How to Build a Collaborative Content Marketing Strategy

Businesses thrive when their various teams are able to work together in harmony, and when each team’s work helps to craft and advertise a singular brand identity. In other words, the various departments within a company should be able to join forces to pursue a single goal.

The same idea can be applied to the idea of working with other companies.

Collaboration is a powerful way for two or more brands to achieve greater success together, especially where their respective content marketing strategies are concerned. When multiple brands pool their resources, funds, and teams to create innovative marketing strategies, all brands involved have a great chance to reap the benefits.

Before looking into exactly how to make these kinds of collaborations happen, we’ll first consider some of the most important advantages of choosing this kind of approach to content marketing. Understanding exactly why collaborations can be so great is necessary to learn how to make them work for your business.

Benefits of collaborating

Collaborating with other companies carries various benefits. In particular, it can be enormously helpful in terms of being able to improve team collaboration even within your own company. This is because learning from collaborating with external teams encourages your employees to apply those lessons within your company.

However, there are also two other major benefits associated with creating collaborative marketing strategies. Put simply, these benefits are increased diversity, and access to a greater number of tools.

Increased diversity

When you’re formulating your marketing strategy, the goal is to reach as many people in your target demographic as possible. Of course, the more people you can successfully include within your audience, the more sales you will be able to make. This means that your company’s marketing strategy needs to account for customers from potentially widely different backgrounds.

Few things can be more helpful to this end than to have as diverse a team as possible assigned to the job of creating your content marketing strategy.

By collaborating with teams from other companies, you will be able to mix your unique company culture with theirs. This ensures that your resulting marketing strategy will be born from a mix of companies which encourage the development of different ideas. In other words, your talent pool will expand while the kinds of ideas that get incorporated into the final product will be more varied.

This will make your strategy more accessible to people from lots of diverse backgrounds. With ecommerce being as profitable as it currently is, this is especially important, since online marketing campaigns can easily reach audiences across the entire world.

Collaborating with diverse teams around the world has also never been easier than it is right now, with most people operating on a work from home (or anywhere) basis. Your company will be able to establish a collaborative remote marketing team with ease because of this.

In short, diverse collaborations lead to the creation of stronger, more broadly applicable content marketing strategies that bring a fresh perspective to the table.

Access to more tools

Teams from a different company will most likely use tools and software that your company does not. This might mean that you will have to consider the benefits of similar tools, before beginning the collaboration process. 

Sometimes, your partner company will introduce you to a better alternative than the one you had been using; sometimes the opposite will happen.

Collaborations can lead your company to consider tools it might not have come across otherwise. Outbound Cloud Contact Center: Choose the Right Software to Improve Customer Relationships, for example, is an article you might have created in conjunction with a communications provider. It might spur a point of discussion that leads to your marketing team realizing they need a new approach to contact centers in general. 

This would lead them to encourage the consideration of a new call center software solution they wouldn’t have encountered without the collaboration.

Put simply, collaborations let your marketing team have access to tools they wouldn’t otherwise get to use. It’s also a chance to encourage other companies to use software that works well for your teams.

How to collaborate

Now that we’ve established why collaborations can be so useful in developing great content marketing strategies, it’s time to look at how to actually build those collaborative marketing strategies. This process can be split into a few simple topics.

The omnichannel approach

Companies that offer omnichannel services are better at keeping their customers engaged with their brand, to the point of being able to retain 89% of their consumers. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that your content marketing strategy takes an omnichannel approach.

In terms of collaborating with other companies, an omnichannel content marketing strategy is ideal. This is because the total number of channels that are incorporated into the overall strategy can increase. Does your partner company have a large social media presence? Use this to your advantage and turn that presence into a marketing channel for your own content!

Increase your reach

To get the most out of a collaborative content marketing strategy, you should aim to make the most out of every resource and avenue that your partner company has to offer.

For example, if you’re interested in giving your conversational marketing a boost, a collaboration can be ideal for this. After all, what better way is there to get your brand into more day-to-day conversations than to spread brand loyalty among more people? By taking advantage of your partner brand’s sphere of influence, you can expand your own.

If what you’re after is a more varied content marketing strategy, then why not invite members of your partner company to create guest content pieces? This can help with increasing diversity, as discussed above, while once again pushing your sphere of influence to include your partner company’s brand loyalists.

Capitalize on experience

When you’re choosing which brand(s) to collaborate with, you’ll most likely be considering in what ways those brands’ marketing strategies are effective. Are their digital ad campaigns particularly popular? Do they have an app that everyone seems to be downloading? Are they the subject of many conversations in their field?

Whatever the reason, your partner company has unique skills. A collaboration between you and them should involve you making the most of those skills.

If they’re a highly efficient small business, for example, you would want to spend time asking their marketing team about their digital marketing strategies for small businesses. Even if your own company doesn’t fall into the category of ‘small business’, there will still be plenty of lessons to take away from how they mitigate their size to maximize their profits.

The key here is to structure your collaborative marketing strategy around making the most out of both your and their skills. In the same way that your marketing team will want to learn from theirs, your partner company’s teams will be eager to see how things work at your company. Be sure to offer them your best skills, as this will encourage them to do the same.

When you’re formulating your winning collaborative content marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure that all companies involved are getting the most they can out of the arrangement. You should be putting in as much as you’re getting back, and vice versa for them. If this is not happening, you should look for a different company to collaborate with.

Parting thoughts: a mutually beneficial strategy

When done right, collaborative work can be immensely helpful. Your team will have the chance for some fresh perspectives, as well as opportunities to make new connections. This can be helpful in all aspects of marketing - especially when it comes to the generation of new ideas.

Often, collaborations can be helpful in terms of having a new set of eyes on the same strategy. For example, you might find it helpful to have a second group of people around who can help you ensure that your PCI compliance stays up to date. Sometimes your partner company will catch small mistakes that can make all the difference!

As mentioned before, the inclusion of new tools can also be a major benefit of collaborating with other brands. The right tools can make a great team into a fantastic one, and can help to boost productivity to previously unattainable levels.

The right collaboration will also help to expand your overall reach. And when your brand is able to reach new eyes, you’ll be more likely to generate more leads and eventually loyal customers. This is especially true when you’ve already got an excellent content marketing strategy - something which your collaborative projects should aim for in the first place.

Learn more:

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6 Ways To Do Smart & Responsible eCommerce Marketing During Covid-19

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