. Are an established brand in their industry
  2. Share a similar audience
  3. Are not a competitor
  4. Have a sizeable audience: email list, social following, etc.
  5. Seem easy to work with and flexible
You may to settle for smaller partners if your startup is at an early stage and as you keep this cycle going, before you know it, your partners will quickly become the biggest names in the industry.
Types of Partnerships to Leverage
The type of partnership you choose depends primarily on the product offering and audiences you and your partner have.
In the case of ‘Supreme,’ co-branded clothes and accessories make the most sense for them and their partners.
As a SaaS startup, we found the three types of partnerships that make the most sense for us are:
  1. Content Partnerships and Co-marketing
  2. Link Building Partnerships
  3. Strategic Partnerships
1) Content Partnerships / Co-marketing
Co-marketing partnerships are when two or more companies work together to promote a shared offer, usually a co-branded piece of content. This is very similar to Supreme’s “co-branding” partnerships.
There are various different types of co-marketing projects you could work on, but the most notable ones are:
With these projects, the goal is to establish mutually beneficial partnerships that generate leads and add value to all parties involved by pooling resources and expertise, to write a piece of content that resonates with both your audience and your partners’ audience.
In many cases, we found this type of partnership, to be the beginning of a long-term relationship with that brand. The key is to choose the right partner and to add as much value to them as possible.
By proving the value of partnerships to your partner and showing them your ability to deliver on a promise, they are more likely to expand your partnership in the future.
2) Link Building Partnerships
Link building is the process of getting external websites to link back to your website. Building backlinks to your pages has two main benefits:
  1. Helps drive referral traffic to your website
  2. Increases your site’s authority (which helps you rank higher on Google).
This process remains a vital factor in how search engines determine which pages rank on every keyword. As a result, the more backlinks you have from quality websites, the more likely you are to earn higher rankings on Google.
Link building partnerships can exist in a variety of ways, we’ll look at the three main ways we have built links to all of our blog posts and pages, i.e. Home page and landing pages.
  1. Link Exchanges (not recommended): This is probably the most popular link building strategy used by online companies and blogs. It is a quick and simple collaboration where you add a link to your partner’s page in an existing blog post and in return, they would add a link to one of your pages on their website.
    Even though this tactic still seems to work well, it does come with the risk of being penalized by Google if done too often.
  2. Guest Posting: This is pretty much self-explanatory. You approach an authority blog in your industry and offer to write a guest post for their blog. Guest blogging gives you the opportunity to build your authority and your brand’s authority.
    The blogs you write with are usually okay with you adding a link to your homepage in the author bio section. Also, in most cases, you are able to fit a few backlinks to relevant blog posts or your pages in the post itself.
    A way we ‘hacked’ this was to find different bloggers in the industry who are doing guest posting themselves and simply asked them to share a list of all the pages they are trying to build links to. This was so we can start including links to these partners whenever we’re writing a guest post on an external website, and naturally, they would do the same with us.
    Now, in every guest post we write, not only do we include a link to our pages, but also six or seven links to our partners. As a result, we get around seven or eight links, on different websites, for every guest post we write. Easy, right?
  3. The Guestographic Method: This is my favorite approach. This is a link building technique which uses infographics in a new way. With this method, you simply create an infographic on your site, find blogs that cover the same topic, share your infographic with them and see if they would be interested in adding it to one of their blog posts.
    You can also offer to write a mini-blog post, which will include the infographic. Here, you are adding value to your partners by offering them something tangible versus simply asking them for a link. You are more likely to be successful using this method.
    We took this strategy to the next level by offering to summarize long blog posts on external websites with an infographic, in exchange for a link to one of our blog posts. In that case, we ask them to provide us with an outline and we quickly create an infographic that has their content on it.
    Link building partnerships are usually quicker than co-marketing projects, but their effectiveness is also much smaller. However, the way we approach this partnership is exactly the same as any other type: it’s simply an opportunity to build a long-term relationship with these brands and expand our partnerships further.
3) Strategic Partnerships
This brings us to the last type of partnership that could help you hack your growth. This includes any type of mutually beneficial partnerships you can create with other companies in your industry. The three main types of strategic partnerships we executed successfully in the past are:
a) Integrations
We mentioned Airbnb’s integration with Craigslist earlier in this post and how it helped them hack their growth. Integrations are a great way for companies to expand their product’s offerings and improve customer experience significantly.
b) Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is a great way to partner up with customers who love you and enjoy your product the most. By compensating them for referrals, you are allowing users to become evangelists for your product.
Similarly, partnering up with influencers and brands in your industry and compensating them for their recommendations is a great way to drive more traffic & sales to your business.
c) Marketing/Publicity Stunts
This is probably the toughest type of partnership to execute on, but it’s a game-changer when done right. Most marketers often overlook collaborating with other brands with the goal to go viral or execute on a marketing stunt. Not only does this reduce your potential cost by half, it also doubles your chances of successfully executing on your viral campaign.
Of course, there are many other partnership types that could be right for your business. However, I only mentioned the ones we personally tested and successfully executed on in the past few years.
Conclusion
Growth is a step-by-step process. Achieving sustainable and scalable growth is the result of hundreds of tiny experiments, optimizations and hacks.
Creating partnerships however, can help you accelerate your growth by leveraging their powerful compounding nature. The more partnerships you have, the higher the effectiveness of each partnership is going to be to your business growth.
Whether you’re looking to build your user base, build your brand or simply increase your profits, partnerships are a sure way to influence every single factor around your business and skyrocket your growth.