How To Collaborate with Small Businesses and How It Can Help You
Collaboration has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years but for good reason. Collaborating with a small business, or knowing how to collaborate with an influencer successfully can take your own female-owned business to new heights. As experts in what makes a collaboration successful, we’ve worked with clients who have experienced a whole host of dream (and a coiple of nightmare) partnerships. In this week’s blog, we’ll look at the various ways you can collaborate with other businesses and why it’s important to know your goal. For a more in-depth look at how to collaborate with businesses, read our how-to guide here.
Why Is Collaboration a Good idea for my female-owned business?
There are so many reasons why collaboration is good for you and your business. Not only can it help you connect with like-minded female entrepreneurs, but it can also open you up to a whole new community who may eventually become potential clients. One of my favourite parts of being a female business owner is the community I have created and the benefits of working closely with a range of other small businesses to provide a service for my clients. For instance, I have been working a lot with branding expert Tash Willmore to provide Your AJency clients with an end-to-end service when it comes to their branding and marketing strategy. I benefit, the experts I work with benefit and most importantly, my clients benefit.
Some of the best outcomes for successful collaborations include positioning yourself an industry expert, building your authority and reputation in your niche or business area, increasing brand awareness and of course reaching new audiences (and hopefully new clients).
Now more than ever, there are endless ways to collaborate with businesses, brands and influencers. Here are just some of the ways we suggest, but you can download our masterplan template and get access to even more ideas!
Ideas for How You Can Collaborate with Businesses or Brands
☐ Run a giveaway or competition with another brand or brands.
Look for brands who align with your values and see if they want to run a competition or giveaway together. You could offer discounts, vouchers for your services, or products as the prize. We find these work best when there is an overarching theme to the giveaway, e.g celebrating strong female business owners for International Women’s Day, cute Halloween treats from independent makers, self-care specials after the school holidays.
☐ Guest blog
Invite someone to write for your business blog. We found in a recent audit that our most successful blogs are the ones where we spotlight female-owned businesses in our ‘Moments to Motivate’ series. Equally, pitch to write a blog or article for another business or brand. This also helps with building backlinks to help boost your SEO. Read more simple SEO tricks for small business owners here.
☐ Appear as a guest on a podcast
Just as with guest blogging, appearing as a guest on a podcast can help build your credibility and reputation in your industry. If you don’t have your own podcast, appearing on a relevant podcast can open you up to a new audience and showcase your authenticity as a business owner, as well as build your brand reputation. Find out how talking at conferences and appearing on guest podcasts helped grow my business.
☐ Work with an influencer
We are often asked about the benefits of working with an influencer. For a long time, it seemed like the holy grail of collaborations. Certainly landing the right influencer collaboration can lead to great results for your business but make sure you are working with the right influencer for your needs. Micro- and nano- influencers can sometimes work better for your business rather than large celebrity followings with an unengaged audience. We spoke with Jess Roe, @TheWindyCityMama who gave us all of her top tips for working with influencers and content creators.
☐ Collaborate on a work project together
More and more, I am working with experts in a range of industries so that I can deliver an even higher-quality service to my clients. Whether it’s bringing in branding experts, SEO specialists or PR gurus, collaborating with other female-owned businesses means that my clients get the best information and offers, and I get to work as part of a team to deliver an exciting project.
How to have a successful collaboration with a business
First and foremost, it’s essential to think about your goal in planning a collaboration.
>What are the benefits to you?
>What are the benefits to them?
>Is there a client/customer benefit also?
>What do you want to achieve from the collaboration?
Once you have these goals in mind, it is easier to plan for, and later measure, your success.
Ultimately for most of us, the goal of any business collaboration is growth. That could be growth of your personal brand, as well growth for your business.
But remember, businesses don't need followers! They need buyers!
Having more converted clients or customers should always be the focus for why you are collaborating, not just to increase your social media following. As people don't have to follow you to buy from you, don’t assume that a collaboration has failed if your follower number doesn’t go up! One of the things I always do is ask clients where they found me and this can often show that a previous collaboration has worked!
When thinking about the most successful collaborations, the thing that comes out time and time again is that it is a clear partnership between the collaborators. Think about what is in it for the collaborator as ultimately, that’s what will sell the idea when you pitch to them. The best collaborations are the ones that go on past the original collaboration and end up as a long-term working partnership.
How to Start Collaborating with other businesses or brands
If you’re thinking a collaboration could help you grow your business this year, download our free masterplan template to help you start planning who you’ll pitch to and how. This is a sneak-peek into the document we use with our own Your AJency clients and also gives you expert advice on SEO and Content Pillars.
With any collaboration, it has to be right for you and your business. Not all collaborations will be transferable across industries. If you’re not sure where to start, get in touch to see how collaborations could benefit your business.
