How To Find The Right Fit For Brand Collaborations

“Competition makes us faster; Collaboration makes us better”

Collaboration with another brand, or social media influencer can be a great addition to your business scaling strategy. When two brands come together, the main objective is to offer unique and innovative products to customers. This will give both of the brands a more competitive advantage in the market and both parties can enjoy the profit increase and return on investment. 

In addition to the monetary value and knowledge and creativity sharing, the reach of both brands will increase. Collaborating not only grabs the attention of industry competitors, but it also grabs the attention of the customer base who can get excited about the outcome of the collaboration. 

You will also see benefits in growing your email list, social media following, greater brand awareness and more sales. This is why I recommend this technique to my product business coaching clients. 

It’s critically important to approach brand collaborations strategically or they will waste your time, or even worse… make you look bad!

Here’s what to look for.

Like-minded Brands

It’s important that you are collaborating with like-minded brands that are in a similar or complementary niche to your speciality. 

For example, a home design blog or Instagram page isn’t going to be a great fit for your corporate gift baskets or shoes. BUT they may be a great fit for someone selling vintage succulent planters. 

You need to be strategic about who you’re partnering with. It can be very flattering when a collaborator wants to work with you, but you need to make sure that they fit in with your vision otherwise you will confuse your audience, you won’t make sales and you will have wasted time, efforts and possibly money.

Engagement Rates

Having a lot of instagram followers for businesses and influencers can look like they’ve done something REALLY right… but there are reports of huge brands having large amounts of fake followers. This is not something you or your brand want to be associated with. 

When it comes to the world of influencer marketing, you want to work with influencers who have high engagement rates to get eyes on your products. An influencer with a low engagement rate may have purchased fake followers. 

You can use the following equation to calculate the engagement rates of a potential brand collaboration.

• Add up the total number of likes and comments on all of the influencer posts in the last 30 days.
• Divide that number by the amount of posts in the last 30 days.
• Then divide that number by the amount of followers the brand or influencer has.
• And multiply that number by 100 and you have the engagement percentage rate. 

Usually, you will want the engagement rate somewhere between 2.5% – 6%. 

6% is very high and may not be totally required. The higher the engagement rate, the more you may likely be charged for the influencer’s work, so it’s totally fine to work with someone on the lower side of engagement. 

Brand Awareness

Sometimes, the value of brand collaboration isn’t a direct increase in sales. If an influencer or like-minded business can get more eyes on your website and more emails on your list, that is a win for the long run. 

For example, you can always create a welcome email series after people sign up to your list from the brand collaboration, and include a coupon. This is a great way to drive sales!

These collaboration techniques are what I teach my clients in The Creative Product Institute and would love to share them with you. For more information, click here to book in a complimentary 30 minute call with me.