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Cristy Ebert Garcia on Partnership Marketing
1. In what ways are you leveraging partnerships to build authentic communities that enhance brands’ trust and credibility?
Marketing is quickly moving from ad-led to partner-led. That makes partnerships – collaborations with creators and other partners not just nice to have, but essential strategies for businesses to acquire customers, drive trust, loyalty, growth, and relevancy with today’s modern consumers.
Trust and authenticity are vital components of credibility, and partnerships - with creators, publishers, affiliates, customers, and even other businesses - are one of the few ways brands can leverage them.
It has become clear that consumers are now in control. They’re no longer an audience, waiting for brands to tell them stories - they're informed, empowered, and turning to their communities for guidance, whether through YouTube demonstrations, direct feedback from their peers online, or TikTok reviews (with more than half of Gen Z now using TikTok as their primary search engine).
At the same time, customer acquisition costs have soared by over 220 percent in the last eight years, but traditional advertising has become ever more expensive and less effective. Against that backdrop, community-based marketing has become an incredibly powerful tool for brands. The creator economy, which is right at the heart of this shift to partnerships, is set to more than double in the next five years, surpassing $480b.
Partnerships allow companies to engage authentically, scale for growth, and drive meaningful conversations that influence purchases in ways traditional channels can’t. Brands on our platform are able to do really exciting things. For instance, we’ve worked with Best Buy to launch the Best Buy Creator program, a new platform that allows influencers and creators to partner directly with Best Buy and help shoppers discover new technology. Within that is Best Buy storefronts, which gives creators the ability to create a one-stop shop to highlight tech featured in their content and earn a commission on sales referred through them.
2. What challenges have you encountered in managing diverse types of partnerships (e.g., affiliates, influencers, customer advocates), and how are you addressing them?
We’ve found that diversity isn’t a challenge but rather an asset when it comes to partnerships. A mature and sustainable partnership program relies on partner diversity. The modern customer journey is rapidly changing and evolving, and a mix of partner types helps brands reach different audiences in different ways.
For instance, influencers are known to drive metrics such as brand awareness at the top of the funnel, while affiliates are conventionally used to effect a conversion at the bottom of the funnel. These two partnership types traditionally operated independently, yet our research shows that marketing teams that combine influencer and affiliate achieve 46 percent higher affiliate-based sales than brands that use only affiliate partners. Combining the two allows brands to build a full-funnel campaign that touches all points of the consumer journey, raising brand awareness, driving conversions, and boosting KPIs.
Of course, you also need a unified platform that manages every type of partnership, streamlines tracking, reporting, and data-driven marketing efforts, simplifies management, and enhances resource allocation. We are constantly investing and innovating in our products - already this year we’ve launched a range of new innovations across our products, including product gifting in Creator, Cash Rewards in Advocate and automated partner re-engagement workflows and an event risk reporting suite in Performance. As always, the aim is to give brands more control over their campaigns, more ways to engage their audiences, and more data to optimize their strategies.
3. What metrics are you using to assess the effectiveness of your partnership marketing initiatives in driving revenue growth and customer engagement?
The modern customer journey presents a real attribution challenge for marketers. While brands aspire to closed-loop, direct-attribution measurement, the reality is far more complex, given the huge diversity of touchpoints on the way to a sale. Partner marketing, which is embedded in content experiences across social, video, websites and shopping sites, is particularly vulnerable to incomplete measurement from models such as multitouch attribution, especially given that different types of partners can bring value in different ways.
For marketers looking to gain a deeper understanding of the true contribution of partner marketing or any marketing program, it is a good idea to test incremental measurement - showing which partnerships truly create new sales rather than just claiming credit for them.
Incrementality measurement is designed to understand the full contribution of a specific marketing effort, such as a campaign, affiliate link, or creative.
An incrementality test might use controls such as suppression in certain locations, or on certain pages or sites, to measure the lift in performance that a specific marketing effort delivers.
In our case, this practical shift has helped companies such as Patagonia and Zenni Optical make better decisions about partner investments, recognize value throughout the customer journey, and transform their affiliate programs from isolated channels into strategic business assets.
4. What is your approach to expand your partnership ecosystem, and how are you helping brands identify new partners that align with their brand values and objectives?
Both brands and creators want to grow their partnerships, with 76 percent of brands looking to expand their creator programs, and 86 percent of creators looking to work with more brands. The key here is alignment on both sides, which requires a mutual understanding of preferences and needs.
For instance, brands need to trust the creator’s expertise. So instead of insisting creators follow a script to the letter, brands should encourage authentic content, such as spontaneous product reviews. Creators rank creative freedom as a key factor for committing to long-term brand partnerships because consumers gravitate toward genuine recommendations and are more likely to engage with the content.
Aligning on the compensation model is also crucial for brands and creators. According to our research, brands and creators indicate a preference for hybrid payment models. When it comes to communication, US brands prefer DM and email, which aligns with creator preferences.
5. How are you staying ahead of emerging trends in partnership marketing, such as the rise of community-driven commerce and the importance of customer referrals?
The way consumers discover and shop for products has changed drastically in recent years. Where marketers once relied on the traditional linear funnel to reach audiences, today’s landscape is much more sophisticated, with an intricate web of touchpoints spanning digital and physical channels, publisher sites, social platforms, and in-person interactions.
The vast number of discovery channels presents a significant challenge for brands and advertisers, and the consideration phase now sees consumers consulting multiple digital and traditional touchpoints before making a purchase decision. Marketers need to consistently produce high-quality content tailored to each channel, maintain consistency in pricing and availability, and provide easy access to authentic reviews, ratings, and other supporting resources.
There’s also a generational component to consider. According to new research, Gen Z require more touchpoints than any other generation before deciding to make a purchase. The vital part of creating partnership campaigns that speak to Gen Z is that they reflect the singular tastes and habits of their audience. Gen Z are sophisticated judges of quality and relevance, but gift guides and influencers, including nano and micro creators, are an impactful way to attract attention and drive purchases. And, knowing that Gen Z does a bit more research than others, providing more content and touchpoints is key to a successful strategy.
Referral marketing is a relatively new kid on the performance marketing block, but one that is growing fast due to its unique ability to reach audiences by leveraging trust and personal recommendations. Referral marketing makes a great fit for partnership marketing because it relies on trust. The aim is to incentivize happy customers to share their positive experiences with others, by providing tangible benefits to both the referrer and the referred individual.
Optimizing your program for mobile, combining your referral efforts with influencer marketing, making the process fun, and helping customers share and refer within their social networks are all good bets.
6. How are you measuring the long-term impact of our partnership strategies on customer loyalty, lifetime value, and brand equity?
According to our research, brands that invested in partnerships during the two years of the pandemic - 2020 and 2021 - saw 29 percent revenue growth per year over those years, with 41 percent growth in 2021 for brands that invested in partnerships early in that period.
We’ve also proven that mature partnership programs offer substantial long-term benefits. Companies with mature programs can see their revenue grow nearly twice as fast as those with less mature programs. Furthermore, we know that high-maturity programs contribute an average of 28 percent of overall revenue, while low-maturity programs contribute only 18 percent.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) - the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their relationship with them - is a crucial measure that helps businesses understand the long-term value of investing in customer relationships. Higher acquisition costs emphasize the importance of leveraging efficient retention strategies, so we talk a lot about retention marketing. Acquisition is obviously important, but clearly it's critical, from a financial perspective, to invest in keeping current customers rather than just spending resources on acquiring new ones.
An engaged customer spends 67 percent more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a business than in months zero through six, highlighting the importance of efforts to keep the relationship active. Research has shown that even a 5 percent increase in customer retention can enhance profits by up to 75 percent.
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