Building a bulletproof marketing collaboration strategy
Marketing collaboration has been popular for a few years but it saw a huge boost over the pandemic months when businesses had to look for virtual ways to build traffic and sales.
And yet, not many businesses do it right. Marketing collaboration is a broad term with many benefits, and yet brands usually understand it as a one-time influencer marketing campaign.
Here are the most common mistakes most businesses make when attempting to build a marketing collaboration strategy. Understanding these will help digital marketers avoid and even recalibrate their digital marketing strategy effectively.
When most businesses decide to set up a collaborative marketing campaign, they usually start with influencer research.
There is no shortage of tools allowing you to identify and even reach out to niche influencers. Most of those tools rely on publicly available metrics – like following and daily activity of social media profiles or traffic of a blog.
There are a few distinct disadvantages of limiting your campaign to that approach:
As a result, your outreach efforts will have a low response rate and often a short-lived outcome. No wonder too many businesses give up on marketing collaboration after a single try.
There are a few ways to overcome this first disappointment by approaching your campaign in a less obvious and more creative way.
Active bloggers, reporters, and social media that became active 12-18 months ago are more likely to promote your brand with passion and inspiration. What’s more, these are tomorrow’s influencers who will likely never forget you.
That’s the concept of growing together that will benefit your brand and build a strong community of brand ambassadors who will keep promoting and defending your reputation in months and years to come – that’s what makes collaboration really powerful. There are lots of examples and case studies of brands working with all kinds of social media users that have engaged small communities.
Depending on the nature of your business and the audience your product attracts, you are likely to have quite a few (or just a few) influencers among your current customers.
Or these may be active social media users or even bloggers, not yet influencers.
Either way, they already know your brand, and keeping them engaged will drive more sales and brand awareness.
Send out a survey inviting your customers to take part in a challenge or a charity campaign, and from those form fills you will get to know your customer base better.
Many ecommerce platforms offer demographics and social media analytics to their customers. So you may be able to get some insights from your current solution without reaching out to customers.
One of the best examples of letting your customers empower your social media efforts is Wendy’s campaign which ended up setting a world Twitter record. The #NuggsForCarter, saw brands like Google and Microsoft hop on to the conversation. The campaign wasn’t planned but the fact that Wendy’s agreed to play along vouches for how powerful the brand’s social media strategy is.
.@carterjwm is now the most retweeted tweet of all-time. That’s good for the nuggets, and $100k to @DTFA. Consider it done. #nuggsforcarter pic.twitter.com/k6uhsJiP4E
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) May 9, 2017
Business-to-business collaboration is another – often overlooked – opportunity. There are likely lots of products that compliment yours, so there may be lots of co-promotion opportunities you can find.
LEGO is one of those companies that are really great at co-branding campaigns as they tend to work with so many diverse brands and it never fails to benefit both sides. Their most recent collaborations with Stranger Things and MOMA are just two examples of many.
The key with LEGO collaborations is that they venture out into many different niches and by doing this they are able to expand their customer base beyond their obvious target audience (that is kids). Look at the two co-marketing campaigns: One is in art and another is in a widely possible show. The first one expands its audience to art lovers, and the second one results in lots of press mentions.
All you need is to keep looking for those and making connections.
Most collaborative campaigns result in one-time initiatives after which both the brand and the influencer move on with their lives to never engage with each other in the future.
And yet, just like search engine optimization (SEO), collaborative marketing offers an accumulative impact, that is, it should be easier from campaign to campaign because it should rely on existing connections.
Collaborative marketing is very much lead development: You generate leads, nurture them, and turn them into prospects and customers. But even then your job isn’t done because you want them to return as repeat customers, again and again. This is where SEO and sales, customer support and content – everything comes together.
Nike Membership is one of the best-known examples of creating a loyalty program that keeps the brand’s customers and collaborators always engaged.
Apart from traditional membership perks (free shipping, points, and discounts), Nike added the powerful community component to their loyalty program: members can join training and run clubs, and exchange style inspirations. This way customers return again and again becoming a really engaged part of the community:
When developing your marketing collaboration strategy, don’t overlook the relationship management components of it because – just like in sales repeat customers are your best customers – in marketing repeat collaborators are your best collaborators because they are likely to become part of your community and drive more and more sales in the future.
In fact, the end goal of collaborative marketing is to create a strong community of content and brand amplifiers who will be promoting your product without you actively asking them to do that.
But speaking of goals…
When brands decide to invest time and effort into marketing collaboration, they usually prioritize immediate results: an increase in traffic and sales. This is understandable because every business has to focus on ROI but just like in many other areas, including SEO and even PPC, there are many more – possibly more important and often long-term – benefits of collaboration:
Failing to include these goals in your planning and reporting means missing out on long-term results which are able to make your business stronger in the long run.
Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.
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