Over these next few weeks I’ll be posting this entire series detailing my strategies on effectively developing strategic partnerships in your community.
I believe that developing strategic partnerships is one of the fastest and most cost effective ways of building your business. It should be one of the foundation elements that receive continual focus with direct goals in every quarter.
Now one of the big problems with strategic partnerships is that local businesses are constantly approached or solicited by others to do things, display things or post things that help other people grow their business. For the business being approached this generally just takes up valuable space and is a waste of time with little to no reciprocal benefit which is why so many businesses won’t talk to you or have a standard practice of saying no.
Here are my five steps to overcoming this. Go with a giving hand and deliver real value that leads to mutually beneficial relationships.
- Interview the Expert
- Sponsor Your Community
- The Charity Lunch & Learn
- Cross Promotion
- Revenue Share Programs
In this post we’re going to cover the fourth step, which is direct Cross Promotion.
This is where it get’s really fun.
If you’ve followed this process as I’ve outlined and fully committed to each step you’ve now doubt created a great new stream of leads for your business. More importantly you’ve created relationships that lend credibility and that are strong enough to ensure your strategic partners will be compelled to work for you.
It’s time to talk to them about direct cross promotion.
One of the common promotions I’ve made popular in our industry from my first speech at Fitness Business Summit was the use of a leadbox.
A Leadbox has some fundamental problems though, they take up space and don’t really do a lot if people are mentioning them and actually directing people to enter.
At this stage in your relationship your partners will likely be excited about promoting your leadbox because you’ve given them so much upfront value.
One of the ways you can further enhance this is start your leadbox with a non-traditional offer. Working with your strategic partner create a prize package for entry that people will perceive as valuable this makes it easy to promote and ensures lots of submissions. Real tangible product combined with services for one winner creates massive perceived value that helps to overcome peoples fear of exposing their personal information. In addition your relationship with the strategic partner will have them excited to promote that value to win to their customers enhancing the number of submissions you receive.
Now obviously when you award the prize don’t stop there, make sure you’re contacting the other submissions with a high value trial or offer to generate as many warm prospects as possible and add them all to your list.
After the first month I recommend switching to a standard offer box for at least 60 days before offering the tangible prize again, you need to keep it fresh. Though the submissions will be lower your relationship will still ensure the strategic partner promotes it. This is also why you will need to rotate it to something dramatic every couple of months.
Now in addition or instead of the leadbox it’s time to talk to your strategic partner about possibly promoting you to their list. Create a high value promotion and provide them all the resources to easily send or promote it. I’d even suggest you let them keep a portion or all of the revenue and simply let them provide the certificates for service that people redeem with you. Your relationship and the tremendous value will almost guarantee they’ll be willing to promote your one-off offer.
14, 21 and 28 day programs or some other high-value trial package work great for this. If possible you always want to direct the promotion to where people are opting in with you to give you their contact information and become part of your list, this is what we’re really buying. Just make sure you’re prepared with your system of converting these people to ongoing clients so you can maximize your benefit from this cross promotion.
Next comes our final step, the Revenue Share Program, stay tuned!
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