Joint Venture Marketing: A Subset of Relationship Marketing

Joint venture marketing is a rapidly growing arm of relationship marketing, and a highly effective one. Relationship marketing holds as its central tenant the importance of building strong, solid and long lasting relationships with your customers and clients.
Joint venture marketing exists under the umbrella of relationship marketing precisely because it is still ultimately concerned with stalwart customer relationships.

When implementing a traditional relationship marketing platform, your company will work directly with a client to forge a relationship and will usually handle all of the customer service itself. With a joint venture marketing partnership, there are many ways to structure your deal, but one of the main advantages can be that some of the customer service piece of the maintenance of your business is shared among your partners.

This also means that you take on an additional commitment to the customer service of your partners, but this also creates a win-win situation, because ultimately you are sharing customers and both gaining new and loyal customers through your joint venture marketing partnerships.

Joint Venture Marketing: Also a Relationship

This may seem obvious, but it is still worth pointing out: a joint venture marketing partnership involves embarking on a new relationship with your partners. This is another way that joint venture marketing falls under the umbrella of relationship marketing.

Through your joint venture marketing partnerships, you have the potential to develop a tremendous rapport with your partners, and these strong business relationships have the potential to increase your sales and profits almost as much as the business agreements that you come to through these partnerships.

It is human nature that we tend to assist people that we like, or feel some connection to or affinity for. It is no different in the business world. As people work more and many jobs become virtual, the lines of business lives and personal lives are becoming increasingly blurred. So what starts out as a business relationship often grows over time, sometimes developing into a personal relationship. Even if your business relationships don't turn personal, developing a strong rapport with your partners is a great way to increase your business.

If you have an equally good product, company and customer service in the same industry as one of your partner's other colleagues, but you have a stronger rapport with the mutual partner, then he or she is much more likely to recommend and suggest your business and products to its clients than the third party, with whom he may not have as close a relationship. Again, this is human nature - all things being equal, we give preference to people that we like.

It may sound calculating to intentionally go after developing a bond with your joint venture marketing partners, but it doesn't need to sound so seedy and manipulative. You are not going to hit it off with everyone - this is natural and cannot be forced. But sometimes just a few extra minutes of conversation, or steering the conversation towards personal subjects, taking the time to find out about your partners on a personal level can open up beneficial avenues for your business.

Again, it is about being interested in and caring about people enough to get to know more about your partners, not using them! Putting a relationship at the central focus of your business holds true for customers, as well as your joint venture marketing partners.