Nov 2, 2009 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Joint Venture Marketing Partnerships for Offline Businesses?

Most of us are familiar with online joint venture partnerships.  We often refer to these as affiliate partnerships.  Essentially, a merchant wanting to sell more of his or her product offers a partner a commission in exchange for promoting the merchant’s product.

When done properly this is a very effective way to sell online.  But does it work offline? 

For a year I was a member of a large joint venture group.  The theory was that, as a member of this group, you could have other members promote your business in exchange for paying a commission on closed deals or you could do the referring.  In the latter case, you would receive a commission.

The group was well-organized and the owners were making a fortune.  However, it was obvious that only a handful of the hundreds of members were actually really active.  Sadly, I was one of the hundreds of inactive members.  My excuse was that I didn’t have a product or business to promote.  It was just that – an excuse.

Now that I do have a business and services to promote, I’m taking all that I know about selling online and seeing if similar concepts work offline. I have two new sites that I’m working on.  One is Guaranteed Marketing Services which will cater to UK-based small businesses looking to improve the ROI of their online marketing efforts.  The second is Modern Sales Prospecting which will sell a very cool DVD product on the front-end and my marketing services on the back-end.

The point I want to make here is that I’ve been contacting potential joint venture partners for GMS and it has been very interesting.  First, I don’t think that many people offer such referral programs here in the UK so I find that I have to do a lot of explaining and educating about what I’m trying to do.  Second (and this happens in Canada too), people don’t believe that they deserve to be paid for referring business my way.

That is something that I just don’t get.

I’m a marketing guy so I know that it costs something to get a customer. That could be time or money but there is definitely a cost associated with each customer.  Since I have a very limited network here I am more than happy to compensate anyone for even an introduction that leads to a new customer.  Somehow, I haven’t been able to effectively get that across to potential partners… yet.

This experiment is still in the early stages but I will let everyone know how it turns out.  In theory, I have a service that can benefit any business owner – whether they currently have a website or not.  It is just a matter of using my marketing smarts to get the word out to enough people in a cost-effective manner.