Marketing leaders, what's one partnership or collaboration that has been particularly beneficial for your brand's growth?

Question

In the quest for exceptional brand growth, we turned to seasoned marketing leaders and CEOs for their most impactful partnerships and collaborations. From the synergy of a WordPress plugin partnership to the strategic leverage of dental business coaching, discover the diverse and powerful alliances in our compilation of 14 expert insights.

Syed Balkhi · Answer

One of my earliest partnerships was with the founder of a WordPress plugin for opt-in popup forms. This was a great collaboration that is still going strong ten years after we started working together. The reason why this collaboration worked was because both my business partner and I saw the need for a tool that helped businesses get more leads without the need for complex technical knowledge. We also believed in putting customers first and knew that we had a great idea in the making. Since we started working together, our business has only grown, and we've continued to reap the benefits of the lessons we learned from our collaboration. Today, we continue to partner up with other founders and create a comprehensive suite of tools to help small businesses grow.

Steve Goldner · Answer

As the CMO for Beard Bros Pharms, the partnership with Catalyst Cannabis Co. stands out as a prime example that drives brand growth.
The partnership is strong and deeply valued for three reasons:
1) Shared key brand objective within each company - delivering valued solutions to patients and consumers that increase their quality of life.2) Business integrity commitment - a shared value system to drive prosperity for each other as opposed to 'squeezing' partners for individual company success.3) Shared commitment to seeing the entire nascent cannabis industry grow successfully beyond our individual companies.

Michael Wood · Answer

I have partnered with homeless shelters in the capital city of Ottawa, Canada. I had 10,000 people on my company's mailing list (pre-pandemic), and I emailed my customers asking if they had winter clothing in good condition—and of course, clean—that they would be willing to donate. We received over 2,000 pieces of winter clothing for men, women, and children that we delivered directly to the shelters.
Our customers were so happy with the initiative; we were told many times that we were the only company they would ever use. With the same mailing list, we sent out an email with 'Get a Job!' in the subject line. Of course, the open rate was phenomenal, and we were asking people to donate used business attire for men and women (and children's clothes as well), so those who could not afford business attire for a job interview could come in and pick anything they wanted off the racks for FREE.
This led another company, Salon Bliss, to contact me and let me know that women could come in for complimentary hairstyling and makeup so they felt as confident as possible walking into their interview. If you support the community, the community will always support you and your business.

Benjamin Rojas · Answer

Our brand saw growth when we started collaborating with different WordPress page builders. One that stands out is SeedProd. They are a popular WordPress theme-builder plugin, and collaborating with them helped us in getting more subscribers, sales, and brand awareness. Our brand seamlessly fits well with page builders because users want their website to be seen by ranking high on search engines. Collaborating with another brand that aligns with what you have to offer lets you tap into their audience, boosting your reach and brand awareness. It's like a win-win where both brands get exposed to new customers.

John Turner · Answer

If you're looking for successful partnership opportunities, look no further than social media. Websites like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok are packed with influencers who would be more than happy to promote your product to their audience. We adopted this strategy a few years ago when we realized these internet personalities can reach prospects who've never heard of our brand. Within a few months, we saw our social media traffic double, and conversions increased across the board. My advice for business owners or marketers thinking of adopting this strategy is to focus on finding partners with an audience that's similar to your own. For example, if you sell website plugins, work with content creators who build websites and do a lot of tech-based videos, since their audience is more likely to show interest in your product or service.

Daman Jeet Singh · Answer

When we started cross-promoting our product with a popular lead-generation plugin, we saw an explosion of new subscribers, sales, and engagement. I believe this is because what we both offer works so well together. Generating leads is a vital part of most sales funnels, so this partnership just made sense to us and our customers. I plan on seeking out other brands in our industry so I can start building rapport with other leaders and making collaboration a vital part of our long-term growth strategy.

Ariya Malek · Answer

Embracing and being in a relationship with competitors is beneficial. Being on the defensive end never looks good; it shows desperation and insecurity. I always embrace competitor relationships and, in fact, sometimes refer out depending on the client's needs. I have found in my business that supporting a client's needs outweighs just selling a product. In the long game, I have always benefited from this mindset. I have experienced being attacked by a huge competitor and, instead of fighting, I decided to create a relationship. To attack someone is to see them as a threat. I treated this situation as a compliment, and in response, the competitor looked foolish. If you know that you have a niche and are an expert in your field, you don't need to compete with anyone, and the right clientele will come to you.

Bryce Welker · Answer

Collaboration and partnerships are literally what make my brand a brand. As an affiliate marketer of finance exam prep materials, I make money by promoting and linking to various high-quality prep courses and resources. My collaboration with several of the leading CPA test-prep companies has been lucrative and helped establish my brand as a trusted source in the finance exam prep niche. From the beginning, this partnership was built on mutual respect and a shared goal of delivering value to CPA candidates.
The key to this success was our commitment to transparency and quality. I only recommend prep products I genuinely believe in. This approach helped build trust with my audience, as they came to rely on my recommendations as genuinely aimed at helping them succeed. They pass their exams, and my brand continues to grow. This is a testament to the fact that choosing the right partners can drive financial success and enhance brand integrity and audience trust.

Aarti Mathur · Answer

Smile Digital Health is an open-standards health IT company, focusing on data transformation and modernization. Our mission is #BetterGlobalHealth. We are champions of a truly interoperable, standardized, and automated health data system that provides seamless patient and community health. This is a massive paradigm shift in healthcare IT. Our mission is big, and one of our top partners has been Gartner.
Over the years, Gartner’s reports, deep research, tools, and insights on IT trends have been instrumental in informing our business and marketing strategies. Our partnership with them has helped us focus our marketing messaging on early adopters and innovators in healthcare and proactively align our marketing campaigns with industry trends, challenges, and themes. Smile has been named in the 2023 Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Healthcare Data, Analytics, and AI.

Blair Thomas · Answer

Having the right partnerships in place and collaborating with the right people is critical to offering the very best products and services to your customers. Partnering allows each party to access each other's skill sets and resources and greatly expands each brand's capabilities. As a high-risk credit card processing company, our goal is to help businesses—no matter their type of business—reach their goals faster and more efficiently.
Our partnership with Shopify has played a huge role in meeting businesses' payment processing and merchant account needs. When choosing a partner, keep this goal in mind: Your collaboration should take the complexity out of your target audience's biggest challenge. It should help support the objective of arming the consumer with the information, tools, and support they need to solve their biggest problem.

Jordan Conrad · Answer

I have had success reaching out to smaller trade shows and membership organizations that are related to our product. There are many local or regional shows and member organizations that don't have a national reach but still have large regional followings of people in your industry or niche. These venues are great because the audience is highly targeted and already focused on your industry.
If you have the budget to attend these shows yourself and collaborate on an in-person event, that usually works best. However, it can be costly to travel and attend shows as someone just starting out in business. Instead, reach out to the show organizers to see if you can collaborate with them or partner with them to sponsor an event without attending. In many cases, smaller, regional shows are eager for sponsorships since they do not have many large corporate clients for sponsorships, and they are very willing to work with you and try to make something work.

Travis Schreiber · Answer

One of the best pieces of advice I can give for companies looking to grow is to not be afraid of your competition and learn how you can work together. If one of your competitors does something that you do, but they do it better, see if you can work together and white-label part of their service for your clients and make it make sense financially for both of you.
Say you're a company that offers something like content writing and publishing, and you have a separate social media management service to promote that content for your clients, but you know one of your competitors who focuses exclusively on social media management can do it better. Rather than building an entire team and investing thousands of dollars to get to where they are, see if you can white-label their service or work with them. If you can make it work, you can immediately offer a better service for your clients, keep them longer, and reinvest that growth into a longer-term strategy if you want to bring it back in-house eventually. Even the biggest companies out there do this, so you shouldn't be afraid to either.
For example, Semrush doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or build their own version of every type of product they offer. Instead, they do things like partner with Brand24 for Media Monitoring, or they leverage tools like Google Lighthouse for performing website optimization audits rather than building their own. Look at your competition as opportunities, not adversaries.

Givona Sandiford · Answer

A partnership or collaboration that has been particularly beneficial for our growth at Melospeech has been our partnership with untrained interns.
In our second year of business, we launched an internship program to train individuals with no experience in operations. Of the three interns that we accepted into the program, two now work in our admin team, and one has gone on to become our billing and payroll manager. We recently enrolled him in some bookkeeping courses, and he submitted his first P&L for us this year after we were greatly dissatisfied with our costly bookkeeping firm from last year. Our CPA shared that his was the best P&L she's ever received from a business.
Being willing to partner with those who do not seem to have much to offer but are eager to learn can open up your business to undiscovered talent that can take you to new heights.

Shay Berman · Answer

One of my earliest partnerships was with a dental-business-coaching company. As the owner of a marketing agency, we work with a lot of dentists. Dentists are healthcare providers first and foremost—they don't necessarily see themselves as business owners, but they are. In order for them to make smart marketing decisions in collaboration with us and treat more new patients, these doctors need to understand the business side of running a practice.
Teaming up with a coaching company allowed my agency to provide our clients with a powerful resource to ensure the dentists and their teams were getting the business education and push they needed, while the coaching company was able to identify practices that needed marketing assistance and pass them along to us. Overall, when it comes to partnerships, it's been less about what my company needs, although that is important, and more so what our clients need that's outside of our wheelhouse. If our clients are successful, then we're successful.

What Partnerships Have Been Beneficial for Brand Growth?

What Partnerships Have Been Beneficial for Brand Growth?

WordPress Plugin Partnership Yields Growth

Beard Bros Pharms Drives Brand Growth

Community Support Boosts Customer Loyalty

SeedProd Collaboration Increases Brand Reach

Social Media Influencers Amplify Brand Exposure

Lead-Gen Plugin Partnership Spurs Subscriber Surge

Embrace Competitor Relationships for Mutual Benefit

Affiliate Marketing Strengthens Brand Trust

Gartner Insights Inform Marketing Strategy

Shopify Partnership Solves Customer Challenges

Trade Shows and Organizations Expand Reach

Leverage Competitor Strengths Through Collaboration

Internship Program Uncovers Hidden Talent

Dental Business Coaching Enhances Client Success