Businesses can achieve amazing growth through collaborating with other businesses. With business collaboration, you can reduce risks, increase success, and improve innovation. With the right plans, you can achieve amazing results.
1. Create More Referrals – When you work with others, even your competition, you create a situation where you will get more recommendations. The reason is that if you’re good at what you do (even if you are competitors) and they can’t take on another client for some reason, they’ll recommend you.
2. Host a Joint Live Event – One way to get a lot of businesses together that are technically competition is to host an event of some sort. You can use the event to educate your industry, or you can get a lot of people together in your industry to educate your customers. Either way, you’ll create contacts that will help your business grow exponentially.
3. Host a Webinar Together – If you don’t want to go as far as a live event, you can host webinars together. You can get a lot of people and do a webinar “summit”, or you can do one webinar at a time interviewing people from your industry.
4. Form Joint Ventures – Once you get to know people within your industry, look at ways you can work together on short-term or long-term projects. Often even in situations where you are competition to each other, you can find a project to work on together to make an impact and to grow your business.
5. Create a Strategic Alliance – This is a good way to create a partnership that is shorter term than a JV partnership. Perhaps both companies want to join for an advertising campaign that is focused on raising money for a charity. They can work together on all the marketing materials and appear in all ads together.
6. Rent Space from Them – One way to collaborate with another business is to use their space. For example, if you sell jewelry that you make (or anything for that matter), you can ask local stores to allow you to set up a pop-up store. Then, in exchange, you market your pop-up as well as their store.
7. Feature Each Other – Another way to collaborate with another business is to find a way to feature each other. This works best with businesses that aren’t direct competition to yours. For example, if you’re an event planner, you can work with a print shop for invitations and a certain rental place, and so forth. In exchange, they will also recommend you as their party planner.
8. Get Social – A fast and effective way to collaborate with complementary businesses is to plan a blog tour. How this works is you get several business owners to allow you to post content on their blog with your byline. They also do the same on your blog.
Using these ways to collaborate with other businesses, you’ll increase awareness, make more contacts, and grow faster.
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