JV Partnerships and Inbound Marketing (Part 2 of 3)

Moving from outbound to inbound marketing has become the method of choice to connect product owners with targeted customers and in so doing adding more value to the product offering that the customer sees.

JV partnerships are, simply put, the way that product owners or product developers match their offering to individuals who own large lists of potential buyers, who in turn promote that product to their considerably larger customer base. This strategy isn't a new one, since joint ventures are really leveraging strengths for some economic, political or social goal. This process in many cases is facilitated by a JV broker or specialist, who provides the service of bridging the gap between the passionate product owner, the large list holder and the customer.

The critical problem that that approach solves is that for many new product owners the major limitation they have is a large customer base. List owners or JV partners don’t have this problem. Their problem is a little different more in the form of whose product do I want to promote, yours or mine? The main question that I am often asked is, how do you go about finding JV partners? The answer isn't a simple one, but properly matching the product and product owner with the partners area of expertise and e-mail list profile is one of the first steps.

The key issue here is that this matching process forms part of what any good marketer seeks to achieve anyway, whether in the B2B or B2C space is really no surprise. The trick really is in the tools that are used to achieve that goal. Knowing what the JV partners interests are and communicating relevant information to them through your blog posts, comments on their websites, membership sites, groups etc, is the norm. This approach becomes even more important in very competitive niches, where message dilution is a constant threat.

Bearing this in mind, putting in place simple and readily available and visible social web tools and leveraging the back end technology that optimizes for the search engines, is a significant advance to help you communicate more directly with your prospects, customers, vendors and clients.

It is safe to say that Inbound marketing as apart of the marketing matrix is here to stay and as a business strategy, it prepares your customers to be receptive to your offering, by adding more value. Understanding how to harness inbound marketing tools and technology is therefore a necessity, before, during and after JV partnership formation.