Your Complete Guide To Collaborative Marketing
Collaborative Marketing can infuse new life into your company!
By collaborating with your associates and building an eye-catching campaign, you will be able to:
● Boost engagement
● Drive sales
● Attract new prospects
● Create a positive brand association
● Develop new products
In this blog, we will discuss collaborative marketing, how it works, and how you can implement it into your strategy.
What Is Collaborative Marketing and How You Can Benefit From It?
When two or more brands team up and work jointly for mutual benefit, it is called collaborative marketing. These brands typically function in separate industries, but they share an overlapping audience base.
These brands come together to develop something new or unique that appeals to their mutual audience base, like:
● Limited Edition Products
● Service fusions
● Events
Collaborative marketing can be an excellent decision for your company if you’ve got a list of peers that are compatible with your products, services, or brand message.
As mentioned before, there are several aspects in which your brand will benefit from this, including getting access to a highly relevant customer base and innovation in marketing ideas.
Moreover, all of this will be accomplished in a brand-safe environment where you will have high-level quality control: lower risks, bigger rewards.
But how do you know which peers are the best fit? How do you make your collaborative marketing a success?
Let’s figure it out.
4 Components Of A Successful Marketing Collaboration
Four components need to be taken care of for a successful marketing collaboration. Let’s dive into their details.
- Your brands should be like-minded.
The collaboration between your brands must make sense to the audience. It should come across as natural that your brand messages have blended even if you both operate in two completely different industries or niches.
Let’s understand this with the example of the collaboration between Adidas and Arizona. Now sneaker and iced tea are not a classic combination, but Adidas and Arizona share a lot in common. Both of them appeal to the “cool” audience between 18-34 years age and most of their products have affordable pricing. Even today, you can get an Arnold Palmer for 99c and some sneakers below $60.
These two brands infused their brand messages and renowned designs to create a new range of products called 99c sneakers. This collaboration resulted in driving thousands of fans.
- Your products should complement each other.
Your products should make sense to your audience base. It should be something new, unique, or better that would make your audience wonder why it wasn’t made before?
This is the reason why IKEA and Sonos collaboration was such a huge success. Typically the product range of these brands is different: IKEA offers affordable furniture while Sonos offers not really affordable sound systems.
These two brands collaborated to make affordable speakers that resemble a furniture piece. The product was called SYMFONISK and had all the features of the Sonos sound system available for an IKEA price. Now, this was a win-win situation for both customers and brands. Let’s see why:
● Consumers got affordable access to a brilliant product.
● IKEA was able to build brand loyalty by offering a genuinely special product.
● Sonos sold at a bargain, which made potential future customers.
● Both of them received positive brand associations from this collaboration.
The launch of this innovative product created a lot of buzzes as speakers have actually become general furnishing for our homes.
- Your target markets should be similar.
As we said earlier, you can both operate in two completely different industries or niches and have entirely different products, but there should be an overlapping audience base for a successful collaboration.
Let’s see how this works with an example. Star Wars are famous for making memorabilia, targeted at all “avid fans” between 18-44 age groups, irrespective of gender. On the other hand, Chubbies manufacture leisurewear and are renowned for their crazy designs and friendly branding. Now, these two have somewhat similar audience demographics.
Combine them, what will we get? – The comfiest range of Star Wars ever! These products were not targeting the entire customer base but just the overlapping subsection of their audience who enjoys both their products.
- Your marketing goals should be complementary.
There needs to be a clear benefit for both the brands out of this collaboration, and typically this is called marketing goals. Let’s understand this with another example.
Netflix and Baskin Robbins collaborated last year. They made a range of limited-edition Stranger Things flavors.
Here both of them had a clear and complementary marketing goal:
● Netflix wanted to build awareness and raise interest in the Stranger Things series. They would create word-of-mouth marketing and enhance their advertising impressions via customers who already visit the Baskin Robbins stores often.
● Baskin Robbins wanted to boost visits to their local shops. The number of people visiting their stores will increase as the Stranger Things fans came to try out the new flavors.
See, a win-win deal! Shared goals make collaborative marketing campaigns successful. To ensure the same for your peers before entering into an association.
How To Find Collaborative Marketing Opportunities?
Now, let’s discuss how you can find ideal collaborative marketing opportunities.
- Look to your peers
Probably you will have several peers in the adjoining industries that you uphold or other brands that you rely on for ideas or whose work you simply adore. This would be a great area to look for collaboration since:
● You are acquainted with their work.
● You know they aren’t your direct competitors.
● You will be able to examine your current relationships.
● You can easily find an overlapping audience.
The better relationship you have with your peers, the more are the chances that they will collaborate with you.
- Analyze the physical product recommendations
In case you sell physical products, online retailers can be of great help in finding brands you can ideally collaborate with.
For instance, Amazon has a section called “frequently bought together” on every product page. These are the brands that align with your audience but are not your direct competitors. You can find some excellent collaboration ideas from here and create some unique products.
- Check what your audience “Likes.”
Tools like Facebook Manager has an “Audience Insights” tool that lets you find out the other business pages that your audience has followed or liked. These are the brands that your audience is already engaging with. Utilizing this tool, you might come across some brands that you didn’t even know converged with yours.
Likewise, you can also apply this to the “Viewers Also Watched” recommendation section on Youtube.
- Connect with personal brands
Another way to expand your marketing reach is by collaborating with personal brands. You can try out options like referral programs, affiliate marketing, creator-led content pieces, and much more. You can even explore the “friends marketing” opportunity by taking this down to a micro-influencer level.
Planning and Launching Your Collaborative Marketing Campaign In 7 Steps
Next step is to plan and launch your collaborative marketing campaign in seven simple steps:
- Make a collaboration team – This will be the team that will initiate this campaign.
- Sync your marketing goals – Then you need to put forward your individual marketing goals and sync them with each other to decide your campaign’s context and direction.
- Decide the type of your collaboration – Plan out how your collaboration will look. For instance, whether it is short-term or long-term? Or what your product will be like?
- Outline the strategy – Decide what tools, resources, and workforce you will require to make this collaboration successful.
- Assign individual roles – Make sure that each brand and team members are aware of what they have to do and by when.
- Design a workflow – Determine how the work will be passed on from team to team and how the team will meet deadlines.
- Get creative – All is set to go now. You just need to explore your team members’ creativity and develop a campaign that your audience will love.
So, this was all about this. Let us know about your thoughts on collaborative marketing in the comments below!