Successful brand collaboration can help your company grow its online reputation (in a good way) and reach a wider audience.
But if your partnership is weak or not the best fit, your collaboration will fail, which could cost you your reputation or even your profit.
A brand collaboration refers to the partnership between at least two brands or a brand and an influencer to promote a specific product or service to get the attention of your target audience on a larger scale.
About 71 percent of consumers enjoy brand collaborations, so it’s worth the effort to reach your marketing goals.
The following are five tips for successful brand collaboration.
Carefully select your partner brand
Simply put, there is more to brand collaboration than discovering a potential partner brand that is fresh, exciting and has a significant following online.
The goal is to thoroughly research the brand you are considering working with. Will this partnership give you the chance to break out of your brand’s comfort zone and reach a new audience? Or, will this partnership help establish your brand as an industry leader? How can you benefit each other?
You should avoid working with anyone who’s already worked with your competition. You want your brand collaboration to feel natural for both parties, and that won’t necessarily be the case if your partner has worked with your competitors.
Ideally, both brands should bring something valuable to the table.
Unclear of exactly what your brand has to offer? Check out our nine expert tips for branding from scratch. You also can view our five steps to determine your brand personality.
Plan your brand collaboration campaign
Planning is everything. Even before you decide on a partner brand to reach out to and propose a collaboration with, you should have some idea of what you want to accomplish.
Consider your goals and the opportunities surrounding them. Once you have at least outlined a plan, you can better select a brand to partner with and bring solid ideas to the table.
You should give your potential partner brand the opportunity to bring its own ideas to the table, too. The best collaborations are a give-and-take that can help you both develop the best possible campaign.
Create and use a clear contract (and guidelines)
Consistency is key to a successful brand collaboration campaign. In order to achieve and maintain consistency while staying committed to authenticity, you must negotiate the details of how your partnership will work and cement that in a clear contract.
Thinking through what each brand will be doing, how it will happen, how often it will happen and what that will look like should all be included in basic guidelines in your contract. Don’t forget about tone of voice, creative elements and which social media (and other) channels you’ll be using.
Any exchange of pay or coverage of expenses should also be part of your contract.
If there’s anything that’s unclear, talk through it to come to an understanding that works for both brands.
Aim to create something valuable
Successful brand collaborations create something that is valuable or at least interesting for your target audience.
Whether that’s fun or entertainment, or perhaps it’s unique and inspiring. Regardless, think through how your brand and a brand partner can come together to not only catch consumers’ attention but leave a memorable impression as well.
The more engaging you can be together, the more likely you’ll compel your audience to take a specific, desired action.
Measure your performance
Of course, there’s no way to tell whether your brand collaboration is working or not if you’re not monitoring the performance metrics.
Especially if some metrics are only accessible by one brand and others are only accessible by your brand, it’s important to discuss in advance how you’ll gather and analyze all relevant data.
Depending on the length of your brand collaboration, you can easily pivot during the campaign based on the data to better optimize your efforts.
In conclusion
In the end, a successful brand collaboration comes down to active management before, during and after the campaign. There are a number of moving pieces when two or more brands come together to collaborate. Keep everything as simple as possible and promote communication between all partners as much as possible.
As you begin to explore brand collaboration, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.
