Identifying complementary businesses to partner with in an effort to add value to your customers and reach a larger audience is a great way to expand your brand awareness and gain exposure with your target markets.The key is to identify a niche of businesses that you can cultivate a relationship with to generate a long term partnership.

Increase Revenue

Looking for ways to increase revenue efficiently, without a significant investment? Strategic partnerships offer small businesses the opportunity to grow revenue and add value for their clients through product bundles, referral or affiliate incentives, or even as a third party seller of a partner service.

For example, Softsys Hosting offers managed servers which are a bundle of infrastructure services, server management, backups and monitoring so that a single product includes everything your business needs from a cloud web hosting server.

When considering how to grow your revenue, it can be intimidating to take on full product development or offering brand new services. Creating product bundles or additional offerings through a strategic partnership is a great way to generate additional value for your clients, allows you to charge more for the bundle, and exposes you to your partner’s client base as well.

Expand Your Customer Base

Consider strategic partnerships as an advertising channel where your direct costs are limited. If you can provide value to your partner’s audience and client list, the likelihood of them sharing information about your products and services is exponentially higher.

Not only is this exposure much less expensive than it would cost through traditional advertising, the conversion rate will be higher because the “ad” will be coming from a trusted source.

Focus on how you can provide value to their client base (not just how they can appeal to yours) and work with your partner to create an outreach campaign that introduces you to their audience.

Avoid Being Turned Into A Commodity

Partnering with businesses that add exceptional value to your clients helps increase client retention and customer satisfaction. This is a massive competitive advantage for your business and enables you to compete on value rather than price.

When considering potential partners, identify complementary services and products that your clients are already searching for once they purchase a service from you.

This will allow you to avoid being commoditized and stabilize your position in the market.