Marketing partners

Growth doesn’t only come from selling to clients. Creators who review your product, the magazine that covers your sector, the cycling club whose members are your buyers, the fair you exhibit at: these are marketing partners. LeadHunter keeps them as accounts like any other, so conversations, next steps and contacts work the same way, but gives them their own list and keeps them apart from your clients.

What makes an account a partner

An account is a marketing partner when it carries one of these relationship types:

Type	For
Influencer	Creators and influencers with an audience you want to reach.
Press / Media	Magazines, newsletters, podcasts, trade sites, radio.
Community	Clubs, associations, forums and groups.
Event organizer	Fairs, conferences and events you exhibit at or sponsor.
Partner	Strategic, co-marketing or integration partners.
Affiliate	Partners paid per referral or signup.
Analyst	Industry analysts.

An account can be a partner and a client at the same time (a bike shop that is also a community hub, say). That matters for the rules below.

Find your partners

Open Marketing → Partners in the sidebar (Marketing has three entries under it: Partners, Actions and Channels). The list shows every account with a marketing type in the active project, with its type, Stage, Audience, social profiles, country and language, the date of the last contact and the next step that is due.

Filter by type, stage and minimum audience, search by name, email, website or city, and sort by audience, last contact, next step due or name. Accounts with no audience or no next step always sort last, in either direction.

To add one, use Add partner and pick the type: the new-account form opens with that type already set. To bring in a whole list (a press list, the exhibitors of a fair), use Import a list and pick the type every row gets; see Importing partner lists.

Partner stage

Partners have their own stage, separate from the client status:

Stage	Meaning
To contact	On your list, not contacted yet.
Contacted	You reached out.
Talking	A conversation is going on.
Agreed	You agreed a collaboration.
Active	The collaboration is running.
Past	You worked together; it has ended.
Declined	They said no.
Not a fit	You decided not to work with them.

A new partner starts at To contact, and so does an existing account the moment you give it a marketing type. Change the stage from the Partner card on the account page (Activity tab) or straight from the Partners list. Every change is kept with who made it, when and an optional reason, so you can see how the relationship moved.

Removing the marketing types from an account keeps its stage and its history; the account simply leaves the Partners list.

Audience size

Audience size holds the partner’s reach: followers, subscribers or circulation. Type it on the Partner card (12500, 12.5k and 1.2M all work). Use it to sort the list or to filter for partners above a minimum audience. Niche, rates or audit scores fit in custom fields.

They stay out of client lists and client stats

A pure marketing partner is an account that has a marketing type, no other relationship type, and a status other than Client or In trial. Pure partners:

• are hidden from the Accounts list by default. To see them there, open Filter and tick Include marketing partners; an Including marketing partners chip then shows, and removing it hides them again.
• don’t count in the funnel on Insights (initiated, clicked, replied, closed and the rates), in the per-product rows of Insights → Breakdown, in the Strong fits reached count, in the channel acquisition counts, or in Client Pulse.

An account that is also a client or a prospect (another relationship type, or status Client or In trial) keeps counting everywhere, as before. The rule reads the account as it is today: a creator who later becomes a client counts again, past outreach included.

Per-campaign rows on Insights → Breakdown keep every account, so an Influencer or Press campaign still shows its own numbers there.

Partners and campaigns

Outreach to partners runs through campaigns as usual. Pick the purpose that matches: Influencer / community for creators and communities, Press / visibility for media, Partnership / reseller for partners, affiliates and communities, Event invitation for event organizers. Those purposes accept their partners.

Sales-shaped campaigns (sales, investor, recruiting, customer expansion, win-back, renewal) soft-block influencers, communities and event organizers, as they already did for press and analysts, so nobody cold-sells to a creator or a club by accident. When you add accounts, LeadHunter tells you how many were held back and why; tick Include influencers, Include communities or Include event organizers to add them anyway. See Outreach reasons and targets for the full matrix.

Because the Accounts list hides pure partners, Add matching accounts to campaign leaves them out too. For a Press or Influencer campaign, tick Include marketing partners in the dialog, or start from the Marketing partners page.

Actions: what you do with a partner

An action is one collaboration or placement: a reel, a post, an article, a podcast or newsletter slot, an ad, a booth or a talk at a fair, a sponsorship, a giveaway, an affiliate deal. Each action belongs to a partner and has its own dates, costs, tracked links, promo code and results, so you can compare one reel with another and one fair with the next.

Open Marketing → Actions to see them all, filtered by stage, type or partner, with reach, clicks, clients, cost and ROI on each row. Use New action there, or + New action on a partner’s Partner card or row, which picks the partner for you.

An action has:

• a name (for example Sea Otter Europe 2026 booth) and a type;
• an acquisition channel, chosen from the type (a booth is an Event, a reel is Influencer); the clients you attribute to the action get it;
• Starts, Published and Ends dates;
• Reach: views, impressions, attendees or circulation, typed by hand;
• Content links to what was published, and an optional promo code;
• a stage: Idea → Proposed → Agreed → Scheduled → Published → Done, or Cancelled. Every change is kept with who made it and when.

On the action’s page, Costs holds what it cost: the fee, the booth, the ad spend. Tick In kind for things you gave instead of money (free months, products) and enter them at list price; they count in the cost and the ROI like any other cost. Tracked links are short links to hand to the partner; every human click counts on the action.

Which clients did an action bring?

Attribution is manual for now: each account keeps one action, the one that brought it in first.

• On an account’s page, open the Profile tab and, in the Source channel card, pick the action in Action or channel. Actions are listed first with their type and partner; a filter box helps when there are many.
• On the action’s page, Attribute accounts does it for many at once. Paste the account names (one per line) or pick the accounts, then Preview: LeadHunter shows which accounts will be attributed, which already are, which already belong to another action or channel (left alone unless you tick Replace another channel already set on an account) and which names match no account or several. Nothing is written until you confirm. Acquired on sets the acquisition date of accounts that have none (the action’s start date by default), so the numbers land in the right period.

Results

Every action shows its results as a funnel:

Step	What it counts
Reach	The reach you typed.
Clicks	Human clicks on the action’s tracked links.
Accounts	Accounts attributed to the action (partners don’t count).
Trials	Of those, accounts in trial now or before.
Clients	Of those, accounts that are clients now.
Revenue	The value of those clients (account value).
Cost	Every cost of the action, in-kind included.
Cost per client	Cost divided by clients.
ROI	Revenue divided by cost.

Cost per client and ROI need one currency (LeadHunter doesn’t convert currencies); when they can’t be computed, the reason is shown instead.

A partner’s results are the sum of all its actions: you see them on the Partner card of the account page, and Actions, Clients and ROI columns on the Partners list.

Marketing dashboard

Click Marketing itself in the sidebar to open the Marketing dashboard. It compares actions over a period (last 30 or 90 days, this year, all time or Custom dates). The period picks the actions by the day they happened (the publish date, else the start date); their results count up to today, because clients often arrive weeks after a post or a fair. It shows the totals, the results by action type and by partner kind (influencers, press, events, communities…), and the top actions.

Importing partner lists

The import wizard understands partner columns:

• Relationship types: a column with one or more types per row (Influencer, Community), or the same type for every row when you import from the Partners page. Unknown values are dropped and listed in the import summary.
• Audience size: columns named Followers, Audience, Subscribers or Circulation map on their own; 12.5K, 1.2M and 12,500 are read as numbers. Anything else is cleared and listed in the summary.
• Partner stage: optional; rows that aren’t partners can’t have one and the summary says so. Partners without a stage start at To contact.

Through the API

GET /api/accounts/?marketing=only lists partners and ?marketing=exclude hides pure partners; ?partner_stage= and ?audience_size__gte= filter further. Change a stage with POST /api/accounts/{id}/change-partner-stage/ and {"stage": "agreed", "reason": "…"}; the stage field itself can’t be changed by a plain account update. Accounts also carry partner_stage, partner_stage_changed_at, audience_size and next_step_due_on (the earliest open next step that has a date).

Actions are channels with an action type: list them with GET /api/channels/?is_action=true (filters partner, action_stage, action_type), change the stage with POST /api/channels/{id}/change-action-stage/, and attribute accounts with POST /api/channels/{id}/attribute-accounts/ (a preview unless you send "dry_run": false). GET /api/marketing/summary/ and GET /api/marketing/partner-results/ return the dashboard and the per-partner results. Each action carries a results block with the funnel above.