Have you heard of Relational Organizing? It’s become an increasingly important strategy that’s employed in today’s political organizing world. Put simply, it is a form of organizing that prioritizes relationships, using them to motivate and provoke action around a common belief or goal. The practice is built on the central principal that it’s easier to convince a friend of something than it is to convince a stranger.

Relational Organizing gained a lot of traction during the 2018 election cycle – supported by the introduction of apps such as “VoterCircle, OutVote, Team App, MyRVP and VoteWithMe“. This popular, intuitive idea helped candidates circumvent some of the problems of traditional campaigning. For example, those who campaign over the phone typically only reach 3-5% of the people they call.

It sure is hard to convince someone you can’t even talk to. It’s pretty easy to understand how this number could rise if organizers were reaching out to contacts they had already formed relationships with.

Relational Organizing is a simple notion that can quite easily be applied to marketing.

It goes without saying that people are more likely to support and connect with those they know and trust. Many brands already enjoy the sort of trust and connection with their audience that is so coveted. So why not utilize the audience connections established by one brand to benefit your brand too? Unfortunately, many brands don’t even consider leveraging relationships with other brands.

Partnership Marketing is a holistic and natural way to make use of untapped resources.

By linking brands with common goals, ideas and target audiences, allowing them to piggyback off of existing connections, brands can find even more powerful connections with new and compatible customers. Employing strategic marketing partnerships for this purpose is a clever way of saving both time and money.

Brand relationships can be difficult to build – you need an expert in your corner.

Building partner marketing relationships is more than simply throwing around resources and hoping that something sticks. It requires careful planning as well as time and effort to introduce and establish the relationship because the partnerships themselves are also built on brand integrity and trust. Most brands do not give partnership marketing the attention it deserves. So the best approach is to work with a third party who can accurately represent your brand to get in front of the best and most appropriate partner brands, enabling you to efficiently reach the audience your company desires.

I spent years working as a music talent agent, a world with relationships at its foundation. It is this background that inspired the creation of Regatta and the approach we take to building strategic marketing partnerships. Having also worked on an historic and groundbreaking election campaign in 2008, I witnessed firsthand how relationships have the power to drive voters to the polls and encourage social action.

Perhaps you’ve struggled with the first step or made promising initial connections only to have co branding efforts fall apart after the first phone call. My agency Regatta has a team of highly trained staff – we call them BrandAgents – with the know-how to build relationships and negotiate marketing partnership deals on your behalf. Contact us if you would like to learn more about what we can do for your brand.