297. Collaboration Ideas for Product-Based Businesses

One of the best ways to grow your business and to get in front of new customers is to collaborate with other small companies… essentially leveraging other people’s audiences. 

When you first hear collaboration, most people automatically think of product collaboration. Where you partner with someone to create a new product. While that can and does work, it’s not the end all be all of collaboration. It takes the most time, energy, and effort to pull off, and if you do it too often, it can actually diminish the success of each one. 

Talking to Larissa Loden, a jewelry designer who has done a fair number of design collaborations has pulled back on them. I can’t remember if we talked about it on this podcast or while I was on hers, you can get links to those episodes below. But, the point is, while most of them were successful, some weren’t, so she decided to switch up her focus a bit. 

All that said, my goal for today’s episode is to talk about other ways you can collaborate with small businesses this holiday season, and beyond.

Prefer to listen to the episode? Click here.

Who Should You Collaborate With

Before we get into the how, let’s talk about the who. Because the success of the collaboration is going to be highly dependent on who you partner with. There needs to be some sort of common thread between the businesses and the audiences you attract.

Businesses That Sell Complimentary Products

The easiest and most obvious is someone who sells a complimentary product. For example, if you sell activewear, you could partner with someone who sells workout gear. Or if you sell skincare products you could partner with someone who sells makeup. 

Businesses with a Similar Target Audience

If your products don’t directly complement each other, but there is a throughline in your audience that also makes for a great collaboration opportunity. For example, being environmentally conscious. If that is the main tenet of your brand and the reason people buy from you, that is the message you can lead with. If you sell environmentally conscious or non-toxic beauty products you can partner with a green home goods company. The products might not be directly related but the underlying ethos is. 

Businesses that are Physically Close to You

If you have a brick-and-mortar location, then tap into your neighbors. Whether you’re in a downtown area, or even just in a shopping center. Your local business community should be the first people you start connecting with. Get involved in your local chamber of commerce, with your local publications, etc. 

Even if you only have an online presence, there is still a lot of opportunity for you to engage with your local community. 

How to Collaborate With Other Product-Based Businesses

Now that we know the who, let’s talk about the what. There are a number of different ways you can collaborate with other businesses, and of course, you don’t have to do all of them. Pick the ones that make the most sense. Instead of trying to do all the things and doing none of them well, go all in on a few so you can make a bigger impact overall. 

Joint Gift Guide

One of my favorite things to do is a joint gift guide with other product-based businesses. Not only are gift guides great for SEO and your customers, having multiple businesses promote that gift guide is a great way to new eyeballs on your business. 

From a logistical perspective, there are a few ways you can do this. You can each publish a version of the same gift guide on your website. This is really my favorite way so that everyone is getting traffic, email subscribers, etc. But you’ve still got people seeing your products that may not know you exist yet. 

If you decide to host your own version of the gift guide, then you’ll have to think about the best way to direct the customer to those other products. You could use a tool like Shopify Collective which would allow you to sell the item on your own site and the source store would drop ship the item for you, 

If you just want to direct them to the other site to purchase, that works too. You can sign up for each other’s affiliate programs to earn a little commission as a bonus. I would also potentially adjust the layout of the gift guide so your customers know they’re going to get redirected to someone else’s website and make sure the link opens up in a new window. 

If you wanted to get fancy with it, you could even create a magazine-type gift guide with a tool like HeyZine* This will create a flippable magazine with links, etc. It’s a fun tool I’ve recently started using for the monthly magazine inside the Lounge Membership. I love a good glossy. Even if you go this magazine route you can still embed it on your site so you’re still directing traffic there. 

The other cool thing about a joint gift guide, and we’re going to talk more about this is a bit, is that you can all chip in for some joint advertising. Whether you’re driving cold traffic to your gift guide or even just running retargeting ads to those who are engaging with it. You can share your audiences across different accounts so you can pool your resources to create a pretty kick-ass paid advertising campaign. 

Joint Live Shopping Event

Another great way to leverage your collaboration is to do joint live shopping events. People love a good live shopping experience, especially when it gives them the opportunity to learn more about the product and ask questions. There is a reason why I believe brick and mortar will never truly die. 

If you’re an eCommerce-only brand, live shopping events are a great way to try and recreate the in-person shopping experience and if you can partner with your other small business friends and get more attendees, that’s a win/win. 

From a logistically perspective, this can be a bit harder to pull off depending on your tech setup. For all the tools out there that let you run live shopping events, I’m not sure you can really sell from multiple different stores live. In that case, you might want to run all transactions through one store, or just share links to the products that you’re covering and have the shopper go directly to the website to purchase them. 

If you align the products that you’re featuring to a joint gift guide, that can make the process a bit more seamless. 

Overall, I would recommend you take a less is more approach in terms of what you’re featuring on these events so it’s not overwhelming or confusing for the customer. 

Learn More About Hosting Online Shopping Events

If you’re interested in learning more about how to run one of these events, I have a couple of resources for you. First, is podcast episode 233, A More Impactful Way to Connect with Your Customer & Increase Sales. We chat all about how to host a successful live shopping event.

Lounge members, there’s also a guest workshop in Circle about hosting live events. You can find that in the workshops and guests section or just use the search bar at the top. 

If live shopping events aren’t your thing, but you would still like to participate in some sort of online shopping event, then I would check out episode 266 Virtual Vendor Events: An Untapped Online Market for Product-Based Business

My guest Charlotte shares how she used these vendor events to grow her handmade soap business. These events typically take place in Facebook Groups and the best part, most of them don’t require any live video at all.

Email & Social Media Shout Outs

Of course, if you’re doing a joint gift guide or live shopping event, you’re going to use email and social media to market those

But if collaborating in such a full-scale way feels overwhelming or like too much damn work, then you can use email and social media just to shout each other out. 

This could look like a secondary message at the bottom of your regular emails or an email campaign dedicated to featuring your biz friends. I would brainstorm with your collaboration partners to figure out a structure that works for everyone. 

While Small Business Saturday is a natural fit, I honestly don’t know how I feel about it. On one hand, it’s arguably the biggest shopping weekend of the year, the messaging ties in perfectly, and capitalizing on the existing energy vs. trying to create it on your own will always work out better. But I’m also weary of directly attention away from your business during that time. 

I think the way I would approach this if it you’re already doing a joint gift guide or live shopping event together and you want to tie your promotion into small business Saturday then that’s awesome, do it. Because you’re naturally going to be promoting eachother a lot throughout the season. 

If all you’re doing is email and social media shoutouts, then no, I wouldn’t do it in the middle of Black Friday Weekend. I also wouldn’t do it the weekend leading into free shipping day as that’s another big shopping bump online. So essentially, I’d do it somewhere between those two weekends. Maybe it’s the Thursday after Cyber Monday for example. 

No matter when you do it, I would try and do it the same day or at leat within a few days of eachother. This will have a bigger impact, especially with any audience overlap on social. You’ll also want to add custom UTMs to your share links so everyone can easily track the impact of these efforts. 

What Content to Share in Collaboration Posts

In terms of the kind of content you share, that’s going to depend a bit on the partners you’re working with and what everyone is focused on for their business. If you don’t have a joint gift guide to share, then I would just do a round-up post of everyone’s best-selling products. You can create a mini-gift guide inside the email and a carousel post for social.

What if Someone Has a Smaller Email List

Every time I talk to business owners about doing these types of shoutouts, there’s always a concern about a mismatch in the number of email subscribers or social media followers. Of course, there isn’t much you can do about social followers since you can’t target your posts. But the truth is, I wouldn’t worry about it too much because followers don’t equal sales. 

Your email list is a bit of a different story. If you’re concerned about a mismatch, you can also negotiate so that the person who has the largest list, only promotes the partner or group to a subset of that list. So if everyone’s list is on average 10k subscribers, and you have 50k, maybe you only send it to 10k of your most engaged subscribers. 

Ultimately, I wouldn’t get too caught up in all that, but if it’s important to ya, that’s an easy way to deal with it

In-Store Pop-Ups

Another great way to leverage other people’s audiences is with in-store pop-ups. If you have a brick-and-mortar store you can host a biz friend for a special event in your store. If you’re an online-only business you can partner with a local small business and do a pop-up at their location. 

When I had my brick-and-mortar boutique, in addition to bringing in vendors to host trunk shows, I also partnered with local jewelry artists to come and set up a table for the weekend. 

It was an easy way to have something special to market, and to bring in new customers who maybe wouldn’t have discovered me otherwise.

And in-store events don’t necessarily have to be limited to actual pop-up events where someone is selling their product in your store or vice-versa. 

Local Small Business Collaborations

It could look like all the brick-and-mortar stores in your immediate area collaborating on some sort of shopping event. Even if your city isn’t doing anything official for you to participate in, it doesn’t mean you and your business neighbors can’t get together to create your own event. 

Set a day or a weekend where everyone offers a special deal for shoppers. And these don’t have to just be businesses who sell physical products. Maybe you have a restaurant that wants to offer a lunch special, or a coffee shop that offers a deal on hot chocolate.

You can even talk to your local publication about covering the event or all the businesses can chip in for a paid advertisement about the event. 

Most local publications, in addition to print advertising have online advertising opportunities for their website, or even buying space in their newsletters. 

Depending on the rules and permits needed in your city, you can chip in to buy advertising on your local radio station and even have one of the VJs come out in person. 

There is no end to the amount of local involvement you can do. 

Again, even if you don’t have your own physical location, it doesn’t mean there is an opportunity for you to get involved with your local community. 

Joint Paid Advertising

Speaking of paid advertising, this is another way you can collaborate with other businesses. Of course this is easier when you’re talking about local businesses. Like we already talked about you can chip in for print or digital advertising, you can buy a billboard together, or invest in some local radio stations. 

If you’re an online-only store, you can still do joint paid advertising. You can share audiences that are visiting your joint online gift guide and pool your resources to run retargeting ads. You can chip in to advertise your live shopping event on social media. Maybe you split the cost of working with an influencer to promote your collaboration or to do a direct mail campaign. 

Pool your resources whenever possible to expand your reach. 

Collaborate on Photo Shoots

You can also use collaboration to capture great lifestyle photos of your products. This won’t work in every industry, but let’s say you’re a clothing designer. You can partner with a jewelry designer that has a similar vibe and collaborate on a photoshoot. Chip in for the space, the photographer, the stylist, makeup artist, the models, etc. Then you can both use the photos. 

Admittedly, this one can get tricky. You need to have the same aesthetic and make sure you’re on the same page about the finished product. 

There’s also the legal aspect of it, especially with the photographer and the model. The photographer owns the copyright to those images unless explicitly signed over to you in the agreement. Additionally, you do need a release from the model in order to use their likeness and depending on how you recruit them, there may be limitation in the time frame, and the placement of those photos. Ideally you would be able to use those images in perpetuity, but if you’re hiring through an agency, that’s not always possible. 

I’m no lawyer and there is a lot of nuance here, but I just wanted to make sure you’re taking that into consideration. 

While it’s a bit more complicated and probably not worth it as you get more established, it could be helpful if you’re just getting started in your business. 

Conclusion

At the end of the day, finding new customers is one of the most difficult things you’re going to do in your business. And the easiest way to do that is by leveraging other people’s audiences. 

Sure, it can be a bit of work up front, and it’s true that you don’t really know someone until you work with them. But, once you find the right collaboration partners you can rinse and repeat the strategy again and again. And of course, you’re not limited just to the Q4 shopping season. 

You can do joint gift guides for other events like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. You can do live shopping events at changes in the season like kicking off spring or fall. 

If you’re local and you want to chip in for advertising you can do that at any point in the year. 

Like every marketing strategy, the more you do something, the better you get at it, the more impactful it becomes. So if you’ve never done this before and the first time it doesn’t quite pan out the way you’d hoped… don’t let that deter you from trying it again. 

And if you’ve never done this and are afraid to reach out, remember that the person you’re thinking about partnering with is probably afraid to reach out too. Someone has to make the first move, so let it be you.