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In this episode of the ºÚÁÏÃÅ Ecommerce Show, podcast hosts Jesse Ness and Richard Otey dive into collaborating with other business owners. Collaborations are a great way to expand your audience without spending too much ³¾´Ç²Ô±ð²â—b³Ü³Ù you’ll need to invest some time in it, for sure.

Tune in to find out how to look for possible collaborations, how to connect with other businesses, and what you can do if you don’t have a significant audience yet.

Why Collaborate with Other Businesses?

Collaborations are a great way to expand one’s reach to potential customers. Collaborating with other businesses doesn’t necessarily require spending money. It can be as simple as a cross-promotion on email lists or giving each other a shoutout on social media channels.

However, you do need to invest time researching and reaching out to potential brands.

How to Choose Brands for Collaboration

Before even contacting a potential brand, you should identify compatible collaborators and plan out what you want from the collaboration.

Here are four main attributes of a partnership to keep in mind:

• Partners should be similarly sized companies. (Usually, a bigger company isn’t likely to collaborate with a smaller company.)
• They should sell products related to yours but not be your direct competitors.
• Their products or services should appeal to a similar demographic as yours.
• Their items or services are around the same price level as yours.

For example, if you sell hammers, you want to look for a business that sells tool belts, but not necessarily another hammer seller.

How to Reach Out to Other Brands

When reaching out, you can use various tactics, from emailing, reaching out on social media, or calling.

When you contact other business owners in your market, list the benefits of your potential collaboration, such as leveraging each other’s audiences that share the same interests.

Ask if they are interested in a cross-promotion opportunity where you promote each other’s products. Offer to promote their products in your newsletter or make a post on your social media pages. Be sure to specify your email list and social media audience size.

Consider creating an image together that showcases how your and their products work well together. You can both use the picture to market your products!

Sweepstakes Collaborations with Other Businesses

Apart from email and social media campaigns, you can offer to run a sweepstake or a giveaway with a potential partner.

Collaborating with other businesses via sweepstakes is effective in so many ways. Through a giveaway, you can get more followers, more people to sign up for your email list, and reach a wider audience of potential customers.

A third party usually organizes these collaborations, matching up companies based on demographics, product types, and audience size. Generally, each of the participating businesses will offer up a gift certificate and promote a sweepstake through email and social media.

A good thing about sweepstakes is that they usually require a participant to enter their email address or phone number. You can get contacts of potential customers through the sweepstake, as opposed to just being featured in your partner’s email or social media post.

What If You Don’t Have a Big Audience Yet?

If you’re just starting out with your business and don’t have a big audience, you might think you can’t offer much for collaborations. In this case, you can try to partner with influencers to get more exposure for your business.

Listen to our podcast about influencer marketing based on influencer seeding instead of the pay-for-post model. Influencer seeding has proven to be more effective and can help you build a following from the ground up.