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Guest: Robert Glazer, the Founder and Chairman of the Board of global partner marketing agency Acceleration Partners. Robert is also a serial entrepreneur, an award-winning executive, a bestselling author, a keynote speaker, and the host of The Elevate Podcast.
Overview: Effective marketing is a constantly moving target. Today’s hot engagement strategy will be copycatted by all of your competition tomorrow. “Old-fashioned” media like print and radio get rediscovered on the cheap … until everyone else rediscovers them and drives up the cost of ad buys. In order to maintain a competitive marketing advantage, CEOs need to start looking for synergies and partnerships that can boost your brand’s awareness, strengthen your appeal to niche customers, and Make BIG Happen.
On today’s show, Robert Glazer discusses how partnership marketing works, action steps that CEOs can take to augment their current marketing strategies, and some of Robert’s key learnings from building a fast-growing company.
Robert Glazer on defining partnership marketing:
“Partnership marketing is an outcrop of affiliate marketing with a bigger umbrella. Instead of paying for a billboard, a click, a banner, or an impression, you work with a bunch of partners and determine what the outcome is worth to you. Let’s say I sell expensive, hundred-dollar German beer steins. It’s 10% to each partner. The partner gets a whole catalog of images and links and things that track it to them. They’ve got a blog and they talk about really cool beer steins and they put the picture up and they link to it. There’s no cost to me, but it’s all tracked. And then they get paid 10% of anything that’s sold. So from a brand perspective, you’re basically paying for your marketing after the sale, or after the lead or the defined event. So it’s very attractive. It’s not as easy as going to Google and saying, ‘I want to buy a million clicks at ten cents each.’ You have to cultivate those partners and relationships. You have to get them set up with the account. But when you have a program of 500 sales reps out there selling your stuff on a commission basis, it can be a real win.”
Robert Glazer on marketing that creates a sustainable competitive advantage:
“When you think about most of the marketing online these days, and particularly the big three of Amazon, Facebook, and Google, it’s all an auction. So it can be really hard. You can find something that works, but then there’s tools to copy that. The cycle of competitive advantage may have worked its way down from years, to months, to weeks, to days, in some cases. And so it’s really hard to do something consistently that works, particularly when you’re trying to grow at a high level. Years ago, when we would talk to companies, they’d say, ‘We figured out X.’ And then they raised venture capital and X alone wasn’t enough. And they had to figure out X and Y, and eventually X stopped working. And if they didn’t work on Y and Z and A when X stopped working, then they can hit a wall. So I feel like I’ve seen this movie several times and what digital has done is just made the whole thing a lot faster. That’s why we’re big fans of partnership marketing or doing things where you can create a sustainable competitive advantage rather than one that someone can just outbid you on tomorrow.“
Robert Glazer on partnership marketing in action:
“When two strong brands can come together and they have customer overlap, that’s always an interesting opportunity. Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola are now making Jack and Coke in a can. A lot of celebrities are influencers and they have a lot of power. Shopify worked with Drake and Taylor Swift at their concerts. They pasted QR codes all over the walls and then geofenced them so that the only people who could access them were at the concert and then had stores where they could buy unique merchandise. You’re using the assets that each have and partnering and not having to pay a lot of money. Again, it’s getting away from the pure auction world and getting back to a little creativity and innovation with marketing and things that someone else can’t just bid a penny more and outdo you.“
Links:
Building a Brand to Drive Client Engagement and Increased Revenues – CEO Coaching International’s Steve Patterson details the specific brand initiatives he executed for four professional sports teams and a university, and how CEOs can apply the lessons from his experiences to make any brand better.
Why a Growth Mindset Is Key to Breaking Through a Plateau – At some point in your business, you’ll hit a wall. It happens to everyone. What matters is how you address it.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average revenue CAGR of 31% (2.6X the U.S. average) and an average EBITDA CAGR of 52.3% (more than 5X the U.S. average).
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