Your brand can benefit from media partnerships, whether you realize it or not. In today’s digital marketing landscape, it’s crucial now more than ever for a business to stand out and find innovative strategies to appeal to and grow its client pool.
Media partnerships are a strong marketing strategy that allows brands to collaborate with other businesses in a similar or complementary industry and achieve mutually beneficial objectives. They play a massive role in developing unique content to reach a wider audience and drive growth for both businesses.
Let’s examine some examples of successful media partnerships for marketing campaigns and consider what your brand can learn and apply.
Why Media Partnerships?
Media partnerships are a successful marketing strategy because they allow your brand to leverage strength from another company and tap into their platforms and audience. Your marketing team may want to utilize its budget to help with strategies like implementing Pathlabs media campaign activation.
Media partnerships essentially create a “win-win” scenario for both parties. They can benefit from shared expertise and resources to increase brand awareness and provide consumers with authority. This results in a more impactful marketing campaign than if each business performed it individually.
Spotify and Hulu
Spotify, a music streaming guru, partnered with Hulu, a video streaming service, to offer customers a discounted bundled membership. The partnership began in 2018 when the brands recognized that they could target a younger demographic, specifically college-aged students, and combine their services to create a package providing music and video content.
Why It Worked: The partnership focused on a mutually ideal target audience, which helped to maximize the impact. Both platforms could appeal to the same demographic and offer a combined service at a lower price than two individual subscriptions would cost, so it brought a good deal to its members.
Hulu could stand out above other video streaming services because it also gave its subscribers the music streaming premium. Spotify stood out as a music streaming service by providing members with the add-on of on-demand video.
Coca-Cola and Netflix
In 2019, Coca-Cola collaborated with Netflix’s Stranger Things and brought back a discontinued product, “New Coke,” as part of the promotion for the show, which was set in the 1980s. Their media partnership showcased how a business can appeal to customers by supplying nostalgia for ‘the good old days.’
Why It Worked: The collaboration blended the use of marketing with content for a seamless experience and engaged both younger and older fans of the show. The partnership also marketed across multiple channels and platforms using retail promotions, digital advertising and experiential events to maximize their outreach.
Marketing partnerships that can work together to evoke emotions in their prospects can leave a lasting impact. Storytelling is also an essential media technique that works well to enhance engagement.
Pizza Hut and Navigate Digital
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a lot of businesses in the retail and restaurant industries down, and Pizza Hut had to close its dine-in locations. They quickly partnered with Navigate Digital to promote the delivery side of the business and drive more awareness there.
Through YouTube, they targeted key audiences with campaign messages and sought to give back to “heroes” or emergency workers in the form of discounts. This created an appreciation appeal and diversified the company’s revenue stream.
Why It Worked: For Navigate Digital, the service levels from the Support and Customer Success Teams helped drive speed to market and optimization, increasing their partner onboarding exponentially. Pizza Hut brought out a positive brand lift tracked across their metrics and improved sales and service by offering great value, bringing awareness to delivery services, and promoting campaigns that focused on giving back.
National Geographic and Rolex
One last example of a successful media partnership is between National Geographic and Rolex, who collaborated on the Perpetual Planet initiative, which focused on sustainability and exploration. They highlighted specific climate change problems and brought solutions using crafted storytelling and engaging visual content.
Why It Worked: Both businesses promote exploration and sustainability, so collaborating on both areas made sense and ensured a more meaningful partnership. National Geographic leveraged storytelling and Rolex brought about premium branding, so they reached diverse audiences worldwide.
Utilize Media Partnerships For Your Business
Successful media partnerships combine resources, expertise, and audiences to significantly impact their bottom line. When taking on a partnership, your brand must ensure that you align shared values, leverage strengths, and develop marketing campaigns that will resonate with intended audiences. By examining the successes in the media partnerships of the past, your business can adopt these same strategies to craft a partnership that not only achieves business goals but encourages a more meaningful connection with your intended consumers for retention and loyalty.
