Ms. Shaw

Sales & Marketing

Eight Steps to Creating Marketing Partnerships

By Stacy Shaw, President & Founder, m-k-t-g

At m-k-t-g, we employ an eight-step approach to the development of strategic partnerships and marketing alliances to ensure that all parties involved receive a ROI that is favorable to both their brand image and bottom line.

Step One: Situation Assessment

The situation assessment requires you to dig below the brand surface to determine what you have to offer, review your operational resources and analyze your partnership history.

The first question you have to ask yourself at the beginning of your situation assessment is what makes your brand or individual property a preferred partner. Or more simply stated, why should someone partner with your hotel or brand? In this step you have to be candid about your organization's mission, your core attributes, unique selling points, distribution, demographics and planned growth.

As with any business decision, your marketing partnerships should reflect and support your brand or individual property's mission and objectives. Embarking on a partnership that contradicts your organization's mission will confuse both your internal and external stakeholders, and creates the possibility of damaging your image as well as your bottom line.

Next you need to examine and be able to communicate clearly and concisely the core attributes and unique selling points of your brand or individual property. Instead of taking a broad-stroke approach, you need to be as specific as possible in your description. For instance, a spa company may describe the facility as a 20,000-square-foot, full-service spa with 18 treatment rooms. However, a more descriptive assessment will differentiate from the competition: "Our Relax Spa offers the only XYZ treatment room in Miami and is known for providing the age-defying mud rub that CNN has dubbed "miracle dirt."

In defining your distribution, think beyond just your number of guestrooms and include your occupancy, your various market segments, channels, and other property attributes that will make you more attractive to potential partners.

An area where many hotels fall short is in defining their demographics. In soliciting partnership, you should be able to tell your potential partner who your guests are, what they spend, when they spend and where they spend. While most properties have the data, they don't seem to have the time or expertise to dissect and analyze below the surface level to really find out about their customers, their habits and buying trends. Does your weekend guest respond to special promotions? Do you have a high rate of weekend stays from a local zip code? Does your bar generate weekday traffic from area office buildings? If you don't have the time or ability to analyze your guest-history data, find an outside company to do this for you. The more demographic and consumer lifestyle information you have about your guests, the more attractive your property or brand will be to potential partners.

The next phase of your situation assessment is to consider your operations. What resources are currently in place to support the partnership development effort? What is your approval process and execution protocol? And lastly, is there a current methodology in place for execution?

The final phase of the situation assessment should be to examine your current marketing partnerships. What objectives have been met through these partnerships? What strategies have work and what hasn't? How has the success of these partnerships been measured? And most importantly, are there any companies that should not be sought as a partner and why?

Answering these questions at the situation assessment step will put you on the right track, and save time and frustration as you get further in the marketing partnership development process.

Step Two: Define Objectives

If you don't know where you are going, then you won't know when you get there. As with all marketing initiatives, clearly defined and measurable objectives will set the tone for success with your marketing partnerships. You should determine at the onset what you want to "get" from your partnership. Is it incremental marketing funds, operating funds, brand equity, PR value, goodwill or community involvement?

You also have to determine the "gives." Once you decide what you want to get, you must determine what you can give. What can you bring to the partnership table? Matching dollars, room or food and beverage trade, in-kind services, product placement or sampling opportunities, exposure to your hotel guests, a database, visibility on your hotel's website? It's necessary for you to make a list of all of your potential "gives," and then determine which ones you can and are willing to offer in negotiating a marketing partnership. Most hotels have some "gives" on their total "give" list that they do not want to offer in a partnership. For example, one hotel may reserve in-room merchandising exclusively for cross-promoting their own hotel's amenities or their brand, while another hotel may see this as a great "give" for a partnership. You need to decide which of your total "gives" you are truly willing and able to provide.

Step Three: Define Metrics

Establish the set of metrics by which your marketing partnerships will be assessed. Some common criteria include revenue generate, number of partners, awareness and purchase intent. In addition, "soft objectives" may contribute to the overall success of the partnership. Although these are not as easy to measure, factors such as employee morale and community relations are also important.

Step Four: Project Scope

As with all marketing iniatives, it is imperative to outline the scope of the project from the budget through the deliverables. Whether it's hard dollars, in-kind services or staff time, there is always a cost associated with partnership marketing. A detailed budget will account for all of these areas. An outline of the expected deliverables along with a timeline will keep all parties focused and on track for success.

Step Five: Contender Set

Once you have completed a situation assessment, defined your objectives and metrics, and developed the project scope, it is time to identify and research your partnership contender set. Potential partners should be sorted into groups based on your objectives. Then all prospective partnerships should be ranked and mutually agreed upon before any contact or proposal is administered.

Step Six: Proposal Templates

Before you begin soliciting partners from your contender set, you need to develop value propositions for each of the objectives you've outlined. Value propositions are clearly outlined in proposal templates, or letters, addressed to prospective partners. The most critical element of these proposals is that they speak from the perspective of the partner. In other words, you must clearly state "what's in it for them" and confirm that the proposition has value.

Step Seven: Contact Management

A protocol for lead qualification and identifying corresponding communication streams needs to be established. This is a crucial period where having "too many hands in the pot" can jeopardize all of your previous hard work. Each member of your marketing partnership solicitation team needs to have precisely defined rolls as well as a communication reporting structure. In some properties this may not be a problem as limited staffing may dictate that only one person handle partnerships. But for other properties or at the corporate brand level where a team of people are working on partnership marketing or an outside agency has been contracted, it's imperative that each person know their role and responsibility, and that a formal communication and feedback method be established. This will eliminate the chance of duplication of efforts as well as reduce the risk of miscommunication.

Step Eight: Measure, Report & Refine

Probably one of the most important but forgotten steps is measure, report and refine. To maximize current and future partnerships, it is crucial to take the time and invest the needed resources to analyze the program and assess the results, both good and bad, to determine the partnership ROI.

Not only will this eight-step approach assist you in developing effective strategic alliances, it will help you to assess the many promotional partnership opportunities that cross your desk.

Stacy Shaw is the president and founder of m-k-t-g, a full-service marketing communications agency focused on the hospitality industry, the agency works with companies that engage in lodging, dining, entertainment, development, tourism, recreation and gaming. Stacy brings over 20 years of marketing and hospitality experience to m-k-t-g. With a communications degree from Eastern Illinois University, Stacy began her marketing career at Foote, Cone & Belding. She continues to hone her passion and her extensive marketing background at m-k-t-g. Ms. Shaw can be contacted at 312-202-6935 or sshaw@m-k-t-g.com Extended Bio...

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