Why Collaborations Are Key to Content Marketing Success
Starting a business with limited funding forces you to get creative with your marketing and turn to less glamorous avenues to attract traffic, build an audience and ultimately extract leads or sales from these efforts.
We’ve all heard organic marketing success stories that cleverly leveraged social media or search engines to gain traction and build successful startups within a short period of time, but viral success doesn’t come with every business venture.
Think about it, these stories are media worthy because they are rare occurrences.
Building your business off the back of content
The internet is filled with consumers ready to absorb what’s in front of them if you can find a way to break into their daily browsing routine. Content marketing works well in that regard.
As an SEO and content marketer by trade, I have always been an advocate of these channels but working in corporate skewed my perceptions since it provided me with luxuries like amplification through paid advertising and marketing budgets to secure beneficial opportunities with other brands.
Starting from scratch quickly brought me back down to earth and even with my expertise it was a sharp learning curve but brought me lessons I am extremely grateful for.
While having an SEO optimized site with all the technical bells and whistles will help your efforts it won’t be what brings in the visits. First, you need to build a base of articles you feel readers would relate to, look to create:
- Content that is superior to all your competitors
- Content that targets your various high-value keywords
- Content that matches specific intent or mindsets potential customer would have
- Content that appeals to specific demographics or archetypes that would be interested in your product
Protip! It’s not enough to simply riddle of facts, stats and helpful hints you have to bring in your personality within your writing, that why it would be too obvious to plagiarise and you start to create a persona in their minds that people would like to engage with before they even contact you.
How to find content marketing collaborations
Creating content is only phase one and I would encourage you to keep creating content but start to augment it with outreach. Since you’re at the mercy of what your social media followers and search engine rankings will provide you with, you need to look outside those barriers.
There is still a plethora of traffic you’re not tapping into and reaching out to other sites is an ideal if the labor-intensive way to tap into those web traffic reserves.
It’s time to break out the excel sheet or Google sheet, whichever you prefer and its time to start building lists of sites you think would have access to audiences with similar interests or overlaps that you can reach out to and introduce them to your business.
Search engines
Head off to your preferred search engine, personally, I would recommend using more than just Google since each Search Engines rankings may provide you with specific opportunities.
Start performing searches for industry related keywords and start taking note of the results you’re getting. Weed out your competitors and start to take note of bloggers, media publications, complimentary services, and review sites and start populating your list.
Social Media
Now head over to Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter and repeat the process, perform searches, look through hashtags and start to identify accounts with a reasonable amount of activity and influence and start populating your list.
How to approach content marketing collaborations
Now that you have your list filled out and sorted through potential targets you would like to approach its time to make content and gauge their appetite for collaboration.
Guest posting
If you’re a confident content creator then guest posting is a great way to soften the blow and get your foot in the door. Offering a site a free piece of content in exchange for a link, social media shout outs or a spot in their newsletter will all help in reaching a new audience.
Link exchange
Did you recently create a piece of content where you referenced another site as a source? Reach out to them and let them know that you appreciate their content.
If it’s a product or service review/listicle you could ask them if they’re willing to feature your article on there about us or media mentions page.
If its a blog post you can make content to say you loved their work and referred it in your article and wanted to know if your article may be a good fit for their social media, email database or even ask them for a specific link from one of their articles back to your site.
Trade exchange
Perhaps you have a discount code or coupon for your product or service reach out and give a brand an exclusive branded code for their audience. In return, you could do the same and pitch your audience on their services.
Partnerships & Co-branding
Do your services complement one another? Why not create unique packages where you both factor in your margins and sell one another's service as a combined deal to both your audiences.
Competitions
Do you have a stock you’re willing to give away or services you’re willing to render for free or at an attractively discounted price? If not, then cold hard cash or a cash voucher equivalent would work better. Speak to your prospective collaborator about the attractiveness of a giveaway of your prize and see if they’ll bite.
Alternatively, you could reach out to these brands and ask if you the would be willing to set some stock aside, or you’re willing to purchase their product or service as a give away in exchange for sponsored messaging towards their audience.
Collaborations mean playing the long game
Building collaborations take time but trust me it does get easier, after the first few, you’ll find your stride and how to gauge situations.
Some collaborations will be short-lived while others may turn into long term fruitful partnerships, so always be open to exploring opportunities and see how you can both gain from working together.
How content marketing has worked for us
We’ve almost exclusively worked with guest posting, link exchange and partnerships as our collaborative strategy and its been pretty fruitful.
We launched our site on 18 October 2016 and received 360 visits during that month. Fast forward to today our blog hosts over 700 articles and for the month of May 2019 we managed to attract 64,052 visitors.
Over the course of the 31 months, we’ve averaged 36,796 visitors per month and a steady stream of leads in the process.
Source: nichemarket Google Analytics
Slow and steady wins the race
In the tech world where we’re constantly mesmerized by meteoric growth at all costs with stories of tech unicorns making it big, it’s easy to forget that businesses weren’t always built off the back of VC’s and multiple funding rounds.
While your story may not be a glamorous one snatching all the headlines, let it rather be a sustainable one. Where growth is a metric but profitability is the target.
About the author
Ché Köhler is the co-founder of nichemarket, a South African Business Directory and digital marketing agency. He is an avid blogger who specialises in writing about marketing tech and cryptocurrency.
