Strategic partners

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.

1. Interview the Expert
2. Sponsor Your Community
3. The Charity Lunch & Learn
4. Cross Promotion
5. Revenue Share Programs

In this post we’re going to cover the first step, which is to Interview the Expert.

I suggest between Google and your knowledge of the locale you find 15 top experts in your area, highly respected, well known, high traffic generating complimentary professionals that cater to your desired client. In fact you should recreate this list every 90 days and begin this whole process anew to continually establish more credibility in your marketplace.

Contact each potential expert to see if we can arrange a 5 minute interview on camera. This is why we start with 15, between reluctance and aligning schedules that list of 15 will likely become 6-9 businesses that will be your focus for the next 90 days.

During the interview ask them 3 questions that accomplish our specific goals.

1)   Ask them to first introduce themselves, share what their key product or service is and then ask them for tips or suggestions on how people using this product or service will get the most from it. The goal is provide real content to help people get more value from this person’s product or service.

Ex. Chiropractor – What can people do after treatment at home to ensure they receive the most benefit from their adjustments?

2)   Your second question is the loose opportunity to sort of talk themselves up. Ask them about what the key benefits are for people that use products or services such as there’s on a regular basis.

Ex. Massage Therapist – What lifestyle changes are people likely to experience from using massage on a regular basis?

3)   Finally ask them about how being fit or regularly active may also contribute to the effectiveness of their product or service.

Ex. Hair Stylist – They say, “80% of looking good is feeling good” do you think people that are regularly active and get their hair styled tend to be more confident and what impact does that have on their day to day life?

You want to appear in these videos with the person you are interviewing. These videos should then be posted on YouTube. The names and descriptions of these videos should be direct matches to the name of the business you interviewed. This will ensure the videos begin to show very quickly underneath their organic listing for their business and as we know from the behaviours of people on the internet they are more likely to watch this video. You are immediately providing third party validation for their business, able to drive their customers to your webpage via a link in the description and borrow and establish greater credibility by appearing in multiple videos with multiple experts in your community. This is why it’s important to choose the well-known experts that may have the best reputation and the biggest audiences.

Make sure to post these videos on your website as well and promote them to your list. The goal is to have that businesses customers see the video as your own list of clients and contacts. From this two important things can happen.

1)   As I mentioned the views provide third party credibility to that expert and provide a measure to which you can immediately validate your efforts to provide them value and bring them new clients. (I have coaching clients who had videos that received well over 100 views in just a few days and every time this impressed the expert that was interviewed.) This opens the door for us to re-approach them with the next step in our process and the Law of Reciprocity will leave them much more likely to accept.

2)   Secondly as I also mentioned when you post these on your website you instantly establish to your audience a high level of credibility. After all you must be the go to expert if you appear with all these other top experts in your community.

That wraps up the correct process for the first stage of developing effective strategic partnerships. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a detailed walkthrough of the other stages.