How to find allies and create marketing partnerships
We have discussed and published articles here before on forming alliances with other small business owners. One simple way to support each other is to do business with each other.
But today I want to introduce you to a very simple way to start down the road toward creating some powerful content and social media marketing alliances with other businesses.
If you don’t have a fairly aggressive social media marketing program now, this won’t help you very much. The first step is to establish your voice on the best social media platforms for your product or service. A healthy number of social media followers and friends will help you successfully pull off this strategy.
With that said, you need to analyze who has a “share of the voice” within your area of publishing on your social media platforms. Let’s use me as an example. The main area where I publish could be easily categorized as “small business.”
Therefore, I would want to take an “inventory” of others who publish social media content within the small business category. There are a number of ways to do this. Let me give you two websites where you can start your research for Twitter.
When you use Twazzup, the best strategy is to search for the hashtags or keywords that you most often use in your Tweets or other social media posts. On Followerwonk you can search Twitter bios by keyword to find those who are in the same niche as you are.
You’re conducting this research to form a picture of the people or companies that have a share of the voice in your market niche. The next step is to find those who are not direct competitors with you.
Continuing with using me as an example, I would find that all kinds of service providers publish to the small business community in the social media. CPAs, crowdfunding websites, even healthy snack food providers are sending their social media messages out to the small business market.
I can then contact these companies directly and propose alliances in social media and content marketing. This strategy costs nothing but a small amount of time it takes to do the research, communicate with the other business and come up with the best ways to share marketing content with one another.