How to Properly Manage Social Relationships & Partnerships in the Digital Era

Today’s information-age has rapidly transformed how people conduct business, learning, as well as general interaction. Advances like instant messaging, social media, and email are primarily designed to make communication and business operations more convenient and easier.Technology is said to be an essential tool to make everyone and everything connected.However, technology seems to be disconnecting everyone instead of connecting?Some find it even harder to build genuine relationships with each other now than ever before.If you are a business owner, and you want to manage your social relationship as well as your partnership correctly, this post will help you determine how you can build and maintain lasting connections. 1. Never Try Innovating Alone As a business owner, you do not want your business to stay within your own four walls. If you are planning to scale investments, talents, and solutions in order to transform and improve your business, always consider strategic investments, acquisitions, and joint ventures.Partnerships are key opportunities for startup to mid-level companies. 2. Articulate and Define Mutual Goals Partnership and social connections in today’s digital world mean nothing if the internal team is not aligned with their goals. To create new relationships you need to first make sure your internal team has a cohesive bond.As you establish mutual goals, it becomes easier for you and your business partner to execute an effective marketing strategy. See to it that your goals are realistic, timely, measurable, specific, and attainable.In case of a small startup, make sure that your goal is straightforward. For example, set one goal to increase your social impressions on LinkedIn.Make sure that you and your partners have similar marketing goals. That way, you can be sure that your strategies are more effective, and you have the same expectations. 3. Keep Your Reporting System In Place After polishing your goals, be it marketing or entire business goals, the next big thing you need to do is to ensure that you have structured reporting. By keeping your reporting system in place, it becomes easier for you to determine and understand which among the leads can be attributed. This is particularly true if you are delegating different industries or verticals to speak to.If you are utilizing a lead sharing model, you need to figure out the exact lead your partner is generating for you. As for the revenue share model, you need to determine how much your partner’s actions are influencing the revenue gains. 4. Consider Guest Blogging When it comes to boosting your brand presence, guest blogging is a solid way to build organic traffic. Make sure to work with a partner that has the expertise to leverage your audience satisfaction and improve your online presence through fresh, relevant, and compelling content.You can start guest blogging by finding relevant industry blogs or thought-leaders and message them with ideas you have to share. If the ideas sound interesting, you can write for their blog and receive traffic.You can set and create posted based on your marketing strategy and schedule, where you can produce the content once every week, monthly, or quarterly. Keep in mind that the blogs shared between you and your partner need to promote your brand effectively while ensuring the information you are presenting is relevant. 5. Promote Products or Services through Affiliate Marketing program As a performance marketing strategy, affiliate marketing has one of the best returns.Affiliate marketing is where you can pay different affiliates such as a newspaper publisher or an independent contractor to generate new sales for you.Affiliates are also great for generating high impressions through your website. Partnerships with brand affiliates can also help boost social engagement since they typically have a much bigger following. They will help you build an alliance of brands that are dedicated to the mutual target audience.For example, if your business is about beauty products, you need to work closely with popular beauty review sites to drive sales. This particular review site will help promote the quality of your brand while driving traffic to your website.Affiliate marketing is among the most popular partnership channels for marketing. where you will pay an affiliate depending on the agreement. An affiliate can vary from a newspaper brand who gets paid based on impressions generated or an independant affiliate who can determine their own way to bringing the traffic to you. 6. Try Joint Products Another effective way to build a social relationships is by partnering with another company to create a new product or solution for a more integrated brand experience.When done successfully, the partnership will result in innovative, fresh product solutions.As technology continues to advance, joint products allow you to keep up with fast-paced development iterations and constant demand for R&D. If you want to enter the joint product concept, you can choose from the following options:Sharing Costs. In this concept, the product partnership is more about cost-saving exercise. This is where you need to share expertise and resources so that the production and marketing expenses will be reduced.Brand Leveraging. Instead of merging the entire product, the brand is often joined. In this product partnership, you will utilize the partners packaging and design.New Product Launch. You and your joint partner will launch a new product in the market. Both of you will leverage each other’s market search, resources, brand image, and resources.New Markets. If your company is based in Europe, you can collaborate with a successful brand in the US so that you can enter the new market. Make sure that the joint product you want to produce will adapt to the new market.The joint product gives you an amazing opportunity to introduce your brand into a broader audience while strengthening your partnership with another company. If you are already decided that you will enter a product partnership, make sure to choose a partner that is reputable, reliable, has a strong marketing style and could bring you to better business opportunities. 7. Explore with Co-Hosting Events Did you know that events are among the best or even most effective strategies you can utilize to build and maintain lasting connections?Co-hosting an event with your partner or another company can be a cost-effective and allows you to combine your list of contacts to invite to the event. By leveraging each others past connections, your attendance rate can be much higher, and also the engagement from the audience.Through co-hosting an event, you have obtained an effective way of reinforcing your partnership while establishing credibility. Most of them will expect brand new offerings and want to know if your partnership will help them resolve their issues. So, make sure that you are going to co-host an event not only to build a stronger relationship but also to satisfy your potential customers. 8. Sponsor A Charitable Organization You can market your brand or sponsor with a charitable cause/organization that fits your company values and build on your community relationships.Be aware that charitable partnership can come in different forms, including exhibitions, sponsorship, public events, raffle contributions, new stories, and award shows. Make sure to choose the form that is suitable for your business type and is based on your campaigns and marketing efforts.Most of the consumers today are very savvy buyers and will look to see if your brand sponsorship matches the organization you are partnering with. They will then check product reviews and figure out if the product/service you create also matches with the organizations values.They usually prefer those businesses having a good reputation and understand their real needs. By involving your business to the charitable cause, you can be sure that consumers will see your brand as reliable. Conclusion The continued technological advancements of our time can either connect or disconnect you with everyone else. But, if you choose to build a stronger relationship with others in your community, you will be rewarded in the long-term.In today’s digital era, communication is easier than ever before, so choose your message you want to put across wisely. About the Author Jonathan Saeidian is the Founder & CEO of Brenton Way, a digital marketing agency that drives growth for brands & ventures. He is also the co-founder of Initiate.ai , an early-stage AI content repurposing platform.Brenton Way combines Jonathan's pragmatic mindset for growth with his creative passion for storytelling to build meaningful campaigns. In its first year in business, the fully bootstrapped agency has gone on to work with brands such as Sephora, Classpass, Regus, & Wipro.For more info about Brenton Way and their marketing strategies, please email their sales team, sales@brentonway.com