95 - 10 Creative Ways To Collaborate with Other Businesses to Grow Your Reach and Impact

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If you've ever wanted to collaborate, but aren’t sure where to start, then now is your chance to get started! Danielle shares 10 creative ways on the podcast today! We hope this inspires you to connect and collaborate with like-minded business owners!

If you are feeling discouraged by trying to rely on just social media to build your business, if you feel like there should be a better & faster way to get in front of your ideal clients and customers, this is for you!

  1. Host a Virtual or In-Person Event with Aligned Businesses

    This is a great way to grow your reach! Hosting an event that connects other businesses that are aligned with your own builds relationships and helps you get in front of their audiences as well. 

  2. Having a Guest Feature on Your Platform

    This includes having guest speakers, writers, and guests on your own platform. These guests share your platform on their own, and do cross promotion to their audience on your behalf.

  3. Guesting on Someone Else's Platform 

    This is just like tip number two, but instead, you are speaking, interviewing & podcasting on someone else’s platform! Your message and business are introduced and shared with their audience that already trusts them.

  4. Email List Features & Swaps 

    This is an easy and quick way to cross-promote! You get a chance to showcase another business that you believe in to your email subscribers, and you get to get in front of a whole other audience!

  5. Social Media

    There are endless ways to collaborate on social media: Collaboration Reels, Live videos with someone interviewing someone else, IG Story takeovers, Post Features, and more!

  6. Host a Giveaway

    Giveaways have garnered a bit of a bad reputation for being spammy or inauthentic, but they can be really powerful. It’s CRUCIAL that you share similar values, ideal clients & audiences. It’s most effective to host a giveaway via your email lists or on social media.

  7. Host A Collaborative Photoshoot

    This is a fun and creative way to collaborate! It’s a great way to save on recruitment and build community while you get content for your business. It’s important to make sure that you share a similar aesthetic with this business and photographers & videographers as this content will help to build the look and feel of your brand.

  8. Product Development or Co-Creation of a Course/Online Product

    This can be a form of going into business with another entrepreneur. It can be structured differently, depending on what the collaboration looks like. This is not only a great opportunity to share a wealth of knowledge between two businesses, but a great way to add a stream of income to your business.

  9. Affiliate Marketing, Sponsorships & Influencer Marketing 

    Affiliate Marketing

    This is promoting a business’s products or services in exchange for a commission or vice versa. For example, Danielle has a podcast course she loves with whom she’s now an affiliate. If you purchase the course through her link, she gets a commission.

    Sponsorships & Influencer Marketing

    This is a good way to promote a product or service to an audience that someone has already built trust with. A sponsorship normally looks like promoting a brand in exchange for an agreed dollar amount or gifting valuable products/services. Different influencers will have different packages depending on what kind of and how much content they will exchange.

  10. Trade of Products or Services 

    This method of collaboration tends to get a bad reputation when brands and businesses aren’t clear on the specifics of an exchange. It is CRUCIAL that equal value is exchanged for a trade of products or services to work well. Clear is kind. This is a great way to provide value and build connections! 

I hope this gets you excited and sparks some ideas about how you can collaborate with your business!

If you would like help to come up with a collaboration strategy together you can apply for 1:1 Coaching with me at businessbabescollective.com/coaching.

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TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Danielle: Welcome back to the Business Babes Collective podcast. I am your host, Danielle Wiebe, and I am really excited that you're here. Thank you so much for joining me. If you are a regular listener, thank you so much. You are amazing. And if you're a new listener here on this podcast, we talk about so many different topics surrounding business, how to create a profitable business in a really sustainable way.

[00:00:21] And we have, I have solo episodes, where they're kind of more tactical sort of workshop style. And then we also do really amazing interviews with inspiring entrepreneurs of how they've grown their businesses.

[00:00:33] So today is a very tactical episode. We are gonna be diving into 10 creative ways to collaborate with other businesses in order to grow your own reach and impact. So I can't wait to dive into this one. And if you haven't listened to our episode last week, we talked all about the benefits of collaboration, so I'm not gonna really go into that at all in this episode.

[00:00:55] This episode is really giving you some ideas of what you can do to [00:01:00] work with other business owners. So if you listened to last weeks and you're like, Oh my goodness, I love it. I'm so excited about the benefits of working with other business owners, collaborating, working together, but you're not really sure what to do, like what, how do we collaborate? Then today's episode is gonna give you some really, really great places to start.

[00:01:18] Before we jump into that though, I wanted to invite you to join us live. We are gonna be hosting. Free Organic Growth Workshop. So mark your calendar for September 28th at 12:00 PM pst. You can go to businessbabescollective.com/workshop to sign up.

[00:01:36] We're gonna be talking all about how to get massive exposure in your business through collaborations and partnerships. So if this is a topic that you are really wanting to learn more about and you maybe are feeling a little bit down about, you know, your reach on social media and you're feeling like you want there to be a different way or a better way, maybe a faster way to get in front of your ideal [00:02:00] clients and customers, then this is definitely for you.

[00:02:02] So again, go to businessbabescollective.com/workshop to sign up for our free training. And it's gonna be so much fun because I'm gonna get to hang out with you live. You can come, you can ask your questions, you can get feedback, connect with the other people that are gonna be on the call as well. So if you've been listening to this podcast and you really wanna connect and learn a little bit deeper on some of these topics, then definitely come join.

[00:02:26] I also wanna let you know that if you are not able to join us live, still sign up for the workshop cuz you are going to get access to the recording after. So even if you're listening to this recording and it's passed that date already, you're like, Oh man, I missed it. Go to go to that link businessbabescollective.com/workshop because we are going to be putting up a recording of that training as well.

[00:02:48] But if you can join us live, I highly recommend it. You're gonna get the most out of it if you can join us live, because then you can ask your questions. You can get feedback right away from me, and we're gonna do a q and a session at [00:03:00] the end. So I'm really excited about that. All right, let's go ahead now and jump into the episode.

[00:03:06] Welcome to the Business Babes Collective podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Wiebe. In this podcast, you'll learn tangible business tips and strategies on how to grow successfully and sustainably. We'll also interview seasoned entrepreneurs so you can listen in on their stories and see behind the scenes of what it took to grow and scale their businesses. Let's dive in as we discuss the wild, exciting, crazy challenging, rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship.

[00:03:35] 10 ways to collaborate with other business owners to grow your own reach and impact. Number one, host a virtual or in-person event with other business owners, other aligned businesses. You guys, this is so powerful. This is really how we grew our entire community. I mean, you guys know some of the stories that we've shared on the [00:04:00] podcast of growing these events and hosting these events. We would not have been able to do that if it wasn't for collaborations. So we would bring other businesses together, we would collaborate together and create a really successful event where all parties are benefiting from the experience.

[00:04:19] And obviously as we grew and as we scaled our business, it became easier and easier to collaborate with other businesses because our reach grew, our community grew, and so a lot more people were interested in collaborating with us because they were able to have that incredible exposure for their business.

[00:04:39] So whether it's a in-person event that you wanna host or a virtual event, we've done this before as well as you, many of you know, during the pandemic we were hosting virtual events, We've done virtual conferences, we've done challenges where we've had guest speakers, and that is a really incredible and amazing way as well.

[00:04:59] [00:05:00] Because if you are bringing other businesses and speakers and collaborators on board, often they will be sharing it to their audiences as well. So you are gonna be getting that exposure that goes beyond your own community, your own audience.

[00:05:14] Number two is having a guest feature on your own platform. Examples of this would be having guest speakers at an event, having guest writers to write a blog post on your blog, having guests on a, Maybe you have a podcast or you have a YouTube channel, or you have a engaged Instagram where you're hosting live videos or you're hosting guest episodes on your podcast, whatever that is.

[00:05:40] Having a guest featured on your platform is an amazing way to collaborate because normally what ends up happening is, that community that that other person has is then gonna get exposed to your platform. So often when we have guests, for example, on this podcast, Our guests are [00:06:00] sharing that episode to their community as well, and so it's a cross promotion and it ends up being very successful. So that's just one way where you can collaborate with someone else is having them as a guest on your platform.

[00:06:13] Now, number three is the opposite. It's guesting on someone else's platform. So the exact same thing, whether you are a speaker at someone else's event, maybe you're being interviewed on a podcast, maybe you are being a guest on a blog or whatever that might be, you are guesting on someone else's platform.

[00:06:31] Now, obviously the obvious exposure from that is that you are getting access to their community and they are introducing you to their community. So that is an awesome way to collaborate as well.

[00:06:44] Number four is email list, features and swaps. I love this one so much because it's so easy, it's so quick and it's incredible way to cross promote other people's businesses and have them promote your business.

[00:06:58] So if you have an [00:07:00] email list and someone else who has an aligned business has an email list as well, all you wanna do is cross promote your businesses. So for example, You're gonna feature their business and they're gonna feature your business in exchange. This is a really, really cool way to not only support another business and showcase another business in front of your community, but in exchange, you are getting access to their community. So it's a win-win for both of you.

[00:07:27] All right, number five is social media. There are so many ways to collaborate on social media. I'm sure you've seen many, such as collaboration reels where you are actually collaborating on a video together and you're both posting it on your account. So one person post it and they add someone else as a collaborator, so it shows up on both your accounts.

[00:07:47] You can do live videos where you're interviewing one another, you're being a guest. Maybe you are taking over someone's Instagram stories for a day or you're featuring someone else and they're featuring you back. There's [00:08:00] so many ways to collaborate, collaborate on social media. Really, the options are endless when it comes to that.

[00:08:06] Number six is hosting a giveaway. So this, I want to say this should be very, very strategic. I think giveaways can get a really bad reputation because sometimes they're done in a really spammy way or it feels inauthentic, but I think giveaways can actually be incredibly powerful, and giveaways can be done through social media, through email, or really any other platform that you have.

[00:08:32] I think it's really important to find businesses that are really aligned to yours. Make sure you have a very similar ideal client or ideal audience if you are going to collaborate with them to do a giveaway.

[00:08:43] All right. Number seven is hosting a collaborative photo shoot. Now, this is a really, really fun and creative way to collaborate with other business owners. When we were first getting started, we did a lot of collaboration photo shoots, and we got invited to a lot of collaboration photo shoots, and this was just a really cool way you would [00:09:00] have a photographer or a videographer, or sometimes both there and then multiple businesses would be there and getting content for their own platforms.

[00:09:09] But the cool thing was is because it was really collaborative, it was a way to actually have other people within, you know, the photos. You know, sometimes if you have either a product based business or even a service based business, you want other people in the photos, but you're like, Well, who do I have in the photos?

[00:09:25] Like if you're a solo entrepreneur, for example, you're like, you're having to either recruit people or maybe hire models or recruit your friends or your mom or your aunt or whoever to be in the photo shoot with you. So collaborative photo shoot is really cool because if you have all of these different brands, you can be really creative with the photos that you can get, and you can also use one another to be in the photos as well. So this is a really cool way to not only build community, but Also to get content for your business.

[00:09:55] One thing that I would recommend though, is make sure that the other businesses that you are [00:10:00] collaborating with have a similar aesthetic, because the photo shoot is ideally going to be very similar in the aesthetic that you're gonna have, especially if you're sharing a photographer, a videographer, or both.

[00:10:10] Okay. Number eight is product development or co-creation of a course or online product. So this is still a collaboration, but it is also a partnership. So this is where you're actually going to co-create something of value that you can either have available for your communities or both of your communities, or potentially charged for it.

[00:10:33] So really, you're going into business with someone else, and this is really powerful. I've seen this done so many times within the online space where two creators, two entrepreneurs or two product, product based businesses will come together and they'll actually co-create something together. And this is just so cool and so powerful.

[00:10:53] There's lots of different ways you can structure it. So maybe it's hosted on one person's website and both people get a [00:11:00] commission on it, or maybe it's on both people's websites and they share commission. There's lots of different ways to structure it, depending on what the collaboration looks like, but this is a really cool way to work with someone else and share their expertise, share your expertise, and it's just a really cool opportunity for another potential income stream to your business.

[00:11:21] Number eight is affiliate marketing, sponsorships and influencer marketing. Okay, this is a big one, and I actually looped these all into one where I could actually probably have each one of these be a point. But if I'm just being honest, I wanted to stay to 10 ways because I didn't wanna have like 12 ways, right?

[00:11:39] So, um, these are all in one, but basically what this means, affiliate marketing, you've probably heard a bit before, but it's basically promoting someone else's products or services in exchange for a commission or having someone else promote your products and services for a commission. So it can be done either way.

[00:11:56] Either it can be something where you are adding an additional income stream [00:12:00] to your business, or you are having other people promote your products and services. They're getting a commission from that.

[00:12:05] So that is affiliate marketing. Sponsorships and influencer marketing, I'm just gonna loop those into one. So if you are a blogger or you are a content creator, so you have a large community of people that know you, like you and trust you, then brands will often come to you and be interested in sponsorships. So they will be wanting you to promote their brand, and normally you will charge a certain dollar amount for that sponsorship.

[00:12:33] If you are the brand and you are wanting to get your products and services in front of large audiences, then you can approach someone who is an influencer in the space that you're in. So they could be a wellness influencer, they could be a business influencer, they could be a fashion influencer, whatever industry your product or service is in.

[00:12:54] and you can actually ask them if they would be willing to partner up, [00:13:00] and normally they will give you some options of what that could look like as far as you know, how much it will cost for them to create, create content, and promote your brand in exchange.

[00:13:11] All right, so that's kind of sponsorships, influencer marketing. It's just summed up. Okay? There's a lot more to it, but for the purpose of this short episode, that's what we'll leave it at.

[00:13:21] And then number 10 is trade of products or services. I absolutely love this one and I know it can get a bad reputation. But this has, we have done, so many different times within our business and it has worked out really well. Now when it does and doesn't work out, this is really, really key. It needs to be equal value for this to work well. So for example, if you have a service, let's say you are a web designer and you are really looking for help In getting your brand out there, maybe you want more PR opportunities or maybe you wanna be featured in different places.

[00:13:59] And so [00:14:00] you meet someone who does exactly that, like that's what they do for their business and they have different packages of how you can work with them, but you find out that they are actually also looking to update their website and they are really wanting to do that. But maybe right now finances are tight, and so you proposed to do a collaboration for a value for value exchange.

[00:14:22] The important part here is that it is equal value for value. So whatever you charge there should be equal amount given on the other side. So this is a really cool way that you, as a business owner, can provide value for another business, they can provide value in exchange, and you guys can do this type of collaboration.

[00:14:42] I've seen this done really, really successfully, and we've done it within our business very successfully. The really important part is being very, very clear on your expectations and on their expectations so that everyone in the collaboration is happy with the result.

[00:14:56] So that is all. That was the 10 [00:15:00] ways that you can collaborate with other businesses to grow your reach and grow your impact. And I hope this gets you excited. I hope it sparks from some ideas of how you can collaborate with other businesses.

[00:15:11] So if you want more of how to actually go about these collaborations, how to pitch them, how to utilize them within your marketing plan, join us for our free workshop on September 28th at 12:00 PM pst. Go to businessbabescollective.com/workshop to register and I would love to see you.

[00:15:29] And if you wanna come up with a collaboration strategy specific to your business and you're like, This is exactly what I need right now, this is exactly what I need to grow my business to the next level, I would love to work with you on that strategy. If you wanna work one on one together, you can go to businessbabescollective.com/coaching and you can fill out all your information and we'll come up with your pitch together. We'll brainstorm some collaboration opportunities. We'll brainstorm other businesses that you can reach out to.

[00:15:57] We'll have a strategic strategy in place [00:16:00] so that you can leave that call feeling super confident in your next steps to collaborate with some really incredible business owners that maybe you've been dreaming of working with for a very long time, but it's something where you just haven't really understood how to go about it or how to pitch them and what to offer.

[00:16:17] So I would love to work with you on that and help you get some organic exposure for your business. I truly believe that this is in the best way to get in front of new clients, new potential customers, without feeling like you have to be on social media 24 7 or feeling like you have to be running really expensive paid ads.

[00:16:37] So I can't wait to work with you on this. This is something I'm so passionate about and so excited to support clients on. Go to businessbabescollective.com/coaching if you wanna work one on one. Or if you wanna join us for our workshop, go to businessbabescollective.com/workshop. That is all for today, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of the Business Babes Collective Podcast. We'll see you soon.[00:17:00]

[00:17:01] If you love this episode, make sure you screenshot, post and tag us on Instagram @businessbabesco. Want to know when the next episode goes live? Subscribe on your podcast app and while you're there, give us a review. Until next time, keep dreaming big, setting goals and taking action.

Danielle Wiebe