What does Collaboration Marketing Really Mean?

Definition; Where two or more businesses share resources to reach a wider audience

If you do a search on Google you will come across a number of search results that have collaboration and marketing in the main title, but upon closer examination there are two very different meanings.

One of them costs you money and the other makes you money!

Getting marketing people to collaborate

As with any activity that requires more than one person, those people need to work together. Marketing is one such beast, with so many activities it is imperative to have a strategy that ensures all work is completed on time and so on.

Therefore, one of the search results that comes up for collaborating marketers is "marketing collaboration software" from vendors such as Huddle and Smartsheet. Great software, but of absolutely no use to a CEO looking to increase his or her reach to new customers!

Collaborating with other businesses to reach a market

This description should fill the average CEO with a combination of excitement and dread. Here is why!

Excitement; because of the opportunity to gain access to the customers and prospects of other businesses. This could mean after 10 times increase in more customers and more long-term revenue, interested referrals, increased referrals, lower marketing costs and overall increased profitability. Increased brand awareness, faster route to market to increase brand awareness.

Dread; because every CEO knows that to instigate any form of collaboration or alliance marketing means negotiation. Not just in terms of finding partners, but more importantly, who does what?

When larger companies get together, the CEOs can make a quick decision however the real headache is, who does what? Even if each company has its own Marketing Department, someone is going to end up doing all the work and then one of the companies in the group becomes accountable to all the others – which is not good.

This scenario can lead to distrust and ultimately a breakdown of the collaboration group, unless there is a third party marketing company involved.

Appoint an Independent Marketing Company

When it comes to establishing the strategy, I recommend that the collaboration group engages a new marketing team expressly for the collaboration project.

The new marketing company can liaise with each of the existing marketing departments of the collaborating groups and report back to the CEOs.

Amazing Cost Effective Strategy

It is extremely cost effective for smaller businesses to use a collaboration or alliance framework as it can mean an increase in reach to new customers by as much as 400% (Example: if all five members have ten customers, you've sold to yours already, so you then have a further forty to market to, i.e. 400% increase).

Exposure of your new brand or group is quicker and far more effective than via typical marketing because the message reaches the ideal, warmed up target rather than the hit and miss of the traditional scatter-gun approach.

Key areas to look out for when establishing a collaboration group are as follows:

• Find businesses who sell to the same decision-makers or markets as you do
• Choose organisations that operate in a similar geographic area
• Work with companies of a similar size
• Try and establish the number of customers each collaborator has so there is no one company disproportionately benefited from the group
• Appoint an independent company to do the marketing

To review salesXchange, an alternative collaboration marketing strategy, click here.