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5 Benefits of Collaboration to Boost Your Business
Collab — you hear it all the time from influencers but what is it? How can you benefit from collaboration and where to even start? Try these tips to get started on your first collab!
You often hear the word “collab” from influencers every time they’ve tied up to a business or a brand. It’s not a marketing gimmick; collaboration helps spread the word about your business in markets that you could not reach in the past.
Aligning interest with like-minded individuals, market leaders, or influencers to share resources and develop exciting projects helps elevate your brand. Collaboration incites excitement from your respective target audiences, taking your online presence to a different level.
The best part? Collabs are the best solution for startups or small businesses that are working on a limited budget. Sounds like your business? Let's talk about collaboration, what it is, ways to do it, and how to make the most of a collaborative deal:
What is a Collab?
Collab or collaboration involves teaming up with someone or another business to market to people outside of your own business bubble. It's like you're “borrowing” a personality's target audience to introduce your business, present your marketing messages, and hopefully, appeal to different people. Collaboration with influential people also adds credibility to your brand, allowing you to earn people’s trust quickly.
Collab Ideas to Try
If you’re doing this for the first time and you’re unsure what kinds of collab projects will work for your business and the person/business you are collaborating with, here are some ideas:
- Joint contests
- Joint giveaways
- Cross-promotion on social media
- Cross-guest appearances/interviews for videos, podcasts, or blogs
- Joint product or service offers
- Community events
- Instagram takeovers
- Joint courses, workshops, or special webinars
- Joint free/paid training
- Joint projects such as a product or limited-edition service
5 Benefits of Collaboration to Boost Your Business
Market Your Business
To grow a business, you need loyal customers, and you can’t have that if no one ever heard of your brand before. A collab with market leaders or other businesses boosts your brand visibility. It’s an effective way of spreading the word about your business to different people outside your own target audience. Even a quick shoutout from an influencer with a sizable following is enough to gain instant recognition from people whom you’ve never marketed to before or those who are totally out of your reach. If your joint project is valuable to an influencer’s target audience, then the collab will lead to more business opportunities.
Build Credibility
Teaming up with a market leader helps establish credibility. People who trust the influencer or market leader will naturally trust businesses tied up to their brand. You can leverage the popularity or credibility of a collaborator to establish authority and trust. You can also use an influencer’s unique experiences or knowledge to become an expert in your own space and in audiences that you may not have reached otherwise.
Grow Your Followers
If an influencer’s followers loved your joint project, it’s only a matter of time before you start getting more followers and better business opportunities. This happens organically, but a little push from an influential personality is enough to expand your viewership.
Of course, the influencer has to ~influence~ his or her followers to take the desired action, which could be anything from watching a joint video tutorial, join a joint giveaway, download free content, or purchase a collab product/service. If you’re still new in the game and you’d like to grow your business quickly and organically, collaborating with a market leader or influencer is the most effective way to do it.
Establish a Trusted Brand
When you think about brands that you grew up loving, you wonder why these brands conjure many fond memories. And when you’re buying something, you automatically look for these brands you grew up loving. There could be better brands out there, some that are more affordable than others, yet you still prefer the brand you know. That’s the power of effective branding; it turns a potential customer into a loyal client.
It takes time to earn people’s trust. When you’re starting your business from scratch, it could take years to build a sizable following online. Think of a collaborative project with a market leader as a shortcut to establishing a trusted brand.
When people trust a market leader, his or her recommendations hold more weight. Collaborating with the market leader makes it easier for his or her followers to trust your brand. By tying up with an influencer, you’ll earn people’s trust much more quickly and acquire many referrals to boot!
Save Time and Money
As a small business, you’re probably spending a small fortune on making content and online marketing. You’re probably hiring people to put together high-quality content for your website and professionals to market your business on various online platforms. Unfortunately, not all companies have the budget for such promos.
Instead of working hard to grow your business, work smart. Teaming up with an influential personality in your industry is one of the best ways to save time and money on content and promotions. You can use and reuse the content you’ve worked on with the influencer — provided that this is a part of the deal (it should be). If the joint project is a new service or product, you can split the overheads with the influencer to minimize costs on your end. Whatever agreement you have with the influencer, you can use his popularity and viewership to save money on marketing and content creation.
Social media led to a new generation of market leaders, and collaborating with these influencers will be most beneficial for your business. Of course, it’s always essential to get your fair share in any agreement.
As long as you're selective of the people you're collaborating with and being mindful of the terms of the agreement, you can elevate your business and build a trusted brand with a collab project.
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