Content Collaboration and Co-Marketing Part One
Working with partner companies can seriously expand your social reach, growth and engagement.
What Are We Talking About Here?
What we are discussing is various parties working together to create content and share that content across their various networks and communities which will achieve more reach and awareness using the shared networks.
The reason I am including “content” in this definition is instead of just swapping content, you might want to work together to create content that works for all of your collaboration organizations at the same time.
“Partnering up” can really give your social efforts a big boost across the board for your brand. Think about two or three companies working together across six to eight social profiles and you can start to understand the potential.
Getting Started
Obviously, you need organizations to collaborate with for this strategy to work. Think of companies that provide complimentary offerings to yours and reach out either through LinkedIn or on their websites to start the process.
Also think about the “what’s in it for me?” aspect from the other organization’s view. What do you have to offer that can help them out? Being prepared for these calls can be the difference in a lukewarm response or a resounding “yes, let’s do this.”
Maybe you have an inhouse videographer or a great designer. Or your marketer is very creative with campaign concepts or copy. Cue up your strengths for your conversations to show value to the other companies.
Put Your Relationships to Work
Get together with your collaborators and discuss synergy and overlapping values. Create a content calendar of collaborative content and look at it all together in real time for some brainstorming.
Use social listening and posting tools so you can engage with your content and your partners content in one dashboard. Some tools allow you to share posting calendars. This makes social monitoring and communication so much easier.
This also allows you to respond to their company specific posts to give your partners some added momentum in the engagement category. We know of course that the more engagement with posts and ads, the higher the impression count goes.
Create a hashtag and tagging scheme for your posts that helps all of you with better reach.
Don’t Forget Your Employees
Bring your team members into the mix as well and have them share your content on their social channels. This can be as easy as asking them to monitor your company channels and simply share the content you post. Super simple!
Create an Agreement
This can be fairly easy these days. It’s always good to work out who owns the content and if you can reuse it.
Example: You spend a year working with a partner company and want to create a blog centered around all the great content you published. But your partner company gets sold and the new owner refuse to let you use the collaborative content. Get it in writing!
Things to Watch Out For
Qualify your partners. You don’t want to spend a month on strategy to find out your partners have no time or resources to help. You’ll end up doing all the work.
Although, if you have the time, that could work in your favor if your partners give you access to the channels and our team has the bandwidth. Just ask a lot of questions and be prepared to politely dig in as to how others will work with you.
Check out their social channels ahead of time and if you see weaknesses, be polite but direct and address them before starting to work together.
Make sure their values are aligned with yours and expectations are crystal clear.
Other Benefits
These relationships can help in other ways too. You’ll each gain insights to how the other companies do things that might help your marketing in other areas as well. What’s better than a team of entrepreneurs, right?
To Be Continued in Part Two
The next article will provide more on content collaboration and co-marketing with some specific ideas on working together. Until then be thinking about who you want to partner with and why and start reaching out!
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