There are a number of different ways businesses can partner.
We’ve mentioned a few here on the blog in regards to the travel industry.
For example, inns and B&Bs often partner with local restaurants to recommend business for each other. Maybe they offer a discount for each other’s guests.
Another example might be an attraction offer discounts to local hotels in the area. This encourages the hotels to send guests to the attraction. The hotel can say something like, “Check out the Rock Valley Waterfall. As our guest you get 15% off the regular price.”
Partnerships are common in just about every industry and they don’t have to be related to discounts. With marketing moving online you often find businesses partnering for things like webinars, co-written guides and things like that.
By now you’re probably starting to get an idea of how partnerships could work for your business. Let’s get into a few more examples and reasons why partnerships will most likely help your business grow.
Reason #1. Sharing Customers
The biggest reason why partnerships help businesses is sharing customers.
In simple math, if you have 100 customers and another business has 100 customers then if you find a partnership you can now each market to twice the number of customers. There might be some crossover, but you get the point.
Actually, a great example of this came when I worked in the catalog industry. Two catalogs that offered complementary products would often exchange names from their customer lists and allow the other to mail catalogs to each other’s lists.
In simple terms you might have a landscaping supply catalog partner to exchange lists with a home materials catalog or something like that.
But this works in a lot of ways. We mentioned a few earlier and you can probably come up with the best way to work together. There are an infinite number of ways you and another business can work together.
Reason #2. Combining Efforts
And that’s the second reason why business partnerships are great: you and the other businesses can combine your efforts.
Let’s say you’re a boutique specializing in apparel. You find another boutique that specializes in jewelry and accessories. Together you could create one email campaign. To pay the designer it’s the same cost. Now you can split the cost with the other boutique.
Or you could create something like an online fashion guide. Instead of only being able to dedicate say, five hours to the project to create it you each contribute 5 hours and come up with a guide that is perhaps twice as good or even better than one you would have been able to create together.
And that kind of brings us to the last reason why partnerships are great for businesses.
Reason #3. Creating Unique And More Valuable Packages
Together, you and another business can often put together packages that are more valuable than you could create on your own.
A simple example would be that your apparel boutique and the jewelry boutique could create different combinations using each other’s products. Together, these packages are often more appealing to your customers than the products are separately.
Back to online marketing, you and the other businessperson could come up with a script for a webinar. As one, you offer your great insight, but as a duo you offer your customers something really special because now they’re getting access to two great experts instead of one.
When you combine your efforts you can often create something twice as valuable and often even more valuable than that and almost always more valuable than you could offer on your own.
How To Find Partnerships
The best way to find partnerships is to look for complementary businesses.
We mentioned a few examples above like a B&B and a restaurant, a landscaping catalog and an interior design catalog, and an apparel boutique and a jewelry boutique.
The first step is to identify the potential candidates. Then reach out to them. There are different ways you could go about it. You could jump right into discussion about an idea you have for a partnership.
If you do jump right into that make sure the partnership is appealing to the other business. You want them to have the incentive to do it, first of all, and to also want to push it once things are rolling.
Another way to approach it would be to simply ask to have a conversation to discuss business. The relationship could simply be two business owners discussing questions and challenges with each other and helping each other out every month over coffee. You’re not competitors so there is nothing to lose and everything to gain from a relationship like that.
And those meetings and conversations often lead to ideas for things like the partnerships ideas we’ve mentioned in the post above.
Conclusion
Business partnerships come in many different forms. Hopefully the ideas are already flowing through your brain and you’re thinking about businesses in your industry you can reach out to. And maybe you already have a few ideas for how you can partner with those businesses.
That’s what I hope because I know that even one business partnership can really help your business grow!
