Joint Venture Marketing: Quickly Taking Your Business to a New Level

Joint venture marketing is an important branch of relationship marketing, where the focus of marketing tactics is on both customer and business relationships. You cannot have a strong and successful business without prosperous relationships with your clients and business associates.  Embarking on new marketing partnership can help you build even stronger client and business relationships, help you deliver better customer service, streamline your practices, and ultimately help take you business (and profits!) to the next level.

Why should I Consider a Joint Venture?

To understand why a joint venture is such an effective technique, it is important first to understand what a joint venture is. A joint venture is a marketing partnership, which gathers one or more businesses together for each party to mutually benefit from the strengths and expertise of the other members of the partnership.

If you are starting a new business, or even if you have a successful, established business, a joint venture marketing partnership is a highly beneficial technique to growing your business, increasing your customer base, building strong customer relationships, and ultimately boosting your company’s bottom line. Sounds too good to be true, right?

Not Too Good to be True!

It may sounds like magic, but the benefits of a joint venture marketing partnership are truly attainable, and not necessarily for a large investment of time or money. The idea behind developing a joint venture marketing partnership and reaching out to potential marketing partners is to first identify companies and businesses that you admire and that are successful, who are in a complimentary industry. When identifying these potential partners, you don’t want to partner with someone whose products or goods and services will be in direct competition with yours. For instance, if you have a wedding planning business, you will not want to partner with other wedding planning businesses – you would be competing for clients rather than benefiting from mutual contacts and clients.

Taking the wedding planning business, an appropriate choice for a joint venture marketing partner might be a catering company or a photographer. Either a photographer or a caterer will have clients who may be in need of your services, and vice versa. Virtually every wedding requires a catering company to handle to the food for the event, and a photographer to document the memorable occasion. Thus, if you develop a joint venture partnership with a photographer and a catering company, you will share clients with them, and mutually inform clients of the other businesses services. Weddings are not the only event for which catering and photography services are required - holiday parties, birthday parties and other special occasions often require these services. Therefore, if you have a joint venture marketing partnership, it has the ability to inform future business both in your standard category, and to expand to reach new clients.

There are a variety of forms a joint venture marketing partnership can take – it can start out as simple as advertising and providing links on your website to your partners websites. This is an excellent first step for a joint venture marketing partnership that can help take your business to the next level.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing & Consulting firm empowering business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges and increase profits. To read more articles related to Joint Venture Marketing, please go to his Joint Venture Blog Site. He can be reached at christian@synertegic.com

Joint Venture Marketing: Creating a Mutually Beneficial Contract

When embarking on a new joint venture marketing partnership, there are a variety of forms your partnership can take. Some small businesses that are newer or just starting out often prefer a more informal agreement - something along the lines of mutual and equal advertising space on one another’s websites.

However, even an informal agreement will require a contract of some sort to protect both parties and to be certain that all participating achieve their goals, and that everyone is held to equal standards. Putting a contract in place is also important so that each party knows what to expect.

For a simple contract, the involvement of an attorney is quite minimal, if necessary at all. There are a variety of websites that inform how to write your own legally binding contracts, and plenty that offer downloadable generic contracts that are flexible and applicable to a variety of cases, as well as being legally binding.

A More Formal Contract

If you are a large and established business and want the confidence of a formal contract, there are several steps you will want to take in order to obtain and establish the contract that will best represent the needs of your company.  A contract may also be a good idea if you embark on a joint venture marketing partnership with more than one partner. The more parties that are involved, the more contract details and potential difficulties may arise. To ensure good business practices and insurance for all involved, a formal contract is a good idea.

Identifying the appropriate attorney to draw up the contract for your business and your joint venture marketing partnership can prove to be a daunting task, especially if you have not managed legal issues in the past.  An excellent first step to help you navigate this process is to consult with resource agencies that can provide background information on what you’ll need to look for in an attorney, what data to present, what questions to ask, as well as potentially making suggestions for specific attorneys they recommend.

Resources and Government Agencies

Government agencies and even local agencies like your Better Business Bureau offer a wealth of basic information to help guide you through the process of learning about a joint venture partnership, as well as the basic business practices and legal ramifications of such a venture. These agencies provide a wealth of resources to help you coordinate the steps that your specific business needs to take when beginning to navigate this process, as well as inform you how to interact with your now potential partners and how to guide the process to get the best out of your new partnership.

Government and local resource agencies will also be able to help you find the right attorney for your business. They will have lists of attorneys and often lists of other clients they have directed to each attorney. In some cases, you will even be able to make contact with other businesses, which have used the suggested attorney, allowing you to get feedback on the performance of your new attorney from a business that has had direct experience with him or her. 

A formal, legal binding contract that has been drawn up by a practicing attorney may be exactly what your business and new joint venture marketing partnership needs to impart a sense of security to all members. It can be a daunting process, but there are many resources available to help you get started so the prospect of selecting an attorney need not be such an overwhelming task.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing & Consulting firm empowering business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges and increase profits. To read more articles related to Joint Venture Marketing, please go to his Joint Venture Blog Site. He can be reached at christian@synertegic.com