Identifying and recruiting the right publishers, creators, and businesses for your partnerships program is essential. But it can also be daunting — for many managers, discovery and recruitment is the stage of the partnership life cycle where they’re asked to make some of their highest impact decisions with the least information. To compensate, they pour a lot of time and manual work into the endeavor.
Finding new partners is personal and requires a custom approach
There’s no getting around it: finding partners is personal. You’ll always have to take a bespoke approach to selecting the people and organizations to help you achieve your business goals. But the tools you use to do it can make a huge difference in the outcome. It’s like looking for The One on The Bachelor versus a really good dating app — your probability of success skyrockets when you ditch the smoke and mirrors (read: sequin gowns and rose ceremonies) for algorithms and automation tools that help you make informed decisions faster.
Impact’s Discover experience, now native to the Partnership Cloud platform for all Impact customers, has been designed to connect you with productive partners efficiently and effectively.
A refresher on where to find Discover and how to use it
You can find the Discover experience in the left navigation bar of your UI.
Discover’s curated home page and advanced search filters help you comb through a growing pool of 40,000+ prospective partners. These publishers, creators, and businesses span promotional methods, geographies, audience sizes, and interests. Rich partner data and fine search criteria let you narrow down your consideration to qualified matches, sorted in order of relevance to your program. Our partner review tools make it easy to get to know each prospect before you propose partnership.
Recommendations, review mode, and more: More new features in Discover
Recently, we’ve added even more features and workflows to the Discover experience to help you connect with productive partners successfully.
Partner Recommendations
Partner Recommendations use machine learning to suggest suitable partners for you to recruit to your program. Our data science team has put together a series of well-established algorithms analyzing millions of data points across the Impact partnership ecosystem to provide a unique set of recommendations for your program based on productive partnerships formed by similar programs.
Consult the “Partners You Will Love” widget on the Discover homepage or filter by recommendations as you browse to find publishers and creators tailored just for you, based on who’s most likely to drive results.
Recommendation, relationship, and Impact account badges
We wanted to make these recommendations easy for you to act on, so we put them in plain sight. We’ve added recommendation tags to prospective partners that our data science team predicts may have high AOV potential, are likely to be conversion path introducers, and more. These tags appear at the bottom of a partner’s tile whether or not a filter is applied, so it’s easy to do a quick visual scan for recommended partners in any list you may be searching or browsing.
In addition to recommendation tags, the Discover experience now features icons to denote if a partner is joined to your program, you’re awaiting their approval, they’re awaiting your approval, they’ve declined you, or you’ve declined them.
These icons help you understand your history with a partner at a glance, so you can avoid doing redundant work or sending confusing messaging. You can also visually gauge how much of a particular partner segment you’ve saturated.
Finally, we’ve added a badge that designates if a partner is already joined to the Discover Marketplace, meaning they’ll be expecting your outreach.
Here’s what it looks like all together:
Review mode improvements
We’ve also made adjustments to partner review mode that help you assess and recruit individual partners at scale. Here’s a sample of improvements to look out for:
- We’ve taken the best parts of bookmarking (ease, efficiency) and created an even more simplified version. Now, when assessing a partner in Discover’s review UI, you’ll have the option to reject that partner or add them as a prospect with the click of a button.
If you reject a partner, you won’t see them again, and you’ll have provided our data science team with the information to better curate partners for you in the future. If you add a partner to your Prospects, you’ll be able to find that partner (and all others that you bookmark) by filtering for Prospects.
- When you click into a partner listing for a partner that’s already joined to your program, you’ll now see an action menu giving you quick links to get more info on your partnership. This makes it easier to manage both new and existing partnerships from within the Discover experience.
- All Discover searches are now passed in URL parameters, which means you can grab the URLs from specific searches and save them for later or share them among your team. Each partner listing also has a unique URL, so you can even link directly to specific partners in the marketplace.
A better way to build your partner roster
Impact’s Discover experience was designed to give you the best tools for identifying and recruiting partners and the best odds of reaching and exceeding your partnership goals. We’re excited to make Discover available to all global clients and even more excited to see the productive partnerships you establish as a result.
Want to know more? Reach out to the Impact’s growth technologists at grow@impact.com.
