Partnerships between SaaS companies can be extremely powerful. With an ever-evolving landscape of providers in the SaaS industry, choosing the best partners to add value to your platform and end-users can be daunting. But, if done right, integration partnerships can be a strategic proposition for you, your partner and your shared users.
As a growing SaaS platform, partnerships give you some great opportunities including;
- Enhancing your product and data-sets
- Making your mutual SaaS platforms ‘stickier’ with end-users
- Getting your product in front of a new audience
- From a digital marketer’s perspective, it’s a legitimate link-building strategy that gets your domain linked from industry-relevant sources, helping you boost your natural search rankings
- The opportunity to partake in co-marketing activities
However, the biggest opportunity should be adding value to your platform’s service and users. If the combination of your platforms creates something no one else is doing, or in a more user-friendly/accessible fashion, you’ll create a win-win situation.
Launching Integration First SaaS Partnerships
So you’ve worked out in which ways your respective platforms complement each other. How is that going to be delivered to your mutual users?
While you could provide an API and a bunch of documentation, or point to an external service, nothing beats a streamlined in-app setup. A few clicks and your offering is authenticated and running. As a result, cutting down on the user’s set-up time so they can concentrate on the service’s function.
This is where an embedded integration solution comes in; allowing you to create and deploy agile integrations with incredible speed. When a user requests a new integration you can have one set up in minutes, without having to impose on your development team’s schedule.
Why Does Integration Make Partnerships Stronger?
As well as giving your application exposure to a foreign audience, presenting your service as an effective extension of the application they’re using gives you a warm introduction.
More people integrating with your mutual services is a big win for you both. Having a fleshed-out integration marketplace builds confidence in prospective and established users.
From a marketing point of view, it gives you both new content to write about and display. Not just any content too, actionable content – the best kind! Especially if you are solving a highly sought-after use case.
How to choose which partner programmes to take part in
The rise in best-of-breed software has given users and businesses so many choices. They are able to use services that most closely meet individual business case requirements. The downside to this is that it can create silos of data. This prevents teams from getting full views of their customers’ experience and hampers making data-driven improvements to their own platform.
While integration provides an effective solution to these issues the question then becomes “which integrations should we build first?”.
The best way to answer this is pretty simple; speak to your users!
If you’re getting requests for the same kinds of integrations you should probably bump that up your roadmap. It’s also a decent indication that users of the apps you need to connect to are also looking for the same technical solution your product offers.
Starting up your own Partnership Programme
While starting up your own SaaS partnership programme may take up resources that are needed elsewhere, the quickest way of setting up an actionable in-app or website programme is through your own integration store or marketplace.
While you may be daunted by the implied scale of that, it’s another advantage of using a dedicated integration platform to manage your SaaS integrations.
Using a feature like our LAUNCH lets you quickly and easily deploy your integrations into your app. Use our tagging feature to only show your users specifically tagged integrations on a page; so, for example, if you have a Salesforce partner page you can display only your Salesforce integrations, letting your users select, authenticate and activate them in a matter of clicks.
If you’d like to create your own in-app integration marketplace get in touch with us for a development and evaluation platform account.
