Building strategic alliances can be a great way to access fresh perspectives, expand your voice and have a positive impact on your content marketing strategy. Leveraging relationships in this way can be beneficial for both parties involved, through the content creation itself and the amplification of it. By sharing the message beyond traditional channels, it often reaches new audiences, increasing your following and hopefully impacting your bottom line.
There is a myriad of avenues to explore for collaboration, from other companies in your supply chain, industry leaders and employees to your customers. Each avenue brings with it different benefits and considerations, so we are going to kick off with the top five reasons why you should consider embracing collaboration in your future content marketing strategy.
1. Pooling resources
Collaborating is a great way to share resources and complement one another’s specific set of expertise. If you pursue an influencer partnership, you can utilise the relationships they hold with their captive audience and benefit from higher levels of content engagement. When collaborating with someone in your supply chain, they bring an understanding and expertise within different aspects of the industry, widening your remit. Additionally, by joining forces, you increase the number of writers, designers, and thought leaders at your disposal, allowing you to expand the scope of your projects – think big!
2. Extending reach
If you are collaborating with more than two partners, you instantly multiply your prospective audience. For example, if you work with an influencer who has 20,000 followers, your content instantly has a minimum of 20,000 opportunities to be seen, digested and shared. This makes collaborative content an exponentially powerful tool for attracting new audiences and generating new business leads for all parties involved.
3. Establishing credibility
When partnering with another respected brand, one of your supply chain companies or a thought leader, your credibility is enhanced as both companies are publicly showing support for each other, tapping into the trust and respect each brand holds with their audience. Thought leadership marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful ways for brands to establish their credibility and grow, showcasing the knowledge the company has on the topic and their individual voice within the industry for heightened message resonance. Incorporating the opinions and ideas of other respected figures in your blog posts, papers, podcasts or whatever format of content you are putting out there, brings with it the authority that those people hold.
4. A unique perspective
With two or more voices collaborating on a single piece, you’ll be including more viewpoints and will create a more well-rounded project. It is easy to get into the groove of your day-to-day and forget that there may be a variety or better ways to do something, different approaches to try, and new technologies that can save you time and money. This is especially true in the B2B world. Every day new information is released to announce exciting new technologies, it’s almost impossible to keep up with everything while managing your workload. By joining up with other parties, you can divide and conquer, so to speak. You save time by splitting up tasks such as researching industry articles, blogs and papers, and bring that cumulative knowledge to the table to share.
5. Increasing marketing budgets
In addition to a divided workload, another benefit can be combined budgets for projects undertaken. If you collaborate with another business, and the terms involve sharing development and marketing responsibilities, joining up your budgets makes sense. This gives a bigger bang for your buck and if done well, it’s a win-win situation for both participants.
So, there you have it, five really powerful points that support the effort to find partners and join forces on your next content marketing project. Our best advice is to start small with a single blog post and track the performance to gauge the success.
Once you have seen for yourself the power of content collaboration, reach out to us and we can work with you to extend these principals across your entire content marketing strategy on a larger scale.
