How Working With Other Brands Can Help Boost Your Business

By Danni Blackburn

Running your own business can be a lonely affair, especially if you work remotely or from home. It’s why networking has proven so vital to me to keep connections growing and an element of human contact each day! Networking has also resulted in me being able to collaborate with lots of other female founders – and this in turn has helped grow my business and theirs. Even the biggest global brands use the power of collaborations to draw on each other’s audiences and find new customers and clients, particularly in the fashion and retail industries. 

Here’s why I think collaborations are one of the best ways to grow your business when you’re self-employed and how you can find your perfect collab partner.

What Is a Collaboration?

For those of you who are unsure, a collaboration simply means a targeted campaign of any size involving another brand or business for mutual benefit. 

I first started doing collaborations as an influencer through my channel @dannimeetsworld. But since launching my own company, Creative Copy Co, I have used collaborations and working with other brands to help boost my business visibility and find new clients.

The most frequent types of collaborations you might see are:

• A guest blog post
• An Instagram takeover (on Stories for example)
• A sponsored review or paid-for content creation
• New product lines designed with a celebrity (think Mrs Hinch, Stacey Solomon etc)
• Pop-up stores/stalls in existing retail space

These are just a few examples and ultimately a collaboration is a working partnership between at least two businesses and brands – so really, how you show up and work out your collaboration is up to you! 

How Collaborations Can Help You Find New Clients and Customers

Here’s the exciting part. 

If you partner with the right brand, you are bringing your products and services to a whole new audience who, hopefully, are already warm to the opinions and thoughts of the brand you’re working with. Be it an influencer with a loyal following, or a brand that has the best reputation in a particular industry – if they showcase you and your business to their existing audience, your collaboration can be as powerful as old-school word-of-mouth recommendations, and there aren’t many things better than that when it comes to trusting in a new brand. 

So How Can You Collaborate With a Brand?

First things first, think about why you want to collaborate. What are you wanting to gain out of it? 

New clients? Increased sales? Just more followers? 

Whatever your goal is, you have to be able to plan and pitch an effective collaboration that will benefit you, but more importantly, will benefit the brand or business you want to work with. 

Here are a few tips of where to find the best collaboration partners:

• Do your research and check the social media channel where you hang out most (Instagram, LinkedIn etc) – what type of brands and businesses are collaborating that could work with you?
• Look within your existing network to see if there are ways you can work together. This could work online or in-person.
• Get to an local in-person networking event and see what new contacts you can make
• If you’re a female founder, reach out to other female-owned businesses who you think could benefit from working with you. Lots of us love working with other female entrepreneurs and sometimes just need to be asked! Similarly if you have an existing client that you love working with, see if there is a way that you can work together to provide a more extensive service or product range.

My best advice is to throughly research who you want to work with and why.

As both a business owner and an influencer, I love working with people who are interested in what I’m doing and can show they’ve seen what I do when they pitch their idea to me. The best collaborations are the ones where we have both bought into the content and ideas of the person we’re working with, and often those relationships last way after the original collaboration has finished. 

If you’re thinking a collaboration could work for you and your business, but not really sure where to start, feel free to get in touch and I can happily talk you through how I got started. 

Danni Blackburn is a content creator who supports her clients across the globe with their social media, newsletters and websites, allowing them to spend time on the parts of their business they really enjoy. If you want to find out more about Danni’s content creation services, head to her website or if you’re more interested in the travel and food she writes about, follow her on Instagram or visit her blog. 

I had the pleasure of working with Danni at one of my Branding Mini Sessions. She was a joy to work with and a walking example of how collaborations can help you grow a business.